We are going to continue our way through the book of Matthew this morning looking at 3:7-10. The first two chapters are presentation of Jesus as the promised king and the ultimate Israelite. We saw in chapter 1 how the genealogy of Joseph as Jesus’ legal father gave Jesus the right to claim the Davidic throne and through the angelic announcement to Joseph that Jesus would be “Immanuel” “God with us.” We saw in chapter 2 the recognition of Jesus as King by the Magi and the apparent threat Herod perceived and his willingness to murder innocent children in order to keep any sort of prophecy from interrupting his claim on the throne of Israel.
Over the last two weeks we have been looking at the person of John the Baptist and his message. This man who was not only the cousin of Jesus but filled with the Holy Spirit from the womb, born under miraculous circumstances, prophesied over at birth, and raised for the express purpose of preparing the hearts and minds of the people to accept their Messiah who was coming after him.
We saw how his appearance and chosen location was a rebuke of the shallow, hypocritical, and useless religion that had overtaken the Jewish people. His message was the same message that the Old Testament prophets preached, that Jesus preached, and that the apostles preached, “repent.”
The motivation for repentance in the hearts and minds of the people was that the kingdom of heaven was finally at hand. The arrival of the long-awaited king had finally come and had the people accepted the message of the greatest man who never been born up and to that point then the restoration of Israel and the beginning of the reign of the Messiah over the earth would have begun.
We have looked at the man, we have looked at the message, we are going to take some time this morning to look at the audience that was the focus of this message. Matthew tells us in verse 5 that all of Jerusalem was coming out to hear this prophet. This message was intended to prepare all the people of Israel for the coming of their King, but Matthew then gives us a small excerpt from a particular accusation that John levels against the religious leaders of the Jewish people.
Let us read 7-10 for look at the first part of this message and we will look at the rest in 11-12 next week in the description of the difference between John’s baptism and Jesus’.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? “Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance; and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. “The axe is already laid at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Large crowds are coming out to the Judean wilderness from Jerusalem to hear what John has to say but we see him call out the Pharisees and the Sadducees specifically in this passage. Who were these men? I feel safe in assuming that most of you have heard about these groups at some point or another. They were the political and religious elite within Jewish society at the time of Jesus. It is important that we have a clear picture of who they were so that we can understand John’s accusative tone in these verses.
In the time of Jesus there were 2 primary groups or lines of philosophy within the Jewish culture. These were the Pharisees and the Sadducees and they are the ones that we hear about in the New Testament. We do not know exactly when these groups arose specifically, but we do know a lot about who they were around the time of Jesus.
The Pharisees were the ideological successors of a group called the Hasidim which means in Hebrew “the pious ones.” Between the Old and New Testament there was a 400 year period of prophetic silence and in that time frame the Greeks under Alexander the Great took over the Middle East and ruled in Jerusalem until the Romans came along.
In that timeframe there was a particularly horrible Greek ruler named Antiochus who profaned the Temple in Jerusalem by sacrificing a pig on the altar of God and forced the priests to eat the meat as the ultimate insult. Out of nationalism and a defense of the Jewish religion there was a revolt known as the Maccabean Revolution. The most prominent figures were part of the Hasidim and were devout, spiritual, and pious Jews who fought for both patriotic as well as religious reasons.
Overtime the political element began to fade and the movement turned into strict, oral law focused traditionalism. They still rejected Greek and Roman culture and so were more popular among nationalist Jews but by the time they had morphed into the Pharisees we know in the New Testament, they had no aspirations of overthrowing the Romans.
The word “Pharisee” means “separatist.” And by the time of Jesus they saw themselves as the most devout individuals within Judaism. So much so that they separated themselves from the common people as much as possible. They looked at even Jewish people who were not part of their strict ideology as being unclean and would go so far as to go through ritual washings and cleansings after every time they returned home after walking out in public just in case they bumped into someone.
