Language Lab: What Is A “pharisee”?

Language Lab: What Is a “Pharisee”?

Bible Blast: Read Galatians 5:13-15

I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Matthew 5:20

Do you know the old kids’ song “I Just Wanna Be a Sheep”?

I don’t wanna be a Pharisee!

’Cuz they just weren’t fair, ya see! . . .

I don’t wanna be a Pharisee!

Well, as silly as the song may seem to you, fairness definitely wasn’t high on the Pharisees’ list of things to do.

Pharisees were a group of Jewish people who wanted to be totally separate from the sin in the world. They did this by following lots of carefully written laws and rules. Following the rules wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the Pharisees had one big problem: a lack of love. They followed God with their heads, but their hearts didn’t get God’s message that his rules were made to help them love people.

The Pharisees didn’t believe that Jesus was God, either. At one point, they even said he must worship the devil because of the power he had (see Matthew 12:23-25).

In Matthew 23:3-5, Jesus talks about some specific ways the Pharisees hurt him: “They don’t practice what they teach. They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden. Everything they do is for show.”

A lot of people use the words Pharisee and hypocrite interchangeably. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing but does another, which is just what the Pharisees did. The Pharisees really missed the point.

So when it comes down to it, that old kids’ song was right. I really don’t want to be a Pharisee.

Girl Gab: Kneel down with your mom today and ask God to plant all the knowledge you have about him deep into your heart.

From the book