THE THIEF COMES TO STEAL, KILL & DESTROY (PART X)

“The Futility of Vain Worship”

By Akin Ojumu

When church folks think about the Pharisees, the picture that forms in their mind is that of a group of super-spiritual people who take religion too seriously. People often think that the problem with the Pharisees is their fanatical demand on people to worship God and their radical insistence on holy living. 

One of the reasons the Pharisees rub people the wrong way is the extreme to which they are believed to have taken religion and the perception of their intolerance to people who were not as religious. The penchant of the Pharisees to scorn and disdain anyone who doesn’t share their religious fanaticism is why people who exhibit pharisaical mannerisms are derided as being holier-than-thou.

Many of you reading this commentary would be shocked if I told you that this perception of the Pharisees is misleading. What ails the Pharisees wasn’t the extreme of their faith in God. They didn’t stick in the craw of the Lord Jesus because He thought they were too godly. On the contrary, the problem with the Pharisees was their irreverence for God and their rank apostasy.

Of course, it’s quite true that the Pharisees started out well. At the very beginning, when they first emerged, their religious fervor was pure and authentic. They wanted nothing more than to please God in everything they did and the greatest thing in all their lives was to love God. Keeping the Law became their sole desire. Earlier on in their history, they demonstrated moral dignity and greatness, a marked tenacity of purpose at the service of high, patriotic, and religious ideals.

The Pharisees were known to abstain from temporal pleasures of any kind. They shunned greed, refrained from avarice, and avoided anything that would make them fall short of the precepts of the Law. So devoted were they to the prescriptions of the Law that on one occasion when attacked by the Syrians on the Sabbath they refused to defend themselves.

In fact, it was their staunch faith and fervent beliefs, that caused the Pharisees to win over their fellow Jews, and it was what made them gain much trust and respect of the people. Due to their single-minded devotedness, their influence grew astronomically. In a few short years after being formed, they surpassed the priests to become the source of authority in Israel despite being in the minority in the 71-member Sanhedrin, i.e., the supreme court of ancient Israel.

Over time, however, the Pharisees became victims of their own success. Succumbing to the frailty, fragility, and foibles of human nature, they drank the Kool Aid of power and prestige, and they got high on their own supply. Soon, the Pharisees became the poster child for everything they had previously denounced. Having developed somewhat of a god complex, their souls got corrupted and pride entered into them. They went about with an air of superiority and infallibility decked up in their colorful flowing robes bedecked with all kinds of shining precious stones. Ensconced in a bubble of inflated sense of self-importance, the Pharisees lost their first love.

By the year 100 BC, the Pharisees had become unrecognizable from what they used to be at the beginning. From being a devout keeper and defender of the Written Torah, they had undergone a total makeover, having been transformed into a twister and distorter of God’s Word. 

Not content with the Written Torah, the Pharisees developed the Oral Torah. Comprised of nothing more than the teachings, opinions, and ideas of the sages, the Oral Torah, aka the Talmud, became their most sacred Scripture and they gave it equality with, and even supremacy over, the Written Torah.

In addition to creating their own sacred Scripture, the Pharisees corrupted the worship of YAHWEH. Abandoning the biblical Mosaic Judaism which was centered on the Written Torah and the Temple in Jerusalem, they fashioned their own form of Judaism rooted in the Oral Torah and the local synagogues. This invented religious system is the Rabbinic Judaism, which is the Judaism you find practiced by Jews around the world today.

Just as we find the landscape of Christianity littered with one-man business centers erroneously called Christian ministries today, so it was with Pharisaic Judaism. Having jettisoned what the Written Torah prescribed as the acceptable worship of YAHWEH which is centered on the Temple and presided over by Levitical priesthoods, the Pharisees embraced a religious system where any James, John, and Joseph could wake up one morning and call themself a Rabbi or a sage. 

The self-appointed Rabbi proceeded to gather followers to himself in his exclusively owned and run local synagogue where he became the de facto supreme leader and “powerful man of God” before whom the laity bowed and worshiped. It was he who determined who was right before God and who was not. So terrified of the Rabbi were the people that they believed he could, with the breath of his nostrils, usher them to Heaven or damn them to hell.

If you are honest with yourself, you would not fail to see this exact same pattern repeating itself in the modern-day Church?

We’ll take it from here next time.