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Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees

by Jerry Ousley  
7/07/2017 / Christian Living

            We like rules.  Even though we may sometimes criticize and rebel, basically we feel like we need rules to set the guidelines.  When we know where the boundaries are, then we can comfortably stay in the lines and keep things straight and organized.

 

            I’m going to confess something today.  I’m guilty of breaking the rules.  If you are a Catholic please forgive me for what I’m about to say.  I didn’t mean it as an offense.  It was just a lazy act.  When I was in the Army as a Chaplain Assistant it was part of my duty to not only assist the Protestant Chaplain’s but the Catholic priests as well.  I learned a lot about Catholics while I was there.

 

            But one of my duties was to keep the Holy Water in stock.  What I was supposed to do when the container (I can’t remember what it was called now) was nearing empty was to report it to the Priest, fill the container with water and have him bless it.  Again, I apologize to you if you are Catholic but folks, the first time I did this it took more time for me to get the Priest to come to the room where the container was kept (I forget what that was called now too) and get him to say his thirty-second blessing.  So I cheated.  What I would do was to add a little water every few days.  It wasn’t blessed and to be honest no one every suspected or even noticed that the container was never empty.  No one knew the difference between the blessed water and the plain water.  So while I was in charge of this part of our duties we never ran out of holy water!  You know what?  I bet I wasn’t the first or the last person to ever do this!  Come on now, if we’d all be honest here I’d also bet that some of you Catholics have done the same thing.

 

            Whether right or wrong, it was a religious rite.  It was a simple ceremony providing a symbolic item.  Sometimes we can find great truths represented by the processes of religious rites.  But when we bind ourselves by those practices more often than not we also bind ourselves right out of our freedoms.

 

            The Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees were like that (to clarify I’m not referring to Catholics by this statement).  If you read the history of these groups you’ll find that at their conception and outset they all meant well.  In their early days the Pharisees helped to re-establish Israel in the Law of Moses.  Their original work did a lot of good for Israel.  The scribes had the privileged but very tedious job of making sure that the copies of the Scriptures were accurate and well made.  I don’t know much about the Sadducees except that like the Pharisees they wanted Israel to keep the Law but they insisted that there was no resurrection.  While the Pharisees taught that all would be resurrected someday and spiritually live again with God the Sadducees flatly denied it (some have said that because of their teaching they had no hope so they were “sad you see”).

 

            By the time of Jesus they had stretched the Law of Moses to the point that they added their own interpretations to those laws.  For instance, the Law of Moses required cleanliness.  There’s nothing wrong with that!  We should stay clean.  But they emphasized it to the point that they didn’t consider a person’s hands washed unless they washed all the way to the elbows, held their hands up and let the water drip off their elbows.  According to them that was the proper way and unless a person did it their way they hadn’t washed their hands.

 

            Even though this sounds silly to most of us it illustrates what we have done today.  Are we guilty of requiring people to do more than what the Bible says in order to be considered to be a Christian?  In the Book of Acts there was a time after the Gentiles began coming to the Lord, that a meeting took place in Jerusalem.  Many of the Jewish Christians were requiring the Gentiles to adapt their own practices and had even said that unless they did it their way then they weren’t part of the Church.  However, Paul and Barnabas disagreed.  As they met it was decided that if they would only do a few things, such as not eating meats knowingly sacrificed to idols, abstain from sexual impurity, and not eat any meat with the blood still in it that they would do pretty good.

 

            We need to take note of that when it comes to telling people what they need to do to be a Christian today.  If we tell others that they have to do certain things to be a believer we may be guilty of imposing more than what Jesus does through grace.  We might find ourselves leading the roles of modern day Pharisees.

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

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