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Hero For Christ

New Pharisees



We live in a world of social chaos and violence, a world in which people feel alienated and alone. The accelerating pace of technological change and the rapid shifting of national and cultural boundaries have made us feel as though we were building their lives on sinking sand. With this as our shared context, it is no wonder that so many of us are returning to Christianity as the firm foundation of our lives.

The irony in this, however, is that the religion we Christians have returned to is hardly Christian at all. It is an Old Testament religion, drawn chiefly from the law of Moses, as contained in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. It has been given a Christian flavor by carefully selected quotations from the New Testament, but it remains pre-Christian at its moral core.

This would not be problematic if the life God intended for us in the modern era was identical to the life he intended for the ancient Israelites, but there is no evidence to support that idea. Both the gospels and the pre-Christian prophecies of the Messiah indicate that Jesus came to earth not to make minor adjustments to the law of Moses, but to establish a new and better relationship between God and humanity. After all, when God described the then-forthcoming new covenant to the prophet Jeremiah, he did not describe it as “similar to” or “an improvement upon” the old covenant. Rather, he described it in the following words: “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers…” (Jeremiah 31:31-32a)

This is not to suggest that the law of Moses was not divinely inspired, nor that it was somehow imperfect and in need of repair from its very origins. Rather, it was perfectly matched to a particular group of people (the descendents of Israel) during a certain period of time. It was intended to service their needs and their needs alone. By the time of Christ, a new phase of God’s plan was coming to fruition.

There have always been those, however, who were unable to accept that God leads us forwards, not backwards. During Jesus’ own ministry, he frequently came into conflict with the Pharisees, a group of highly educated, highly devout and highly inflexible religious scholars, the fundamentalists of their day. Rather than praise their piety, he accused them of neglecting the “weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith,” and of zealously seeking converts only to make them “double the child of hell” as themselves (Matthew 23:15, 23). Furthermore, he accused those who studied of the law of “stealing” the key of knowledge, saying not only that they had failed to enter the service of the Lord themselves, but also that they had hindered others by placing religious obstacles in their paths (Mark 11:52).

These words were proven prophetic in the years following Christ’s departure from his earthly existence, as shown by an incident recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. It seems that there was a group of Pharisees who had converted to Christianity, yet retained their old preconceptions. Presumably acting with the best of intentions, they sowed discord among the new Gentile disciples by demanding that they adopt the law of Moses. In response, the apostles issued a stinging rebuke, saying neither they nor the Holy Spirit had issued any such commands (Acts 15:24, 28).

The original Pharisees vanished into history, but we modern Christians have made ourselves more descendents of theirs than of the wise apostles. We have become the Neo-Pharisees, preaching the law of Moses under the banner of Christ. Even worse, we have abused that law, transforming it into a tool of social conformity, sexual persecution, and warmongering, all mislabeled as Christian discipleship.
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