Life of Christ 3
Jeremiah 2:13 For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
How did they get in such a mess? I
mean, look at the incredible contrast revealed just in the Sermon on the Mount
between how the Pharisees viewed Moses' Law and how Jesus did. They were
practically polar opposites. Say what you will about Israel's struggles with
idolatry in the Old Testament the nation never incorporated a completely
erroneous view of the Law. So how did they get in such a mess?
I think to answer that you have to go
back several centuries before Christ. When Alexander the Great blew like a
whirlwind through the known world he had no time to construct a lasting
political machine. But wherever he went the rich Greek culture followed along
behind, and like kudzu in the South, it began to cover everything in its path.
This process is known in history as hellenization. Even the Roman empire, much
stronger and more permanent than the Grecian one, found its culture substantially hijacked by the Grecian culture. Some of these developments were certainly
positive for the later spread of the Gospel such as a wide knowledge of the
Greek language. Others were not.
The Jews have always been a people
substantially at odds with the cultures around them. We can see this reflected
not just in the stories of the Old Testament, but also in Jewish history
throughout the last two millennia down to the modern day. This is because to be
Jewish is not just an ethnic identity. It is also a religious identity. Speaking
humanly, Abraham birthed the world's first monotheistic religion, and Moses
built on that a structure so different from the religions around them so as to
be practically unrecognizable. Religion, and the detail with which it was
observed, was the single most controlling factor in the life of the average
Jew. Edersheim phrases it this way, 'The history of Israel and all their
prospects were intertwined with their religion; so that it may be said that
without their religion they had no history, and without their history no
religion.'
Much of the rise of the Pharisees in
the four centuries between the Old and New Testaments can be traced directly to
an attempt by the Jewish religious leaders
to beat back the hellenization of their religion based culture, and thus
their very identity. In a sense, then, the Pharisees were birthed out of the
noble aim of protecting intact the very idea of what it meant to be Jewish in
the face of a world gone madly after the Greeks.
In conjunction with the rise of the
Pharisees came the birth of the synagogue and the advent of rabbis. In the Old
Testament the Tabernacle, and then the Temple, was the center of Jewish life.
With Nebuchadnezzar's complete destruction of Solomon's Temple in 586 BC, and
the corresponding Babylonian Captivity of the main body of the Jewish people,
came a necessity for a new kind of worship. The gradual solution was the
formation of localized places of worship. Like mini temples, these became the
centerpiece of the community, offering schooling for young people, regular
public Torah readings and sermons, etc. and thus the social and
religious streams of Jewish life convened around them. This growing tradition
continued to expand even after the return from Exile under Ezra, driven in part
by ease of use, and by the continued adoption of synagogues amongst a plurality
of Jews still living voluntarily in exile. By the time of Christ there were
hundreds in Jerusalem alone. Every community had at least one, and the larger
the community the more it had.
In the Old Testament the Mosaic Law
ordained the positions of priest and Levite, and God ordained the position of
prophet. With the failure of Israel to produce prophets in the four centuries
immediately preceding Christ, and the geneological confusion resulting from the
destruction of Solomon's Temple, the position of priest and Levite became
somewhat less authoritative, and the position of prophet nonexistent. This, combined with the rise of the local
synagogue, produced a new position in what was to become Judaism, that of
teacher or rabbi. By the time of Christ these rabbis were the movers and
shakers in Judaism. They gathered to themselves disciples, established
theological schools, and engaged in vigorous debates over minute points of the
Law.
The Pharisees desire to ensure a pure
stream of religion and culture married well with the increasing influence of
the local synagogue and rabbi in Jewish life. To them the Torah (particularly
the first five books of the Bible, the Mosaic Law) was supreme. In their
zealous sincerity to ensure the nation's righteous adherence to it they
produced a series of ever increasingly complicated and bizarre rules. They
justified the strict enforcement of these complex rules by trying to trace them
back to Moses, insisting that the same time God gave Moses the Torah He also
gave Moses an oral commentary on it, a commentary they had managed to refine
and improve upon in the intervening centuries. Naming Moses the first rabbi,
and thus borrowing his authority in the mind of the average Jew, they insisted
this Oral Torah was a fence designed to protect the garden of the actual Torah.
Influential rabbis taught this in synagogues all over the Middle East in the
time of Christ, and although there were other serious contenders for the
religious leadership of the common Jewish man, it was the Pharisees who held
the upper hand.
It shouldn't surprise any of us that a
complex system of man made rules in the Oral Torah foisted upon the Scripture produced an
externally oriented, highly legalistic, inwardly empty, and spiritually
bankrupt religion. In the course of this year you will discover, if you
continue to wade through this blog with me, an exponentially increasing clash
between a Jesus bent on turning people back to the simplicity of a heart
observance of God's Law, and rabbinical Pharisaism's iron-willed adherence to the
spiky fence surrounding the garden of the Torah.
Edersheim
well says, ' Thus as
between two – the old and the new – it may be fearlessly asserted that, as
regards their substance and spirit, there is not a difference, but a total
divergence, of fundamental principle between Rabbinism and the New Testament,
so that comparison between them is not possible. Here there is absolute
contrariety.'
In just a few short years Jesus would declaim at a
precisely timed moment, 'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink' (John 7.37). He was the personification of a fountain of living water. Rabbinic
Pharisaism was the institutional personification of broken cisterns.
When Jesus arrived it would be to a nation dying of thirst.
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