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38 Then He said to them in His teaching, “Beware of the scribes, who desire to go around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, 39 the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts, 40 who devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation. ~ Mark 12:38-40
Today, we return to our study of Mark 12 where the Lord Jesus has been highlighting why the religious leaders of Israel were so close to the kingdom of God, yet they lacked what was essential: a personal relationship with God.
In context, the religious leaders had unsuccessfully pummeled the Lord Jesus with question after question in order to get Him to say something that they could have used against Him. At this point in the narrative, they had concluded that they needed a different approach. As it turned out, they bribed Judas Iscariot to betray Him. It was clear that the religious leaders of Israel were corrupt.
When the Lord Jesus wiped out their corrupt business in the temple just the day before, many of the regular people were attracted to Him because they knew the corruption of the religious leaders. They knew they were paying ten times the price they should pay for a sacrificial animal. They knew they were being over-charged in the exchange of coins when they brought their temple tax offering. And, the Lord Jesus even said, "This is My Father’s house, it’s to be a house of prayer, but you turned it into a den of thieves."
In today's passage the Lord Jesus was, yet again, in the outer court of the temple, teaching in the court of the Gentiles which was a gathering place for all ethnic people, Jews and Gentiles. Closer toward the temple itself was a covered porch known as the court of the women where the people would linger after the sacrifices were made just to worship or to spend time in God's presence. One of the chambers was called the chamber of the silent. Around the chamber of the silent were thirteen trumpet-shaped boxes where people would pay their tithes.
It was into one of those boxes that most of the worshippers gave anonymously without fanfare. It was also a place where the poor received financial help without being embarrassed. But, as always, there were those who loved to give lots of coins so others could hear the coins drop one after another. They did so that others would notice their generosity. They gave for the effect of notoriety, and, the Lord Jesus was there watching.
It was at that point that the Lord Jesus said, "Beware of the scribes." In saying those words He was warning against religion which is rules without reason. It is a system without substance. It's belief without Bible. Those most at odds with the Lord Jesus were the religious. They sought to put Him to death. This explains why the harshest words of the Lord Jesus were designated for the religious, especially the religious leaders.
It was religion that motivated the Crusades, two hundred years of history from 1095 AD to 1291 AD that pitted belief system against belief system at the point of the sword. It was religion that brought civil conflict to Ireland between Catholic and Protestant for years. It was religion that brought airplanes into New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. It was religion that motivated ISIS to take Christians and behead them on the beaches of Northern Africa, and also, it was religion that motivated them to put other Muslims in cages who didn't agree with their religious beliefs and burned them to death.
Described in the remainder of this passage is the endless road that religion or false godliness leads. The problem is, like the proud, we know the lure of religion which leads us into the wicked den of self-worship. Pride and arrogance are tangled up in self-worship and it is the very essence of sin.
The robes that the religious leaders wore went all the way to the ground. They were fancy, unique and expensive. These robes had tassels on them, little reminders that they belonged to God and were accountable to His Word. As the centuries passed by, the religious leaders of Israel decided that these were the symbols of their glory, not God's glory. This caused people to inaccurately conclude they the religious leaders were holy.
Luke tells us that the religious leaders loved the symbols of their glory. In fact, they were so exalted in their own minds that it was more punishable to act against the words of a scribe than the words of Scripture. They had exalted themselves over the Word of God.
Like the religious leaders of Israel, when we base our relationship with God on our ability to perform spiritual duties, we deny the power of God's grace in and through our lives. God does not love us because we dress a certain way, pray, read our Bibles, attend church or witness, yet, millions think God is mad if they don’t perform these and other duties perfectly. As a result, for those who yield to religion, they struggle to find true intimacy with the God who created them.
Like the religious leaders of Israel, when we are religious we deceive ourselves into believing that we can win God’s approval through a religious dress code, certain spiritual disciplines, particular music styles and even doctrinal positions. And, religious people rarely interact with nonbelievers because they don’t want their own superior morals to be tainted by them. When we ingest this poison, we typically struggle with sinful habits ourselves, sinful habits that we cannot admit to anyone else.
When we get to the point that we hate religion that we know to be in us, we can be assured that this a step in the right direction. This is what separates the authentic from the religious. This disposition that is in all of us is a mere reminder that we desperately need the Lord Jesus, the Lord of Grace, to be the only One whom we worship. And, when we get to this point in life, we become increasingly aware that it is He who puts all of our enemies under His control, even the sinful desires within us which clamor for the notoriety from others that we know to be still in us.
