Success or Tragedy?
If you have young kids, I’d like you to imagine a scenario about your children for a moment. Imagine they’re grown adults and out of the house with families of their own. They go to church and Sunday School every week, they’re involved in a bi-weekly Bible study, and they attend prayer meetings every month where they’re known for their eloquent prayers. They fast twice a week and give tithes on every dollar they make. They’re successful in business and well-respected in their local community. They’ve never lived a lifestyle of outright sin. However, they don’t have a true love for God. Is that scenario a success or a tragedy?
Up until that last point, that sounded pretty good, right? This scenario is a tragedy, however, because the adult children in the above story are not regenerated, which is evidenced by their lack of true love for God. In other words, they aren’t saved—they’re just playing at religion. Scripture is clear that good works or religious activity alone cannot save.
Parenting and Legalism
How I described the adult children in the above scenario would also describe the Pharisees (the religious elite in Jesus’ day) to a T. They were hyper-religious and obsessed with outwardly obeying the law, but didn’t possess true saving faith. Jesus reserved his harshest words for the Pharisees, not the prostitutes and tax-collectors.
As Christians, I’m afraid it can be easy to fall into the trap of parenting like a Pharisee. In our desire to have our children honor God, we can stress moralism and self-righteousness, while neglecting the gospel. We of course want our children to obey God’s law, but teaching them the law alone is not enough. We need to teach them about their sinful hearts and their need for Jesus to save them.
To be clear, we cannot save our children, but we can take a big picture approach to how we faithfully parent them. We can choose to parent them with a focus on the gospel and their hearts. We can choose to not parent them in a legalistic, self-righteous way. We can choose to not parent them like Pharisees. As parents, our primary focus should be on addressing sin in our children’s hearts and their need for Jesus to save them, not merely their external behavior.
In this series of articles, we’re going to use one of Jesus’ most contentious confrontations with the Pharisees in Luke 11:37-54 as a framing device to see how we can avoid parenting like Pharisees.
The Traditions of the Pharisees
Before we start breaking down the text, we need to set some context. This incident takes place late in Jesus’ ministry. He has already become popular with the people of Israel. Great masses of people were coming to Him daily for healing, to see Him perform miracles, and to hear Him teach.
While he was a sensation among the common people, the religious elite hated him for several reasons. First, they were jealous of His popularity. Second, he was constantly criticizing their hypocrisy and their false religious system. At this point, many confrontations between Jesus and the religious elite had already taken place. We’ll see one of the most heated interactions with the Pharisees in this passage.
Let’s start in verse 37.
While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table.
While Jesus was in the midst of teaching, He was invited to dinner with a Pharisee. Who were the Pharisees?
The word “Pharisee” means “to separate”. These were religious elitists who were known for their intense pursuit of being separate from sin and uncleanness. They were not priests, but rather laymen. There were about 6,000 Pharisees at that time, and they were devoted to keeping the OT law. They prided themselves in their supposed obedience. They were self-righteous and thought they were better than everyone else. They were both well-respected and feared by the common people. As mentioned earlier, they hated Jesus for his attacks on their hypocritical self-righteousness.
Yet, we see a Pharisee inviting Jesus to his home for a meal. This isn’t like inviting someone for a quick bite to eat at a fast-food restaurant today. Bringing someone into your home was an intimate experience. A meal was a tacit form of acceptance through hospitality. This is odd, because Pharisees usually wouldn’t dine with non-Pharisees, especially someone like Jesus who was known to associate with sinners.
Yet, Jesus accepted the invitation and went to the Pharisees house to share a meal. However, there’s a problem as they get ready to eat.
The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner.
The Pharisee was shocked by Jesus’ behavior. He didn’t first wash before the meal. This wasn’t a matter of hygiene. The Pharisee wasn’t concerned that Jesus would get sick from germs because he didn’t wash his hands before touching His food. He was shocked that Jesus was violating a religious tradition.