They were the super “spiritual,” ultra-fundamentalist, ultra-legalist, group who perverted the law of God to where there is no real devotion, no real godliness left but instead only external, phony man-made rules that were adhered to in great detail with as much separation from those outside as possible. “Do not drink, do not chew, and do not go with those who do.” That is why throughout Jesus’s ministry they hounded Him constantly for hanging around drunkards, sinners, harlots, and tax collectors. They were the hard-core works-based religion.
The Sadducees were the opposite. They were the top tier, ivory tower, theological liberal scholars and elites. The origin of their name is a little bit harder to trace, some believe it is based on the name of the high priest Zadok from 1 Samuel, but we can’t be sure and that really does not matter. We do know that they came out of the economic elites of Jewish culture. They were the ones who compromised and collaborated with both the Greek rulers and then the Romans when they came in. They were in it for the power and authority. By the time of Jesus, the high priests ruling over the temple in Jerusalem were Sadducees.
They were all about the here and now. They rejected any idea of the resurrection, they were largely anti-supernatural and so lived for this world and all they could get out of it because they did not fear anything in the next. They only claimed to accept the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis to Deuteronomy, and would not accept any of the rest of the Old Testament as having any sort of authority.
They were generally disliked by the Jewish people because they collaborated with the Romans, but their willingness to do so and their ambitions made them extremely wealthy and connected. The term chief priests that we see throughout the Gospels refers to the Sadducees, it is used almost as a synonym.
Their big money maker was running the Temple. They were the ones who sold sacrificial animals and exchanged money in the Temple. They forced the Jewish people to pay exorbitant prices for the best animals otherwise they would not allow them to be sacrificed. When Jesus overturned the tables in the Temple and drove they money changers out with whips, this was the group He was doing it to and they hated Him for messing with their profit margins more than His political or theological statements.
The Sadducees were wealthy and politically influential, but most of all theologically liberal. The Pharisees were much more popular with the people because they rejected Greek and Roman culture but were hard-line legalistic. They spent a lot of their time fighting each other and really the only thing that they could agree on was their hatred of Jesus.
So to summarize, the Pharisee was ritualistic, the Sadducees was rationalistic. The Pharisee was a traditionalist, the Sadducees was open theologically to whatever sounded the best and worked for them in the moment. Their approach to religion was very different but they were both very centered on themselves. For both groups, their religion was all about self-effort, about doing it yourself and making sure others knew it. It was all external.
Then along comes John the Baptist and his message is all about the inside, the heart. Jesus was the same way. it is the inside that matters and we will see that in the Sermon on the Mt. as He goes after the external religious ideology of the Pharisees. In Matthew 23 Jesus will go to town on them with some of the greatest condemnations of religious hypocrisy. He calls them “whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness.”
This pattern of abusing the truth of God remains rampant today. We can see both of these approaches to the gospel within those who claim to be Christians today. Both the ritualistic, legalist and the theological liberal reject the truth of Scripture. Both groups will take the Word of God apart and keep what they like while rejecting the parts that they do not. They do this by either by changing the meaning, molding and manipulating it until it supposedly says the opposite of what the original author intended, or by simply out right rejecting it as having any authority. This assault on the authority and sufficiency and truth of Scripture has been going on since before the time of Jesus and will continue until He comes again to rule over the earth.
We have legalists like the Pharisees who require certain ceremonies and adherence to certain rules and sacraments in order to remain in good standing with God. They force those who follow their system into rules in tradition that go beyond what Scripture has called for. They rely on the traditions that have been created over the centuries that have nothing to do with what the biblical authors laid out for the church. They add to the Bible, calling it different things but always rejecting the authority of Scripture in order to promote their own systems.
All too often those within the systems that are particularly good at following the rules that they have made will stand above the rest, separating themselves and congratulating themselves with how pious and holy they are compared to the rest of the commoners.
