One author I keep turning back to again and again is the Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. And one work I so often revisit is his collection of sermons on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). On Sunday mornings at Westminster Chapel he had delivered 60 expository sermons on this portion of Scripture. A two-volume book version of them was released in 1959 and 1960 as Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. It is now available in one volume.
Here I want to focus on just one sermon/chapter: “Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees.” It is an exposition of Matthew 5:20: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In it he contrasts the true righteousness and holiness demanded by our Lord, and the false version as lived out by the scribes and Pharisees. In the opening paragraph he says this:
We turn now to deal particularly with the statement of verse 20 in which our Lord defines His attitude to the law and the prophets, and especially perhaps to the law. We have seen how vital this short paragraph, running from verses 17 to 20, is in His ministry, and how it must influence our whole outlook upon the Christian gospel. Nothing was more important than that He should state very clearly and explicitly, at the outset, the characteristics of His ministry. There were many reasons why men should harbour various misapprehensions with regard to that. He Himself was unusual; He did not belong to the order of the scribes and Pharisees; He was not an official doctor of the law. Yet here He was standing before them as a Teacher. Not only that, He was a Teacher who did not hesitate to criticize, as He did here, the teaching of the recognized, and, in a sense, authorized teachers of the people. Moreover, His conduct was strange at certain points. Far from avoiding the company of sinners, He went out of His way to choose it. He was known as ‘the friend of publicans and sinners’. There was also an element in His teaching which emphasized the doctrine called ‘grace’. All these things seemed to differentiate what He said from everything that the people had ever heard, so they were obviously liable to certain grave misunderstandings with regard to His message and its general import.
Lloyd-Jones continues:
Holiness is not an experience that we have; it means keeping and fulfilling the law of God. Experiences may help us to do that, but we cannot receive righteousness and sanctification as experiences. Holiness is something we practise in our daily life. It is the honouring and the keeping of the law, as the Son of God Himself kept it while He was here on earth. It is being like Him. That is holiness. So you see it is intimately related to the law, and must always be thought of in terms of keeping the law. It is at that point that the Pharisees and the scribes come in, because they appeared to be most holy people. But our Lord is able to show very clearly that they were lacking in righteousness and holiness….
The Pharisees were men who were outstanding and famous for their sanctity, so-called. The very word ‘Pharisee’ means ‘separatist’. They were people who set themselves apart, and they did so because they had formed a code of the ceremonial acts connected with the law which was more rigid than the law of Moses itself. They had drawn up rules and regulations for life and conduct which in their stringency went far beyond anything we find demanded in the Old Testament Scriptures. For example, in our Lord’s picture of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went up to the temple to pray, the Pharisee said that he fasted twice in the week. Now there is no demand in the Old Testament that men should fast twice in the week. Indeed the Old Testament asked for only one fast in the year. But gradually these men had elaborated the system and had actually brought it to the point at which they exhorted and commanded the people to fast twice in the week, instead of only once in the year. It was in such ways that they formed their excessively stringent code of morals and behavior and, as a result of that, everybody thought of the scribes and Pharisees as patrons of virtue.
Studies in the Sermon on the Mountby Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn (Author)
He goes on to say this:
We must realize that this is one of the most serious and important matters we can ever consider together. There is a real and terrible possibility of our deluding and fooling ourselves. The Pharisees and the scribes were denounced by our Lord as being hypocrites. Yes; but they were unconscious hypocrites. They did not realize it, they really thought all was well. You cannot read your Bible without constantly being reminded of that terrible danger. There is the possibility of our relying upon the wrong thing, of resting upon things that appertain to true worship rather than being in the position of true worship. And let me remind you tenderly, in passing, that it is something of which those of us who not only claim to be evangelical, but are proud to call ourselves such, may very easily be guilty….
I have tried to extract certain principles which I put to you in this form. The first and, in a sense, the basic charge against them is that their religion was entirely external and formal instead of being a religion of the heart. He turned to them one day and said, ‘Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God’ (Luke 16:15). Now let us remember that all these statements which are thus made about the Pharisees by our Lord are judicial condemnations. There is no contradiction between the love of God and the wrath of God. The Lord Jesus Christ was so full of love that He never complained of anything done to Himself. But He denounced judicially the people who misrepresented God and religion. That does not imply any contradiction in His character. Holiness and love must go together; and it is a part of holy love to unmask the false and the spurious and to denounce the hypocritical….
He reminds us that living a holy and righteous life is clearly part of what the real Christian desires, but of course it does not come about by trying really hard and/or as a form of works righteousness:
Now let me ask the question that is probably in your mind at this point. What then is our Lord teaching? Is He teaching salvation by works? Is He saying that we have to live a life better than that of the Pharisees in order to enter the kingdom? Patently not, because ‘there is none righteous, no, not one’. The law of God given to Moses condemned the whole world; ‘every mouth has been stopped’; all are ‘guilty before God’ and have ‘come short of the glory of God’. Our Lord did not come to teach justification salvation by works, or by our own righteousness. ‘Very well,’ says the opposite school; ‘is He not teaching that salvation is by means of the righteousness of Christ alone, so that it does not matter at all what we may do? He has done it all and therefore we have nothing to do.’ Now that is the other extreme, and the other error.
So we again must make this helpful distinction between the one-off act of justification secured by faith in the finished work of Christ, and then the ongoing work of sanctification and growth in holiness as we obey Christ and allow the indwelling Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of the Son.
His closing paragraph nicely ties all this together:
Some of the most vital questions that can be asked, then, are these. Do you know God? Do you love God? Can you say honestly that the biggest and the first thing in your life is to glorify Him and that you so want to do this that you do not care what it may cost you in any sense? Do you feel that this must come first, not that you may be better than somebody else, but that you may honour and glorify and love that God who, though you have sinned against Him grievously, has sent His only begotten Son to the cross on Calvary’s hill to die for you, that you might be forgiven and that He might restore you unto Himself? Let every man examine himself.