The Greek word used here for “wash” is baptizó and it’s where we get our word for “baptism.” It means “dip”, “sink”, or “immerse”. The Pharisee wasn’t upset that Jesus didn’t rinse His hands of germs before eating. The Pharisee is appalled that Jesus wasn’t performing an elaborate ceremonial cleansing that the religious elite would perform before a meal. This ceremonial cleansing had three steps:
1. Pouring water over your hands pointed upwards while the water flowed down your wrists
2. Pouring water over your hands pointed downwards
3. Scrubbing your hand with a clenched fist and alternating hands
It was meant to symbolize the washing off of the uncleanness of the world. If you really wanted to be extra-holy, you could take a full bath. Now keep in mind, there was no Scripture or OT law commanding this cleansing procedure. This was something that the Pharisees did on their own to be extra-spiritual. This was legalism and Jesus would have no part in it.
What is legalism? Legalism can occur in two ways. One, legalism is elevating the traditions of men to be equal to the commandments of God. Two, legalism is attempting to keep the law in order to be saved.
The Pharisees were guilty of both forms of legalism. They adhered to hundreds of traditions and man-made laws as though these rules came down from God himself. They judged others for not keeping them and felt like they were extra-pleasing to God for keeping them. They believed they were righteous in the eyes of God for keeping all of the OT laws and these additional man-made traditions. They were wrong on both accounts.
As parents, we want to avoid legalism like the plague. As we’ll see shortly, Jesus condemns legalism and the different sins it can produce. Now, is it wrong to have rules in your house that are not in the Bible? No—there’s no verse that says, “no shoes on the couch,” but that is a reasonable rule. As parents, you can and should set the rules for your house.
You should obviously hold your children responsible for not violating Scriptural commands. They also need to obey the rules that you give them as parents. It’s perfectly fine to have rules like don’t play baseball in the house or brush your teeth before bedtime. The key is that you need to know the difference between your rules and the Bible’s rules. Don’t judge other families for not keeping your rules that are not found in Scripture. (e.g. “a good Christian would never fail to brush his teeth before bed.”) And don’t teach your kids that keeping the rules is enough to be right with God. More on that later.
Let’s move along in the story. What is Jesus’ response to this Pharisee being offended that He didn’t keep this tradition of ceremonially washing before a meal? Is He going to apologize for offending His host? No—not quite.
And the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. 40 You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?
Jesus directly confronts the legalism of the Pharisees. He’s at a meal, so he uses an analogy of cups and dishes. The Pharisees were like fools who only focused on cleaning the outside of the cup or the bottom side of the plate and left the part that was actually touching the drink and the food filthy. That makes absolutely no sense.
Imagine coming to my house for a nice dinner and I give you a crystal glass for your drink. The outside is sparkling and exquisite, but you look inside and it’s stained from some drink from a long time ago. There are dried bits of food on the bottom. Somehow, there’s strands of fur from my dog, Molly, on the inside rim of the glass. You would be absolutely disgusted. It doesn’t matter how clean the outside is if the inside is filthy.
Spiritually, that is how the Pharisees approached their own lives. They were focused on the external and paid no attention to their hearts. Jesus says their hearts were full of greed (literally, “robbery” in Greek) and wickedness (or “evil”). They were only concerned about what people could see on the outside and they had no true concern about what God as Creator saw inside of them.
In Mark, Jesus describes the Pharisees as being hypocrites:
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
Mark 7:5-9
If your lips are saying the right things on the outside, but on the inside you have no love for God and your heart is full of sin, that is not honoring to God. God does care about your external behavior, but He also cares deeply about your heart. That is who you truly are as a person. That is where sin and evil come from, not from external behavior.
And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Mark 7:20-23
Jesus tells the Pharisees to focus on their hearts.
But give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.
The word for “alms” in Greek (eleémosuné) can mean “charity”, “mercy”, and “compassion”. The sacrifice that God cared about was a merciful and compassionate heart that can only come from a heart that is cleansed through true faith. If they focused on their hearts, then all things would be clean for them through the regenerating power of God and they wouldn’t need to perform ceremonial cleansings that they made up to feel holy. Jesus is reorienting their focus from the external to the heart.
As parents, we should never lose sight of the hearts of our children. In our next article, Jesus is going to continue tearing into the Pharisees and we’ll see several sins that come from legalism that we should avoid in our parenting.