Anything that adds to the call to repentance, anything that is added to the justification granted by God at the moment His grace and mercy descend upon an individual in the gift of faith and repentance is the beginning of this false system that is traced back to the Pharisees that Jesus so forcefully condemned. Salvation is the gift of God by his Grace through the faith that he grants and anything that is required of man to obtain or maintain salvation is a false gospel.
We also have our Sadducees. Theological liberals who reject the authority of Scripture by pulling it apart and trying to rationalize any supernatural element. They take out anything that has the air of supernatural intervention. They do mind-boggling theological and grammatical gymnastics in order to make all of the miracles and direct intervention of God described throughout Scripture a rational or natural occurrence.
While they claim to be Christian, they tell us that the Bible is not really the Word of God, that all you have to do is kind of feel God in your own personal way. God is not a holy or just God who calls for the punishment of sins but a God that is only love and really just wants you to feel good about yourself and to have a relationship with Him.
Because God would never punish His creatures, Jesus did not die as an atonement for sin on behalf of sinners but to show the ultimate level of love and obedience to God. To be an example of how we should care about others.
They reject the need for repentance because they claim that man is inherently good and God would overlook any mistake we could make.
Both of these philosophies, like the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’s day, have distorted the true gospel with their own man-made form of religion. Paul warned the church leaders of Ephesus in Acts 20 that from among their own would come Savage wolves who would tear at the flock.Who would draw away the disciples after them. Peter warned of the same thing in his letters. They may sound good at first, they may look good at first, but they are nothing more than snakes in the grass who poison the work of the church from within and bring nothing but destruction and ruin to the kingdom of heaven.
That is the point of John’s harsh rebuke in calling them “you brood of vipers,” or “you offspring of vipers” in verse 7. Vipers in the Bible refers to several different types of highly venomous snakes that are very common in the Mediterranean world. One particular type of viper sits out in the sun usually among dried grass and sticks and when people would collect kindling, usually children, they would grab this viper mistaking it for a stick and be bitten. That is the kind of deadly and deceitful influence that these false teachers had on the people of Israel and continue to have in the Church today.
Simply because they claim to believe in the truth, simply because they hold the Bible in their hand while they talk, simply because they say the name Jesus does not make them truly Christians. The Pharisees and the Sadducees of our day exist within the church and often have a much more pleasant demeanor then did the ones in Jesus’s day. This only makes them far more dangerous.
John calls out this religious hypocrisy when he saw the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to him for baptism. We see that in verse seven that these religious leaders were coming out for the baptism that he was preaching as a show of repentance. We will talk more next week about what that baptism meant to the people, and what a massive statement of their repentance it really was, but it was clear immediately to John that these men were not coming out of a heart of repentance but out of selfish ambition.
All of Jerusalem we saw in verse 5 were going out to John the Baptist to hear him preach and to be baptized by him. The Pharisees and the Sadducees recognize that the people at least saw John the Baptist as a prophet in line with those from the Old Testament and it is very likely that they went out to feign support for his ministry and even submit to his baptism in order to get him on their side in their petty struggles against the other side.
But John wants nothing to do with their false religion. John wants nothing to do with their petty squabbles. That is exactly what he came to preach against. From the beginning, the message of the gospel, the message of Scripture, the message of the Old Testament as well as the new has been “repent.” The Old Testament is as much about the need for repentance in the heart of the Israelite as it is in the heart of the New Testament believer. The purpose of the sacrifices and the washings and the acts that were to be taken in the temple were a way to show a heart of repentance to God.
There was no repentance in the heart of these Pharisees and Sadducees who came out to John. We see in verse 9 that John anticipates their claim to salvation. “Do not suppose you can say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our father.” That was the foundation for both the Pharisees and the Sadducees religion, that they were the children of Abraham. They did not base their salvation on repentance, they did not base their salvation on the grace or mercy of God, they placed their hope for salvation on the fact that they were a part of the chosen people.
There is even teaching from rabbis of this time that said Abraham sat at the gates of Gehenna, the gates of hell, in order to turn around any Israelite who may have accidentally gone that way. John tears that mentality apart. He rips away what they believe is their foundation in one swift stroke.
