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12 Then His disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” 13 But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.” ~ Matthew 15:12-14
Today, we return to our study of Matthew 15 where the religious leaders from Jerusalem had traveled 90 miles to confront the Lord Jesus because they felt His popularity was getting to be too great. They feared losing their status with the people of Israel so they felt that they had to diminish the Lord Jesus in their eyes. To do this they felt they must catch Him in sin. Since they had a hard time of doing that, they caught His disciples in sin, so they thought. The Lord Jesus then set them straight revealing to them their sin. They were the self-appointed guides of God’s people but they were blind.
In v.12 of today's passage we read, "Then His disciples came and said to Him, 'Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?'"
The Lord Jesus rejected the teachings of the Jewish religious leaders because their teaching did not align with the truth. These religious leaders avoided addressing man's problem which is that his heart is utterly wicked apart from the Lord. When His disciples were alone with the Lord Jesus they asked Him the ridiculous question. They asked if He knew that He had offended the religious leaders. Since He is God, the Lord Jesus knows all things. The disciples had been with Him three years and they still asked this very ignorant question revealing how shallow was their theology.
The religious leaders of Israel seemed to lack the knowledge that all of mankind since the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden had been polluted by sin or planted by Lucifer. Christianity is the only "world religion" that teaches Original Sin, meaning that man was born with a wicked, sinful heart. And, it is sin that has separated us from having a personal relationship with God and from loving Him and others as we ought. When we entered into a personal relationship with God, He, through the Holy Spirit began writing His law on our hearts. The essence of His law is "love." And, through His Spirit and His Word, He teaches us His love for us, modeling for us what it looks like to love others. There is no way for Christians to justify treating others in a way that God does not treat us. One way of knowing that we are growing in a meaningful personal relationship with God is seen in how we treat other people, especially the worst.
Brennan Manning writes in his book Abba's Child, "My identity as Abba’s child is not an abstraction or a tap dance into religiosity. It is the core truth of my existence. Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness profoundly affects my perception of reality, the way I respond to people and their life situations. How I treat my brothers and sisters from day to day, whether they be Caucasian, African, Asian, or Hispanic; how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street; how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike; how I deal with ordinary people in their ordinary unbelief on an ordinary day will speak the truth of who I am more poignantly than the pro-life sticker on the bumper of my car."
It was a good thing that the Jewish religious leaders were offended. Had they not been would have revealed just how closed off they were to truth. I find it rather instructive that the two men who took the Lord Jesus down from the cross after He had died were both former Pharisees. Typically a criminal would be dumped into an empty grave or a pauper’s field, buried under a pile of rocks. But, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were those two men and once they touched the dead body of the Lord Jesus they were cut off from being leaders in the Jewish religious community. This came at a very high price. They were henceforth not paid the handsome salaries they received as Jewish religious leaders.
Nicodemus and Joseph didn’t realize that Calvary did not spell the end of the Lord Jesus, but the end of death. The blood-encrusted body they laid in that tomb would soon come to life, shaking off the cloth wrappings and thus the chains of death. Nicodemus couldn’t have known that the expensive ointments and perfumes used to give the Lord Jesus a King’s burial were only temporary. Joseph didn’t know that his tomb would only be a temporary resting place for the Son of God. This grave would sit empty forever, and so would the graves of those who trust the Lord Jesus as Savior. Joseph’s prized real estate would stand as a witness of Christ’s triumph over the curse of sin.
In v.13-14 of today's passage we read, "13 But He answered and said, 'Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.'"
The plant was a metaphor for anyone who has no personal relationship with God, particularly the religious leaders of Jerusalem. The metaphor was used to describe the evil condition of such men who should have known the identity of the Lord Jesus when He was born in Bethlehem. The religious leaders appeared to most to have had a relationship with God but as the Lord Jesus will later say, they were of their father the devil.
In Psalm 1:6 we read, "The way of the ungodly shall perish." Notice that this verse does not read, "The ungodly shall perish." God put it the way He did in order to point out that the ungodly always has the opportunity to turn away from the way that leads to destruction. By repenting from the way of the self, they could be postured to believe in Him as their Savior. By the way, anything is godly because God is there. We, through the Lord Jesus have been pronounced godly because the Holy Spirit is present in our lives and the Lord Jesus sacrifice on the cross opened the door for that to happen. God has given to all who are willing enough to believe in His Son the free gift of forgiveness and the subsequent godliness.
