In my post “Not Far from the Kingdom of God” I made this comment, “[The Pharisees’] problem was that they totally misunderstood and misrepresented God’s Law.” Let me expand on that a bit.
We often hear the Pharisees described in terms that make them out to be the apex of strict, (Mosaic) Law-abiding Judaism. Some people will talk about how the Pharisees not only kept the 613 commandments of the Torah, but even built their own hedge around the Law to be sure they didn’t come close to violating any of it. With such a picture as our backdrop, we sometimes then get the impression that Jesus comes along and says, “Hey everybody, can’t we just lighten up and obey the spirit, rather than the letter, of the Law?”
In response to the ideas summarized in the above paragraph I say: wrong, wrong, and wrong. First, the Pharisees may have been perfectionists when it came to obeying the traditions of the Pharisees, but not when it came to the Law of Moses.
The Pharisees and the scribes asked [Jesus], “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands?”
And [Jesus] said to them, “… Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.” He was also saying to them, “You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.” - Mark 7:5-9 NASB
Experts at setting aside the commandment of God, that’s what the Pharisees were! They weren’t strict (Mosaic) Law-abiders, they were Law-neglecters!
Second, did the Pharisees build a hedge around the Torah, in order to be careful to obey everything written in it (cf. Deut 6:3)? No way!
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” - Matt 23:23
The Pharisees did indeed build such tightly woven hedges with respect to certain traditions that even a gnat couldn’t fit through their filter. But when it came to “the more important matters of the law” the Pharisees opened the gates wide enough for whole herds of camels to come trucking through.
The problem with the Pharisees wasn’t that they were over zealous for the Law. God has never been angry with anyone for being over zealous for His Law. The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119, and verse after verse extols the beauty of God’s commands, decrees, precepts, statutes, and laws. I don’t think that Jesus is angry with the Psalmist for being over zealous for God’s Law. The problem with the Pharisees was that they were under zealous for major portions of God’s Law, such as all that stuff in the Law about justice, mercy, and faithfulness.
Paul, recalling his past as a Pharisee of Pharisees says, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal 1:14). Yes, the Pharisees did have a form of zeal, but it was not a zeal guided by a right understanding of God’s Law (see Romans 10:2, Phil 3:6a). They may have appeared “blameless” in the eyes of fleshly man (Phil 3:4-6), but in God’s eyes they were clearly wicked, unclean, Law-breakers (Matt 23:25-28, Rom 2:17-27). The true Law of God makes man tremble (Ezra 10:3). Pharisaic traditions inflate a man with pride (Matt 23:6).
We often refer to religious groups who enforce their own lengthy lists of laws in addition to the Bible as “modern day Pharisees”. That is often a fair description, but again, I disagree with the sentiment that says that such people are too focused on law. Usually the greater offense is not the laws they add to the Bible, but the commands they take away in the process. The reason that ancient and modern day Pharisees love to show off their gnat filter is to distract attention from the full grown camels rumbling around in their bellies.
So then, when Jesus comes along His goal is not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, as if they were a bad thing, but to fulfill them. And He did not merely obey the “spirit” of the Law. Jesus, much more than the most rigorous of Pharisees, fulfilled the Law down to the smallest letter, down to the least stroke of the pen (Matt 5:17-18). When we think of the apex of strict, (Mosaic) Law-abiding Judaism, we should think of JESUS, not the Pharisees.
You see, one problem with ascribing too much credit to the Pharisees as being Law-keepers is that it makes the Law look bad. If a Pharisee is what strict adherence to the Law looks like, then ugh, who wants to have anything to do with that? So then we start talking about “not being under the law, but under grace” and we often attach an entirely different meaning to that phrase than the meaning in Paul’s epistles. Paul, the great preacher of justification by faith apart from works of the Law, did not have bad feelings toward the Law itself. On the contrary, he agreed with the author of Psalm 119 that, “[The law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.” (Rom 7:12) Indeed, the goal of Paul’s gospel of grace was not to nullify the Law, but rather to uphold the Law (Rom 3:31).
The Law, as God intended it, centers around love: first of all whole-hearted love for God, and then love for man. And from that center the Law extends to the weighty implications of love such as justice, mercy, and faithfulness. If we understand the Law as the perfect standard of holiness, righteousness, and goodness, then when we look at Jesus we see the ultimate fulfillment of the Law. And conversely, we should look to Jesus in order to properly understand the Law. If Jesus is what it looks like when the Torah is lived out to completion, then you really can’t blame the Psalmist for going on and on about the glory of God’s marvelous decrees, can you?
Finally, let me touch on the implications of this to our own relationship to the Law. Certainly Jesus’ listeners must have been shocked to hear him say, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20). But I disagree with the teaching that says the Sermon on the Mount was merely intended to drive the disciples to despair of how hard it is to obey God’s law. Indeed, none of us comes close to fulfilling the Law of God, and that’s why the first word of Jesus’ public ministry was “Repent!” But I would argue that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus truly meant that a son of the kingdom will walk in accordance with the Law more than a Pharisee would. If anyone treats the weighty matters of the law such as love, justice, mercy, and faithfulness with as much neglect as the Pharisees did, then he can’t really claim to be Christ’s disciple.
In our sinful state the Law brings no power for righteous living but only condemnation. When we are united together with Christ who died and bore our condemnation, we are set free. Not set free for lawlessness, but set free from lawlessness for righteous living (Titus 2:11-14). Indeed, it is not James, not Jesus, not Moses, not the Judaizers, but Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, the apostle of justification through faith, who says,
“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” Rom 8:3-4
To the extent that “meeting the requirements of the Law” means “being like Jesus”, may it be said of me that I delight in the Law of God more than the most Pharisaic of Pharisees!