“For I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. The axes already laid the root of the tree; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
We will see over the course of Jesus’s ministry that he had to continue tearing away at this belief to get the Jewish people to true repentance. The apostles had to continue the same fight throughout the first century of the church’s existence. Simply because a person was born into the Jewish people did not mean that they were going to be granted salvation.
Unfortunately, we have to continue the fight today. Simply because you are part of the church, simply because you were baptized, simply because you prayed a prayer or signed a book, simply because you claim to believe in Jesus does not mean you are truly one of his own. I believe this is one of the greatest arguments against infant baptism, not only do I believe there is a great deal of evidence against the practice in Scripture, but from a practical standpoint, infant baptism has for generations given a false sense of security to people. But we will have to spend more time talking about that later.
John does not leave these Pharisees and Sadducees with a warning of impending doom and nothing else. He attacks their hypocrisy, he attacks their false religion, and he warns the people of their nature in calling them a “brood of vipers” but he preaches to them the same message he has been preaching to the people. That short, pointed message that he started with in verse two, “repent.” Specifically, he tells them in verse eight to “bear fruit in keeping with repentance.”
The kingdom of heaven is at hand, part of the coming of that kingdom is the coming judgment of God against the wicked. That is the wrath of which John says they are fleeing in verse 7. Nobody wants to face the wrath of God. They may claim not to believe that it is coming or that they have some sort of insurance against it, but nobody wants to face the wrath of God.
What is it that gives us assurance that we will not face that wrath? It is not being a part of the chosen people as the Pharisees and Sadducees thought. It is not just going to church or having prayed a prayer as is unfortunate mentality common today. It is to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. It is to demonstrate that there is real repentance in your life. It is showing through the choices and actions of your life that you have been transformed, that you have been turned around, that you have rejected the sin that you were enslaved to and begun to fully pursue righteousness. That is the fruit of repentance.
It’s works. It is a life of obedience to the word of God. It is a life marked by devotion to the Word of God, studying and meditating it, in order to more fully understand how we are to serve and worship God. It is a complete change of lifestyle.
James, the brother of Jesus, challenges us in 2:14-17 of his letter to the church, “what use is it, my brother and, if someone says he has faith but has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘go in peace, be warmed and be filled,’ and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.”
Works do not precede faith, our faith, our salvation, the grace of God that has been given to us as a gift is not dependent on works but good works sure does follow it. The greatest verse describing the gift of grace and faith given to us by God is immediately followed by a requirement of works. Ephesians 2:8-9, “for by grace you have been saved through faith; and not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” That gift is wholly a gift and not dependent on anything we can do to earn it or keep it, but then Paul continues immediately in verse 10, “for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”
If your life is not demonstrating the good works associated with a righteous lifestyle then you should fear the wrath that is to come. Repentance is the necessary requirement for salvation and it is only granted through the grace of God but if you are not bearing fruit in keeping with repentance then you are not truly repentant.
Preachers for years have talked about the assurance of salvation. They have said that as long as you prayed the prayer, as long as you asked Jesus into your heart, as long as you say you believe in Jesus and admitted that you need a Savior you are absolutely safe in the hands of God. You can feel 100% secure and that if you worry or question it then you are questioning God. They are vipers.
Scripture gives no such assurance. James continues in 2:19, “you believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?” If you are not living a life that is bearing fruit in keeping with repentance than any faith you may claim to have is useless and you should be afraid of the wrath that is to come. Do not fall prey to the Easy-Believeism’s false assurance.
If you have been granted salvation from God, you can know that He will sustain you. You can have faith in the preservation of the saints because it is based on the power of God, and not on your ability alone. We can be confident in Paul’s statement in Philippians 1:6, “for I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfected until the day of Jesus Christ.”
We can be confident of God’s work in our life, but that confidence must be based on the fruits of repentance as they present themselves in our continued pursuit of sanctification.