The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity is on August 28, 2022.

Readings for Year C can be found here.

The Gospel reading is as follows (emphases mine):

Luke 14:1, 7-14

14:1 On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

14:7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.

14:8 “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host;

14:9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place.

14:10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.

14:11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

14:12 He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.

14:13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.

14:14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

This post is long; as last week’s explained how synagogues developed, this week’s discusses how the Pharisees came to be so powerful.

We are in the middle of Luke’s accounts of our Lord’s teaching the disciples and others with whom He came in contact. These lessons began in Luke 9 and extend to Luke 19. We are in the last six months of His ministry.

Luke 14 begins with an account of Jesus going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees for a meal on the sabbath; He was being watched closely (verse 1).

The King James Version and other translations say ‘eat bread’ rather than ‘eat a meal’.

John MacArthur explains:

It says “to eat bread” and the reason they ate bread on the Sabbath is because you couldn’t cook anything and so the bread would have to be made the day before.  Couldn’t do any work on the Sabbath.  That meant you couldn’t cook anything and they would probably have something you could dip the bread in and it was pretty much what the meal was all about.

Even today, some devout Jews ensure that cooking, normally a stew that can stay warm, is done before the sabbath. Some Jews employ a shabbos goy, a Gentile who serves them and takes care of basic needs on the Sabbath, like turning on the lights when it gets dark. It is said that this custom is falling out of use, thanks to electronic timers. A number of famous men were shabbos goys, including Harry S Truman and Barack Obama.

Matthew Henry’s commentary says that the Pharisee did not have good intentions in inviting Jesus to his home:

The Pharisee that invited him, it should seem, did it with a design to pick some quarrel with him; if it were so, Christ knew it, and yet went, for he knew himself a match for the most subtle of them, and knew how to order his steps with an eye to his observers. Those that are watched had need to be wary. It is, as Dr. Hammond observes, contrary to all laws of hospitality to seek advantage against one that you invited to be your guest, for such a one you have taken under your protection. These lawyers and Pharisees, like the fowler that lies in wait to ensnare the birds, held their peace, and acted very silently.

In last week’s reading from Luke 13, Jesus healed the bent over woman in the synagogue on the sabbath, so they knew He performed miracles which they considered to be work. Jesus rightly accused His critics of hypocrisy and turned their man-made rules on them, saying that they had no problem untying their ox or donkey on the sabbath to give them water.

Our Lord’s opponents were put to shame as the congregation rejoiced at His healing the woman, who had been suffering for 18 years from an evil spirit that caused her to be bent over.

MacArthur recaps the end of Luke 13, which provides further context for today’s reading:

He is moving, although not in a direct line, from town and village around the area of Judea, ultimately headed to that final Passover in Jerusalem …

Chapter 13 ends with a judgment pronunciation.  Verse 34, Jesus says, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her, how often I wanted to gather your children together just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you would not have it.  Behold your house is left to you, desolate.  And I say to you, you shall not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’”  It’s over for you, He says.  I tried to gather you often.  You would not. You are the city that kills the prophets, stones the messengers of God and, of course, they would kill Him as well.

Regular readers of these exegeses and Forbidden Bible Verses know how spiritually blind the Jewish leaders were and how determined they were to kill Jesus.

MacArthur explains how the Pharisees came to be so powerful and why most Jews obeyed them:

They were, of course, sinful and they loved their sin.  And they were in darkness and they chose their darkness, but they were confirmed in this condition by their religion, which made the bondage so strong.  And the ones who wrapped them in this bondage were none other than their religious leaders.  The Bible warns from front to back about false teachers and the deadly, eternally destructive impact they have on people.  Satan, himself, is disguised as an angel of light, purveying false religion in order to capture men’s souls.  All his messengers are angels of light says the Bible.  They come offering light; they bring only darkness and death.

Hosea put it this way, “Like people, like priest.”  People are like their leaders.  The Jews had rejected the Messiah.  They had rejected their Lord, their Redeemer, their Savior, the Son of God and consequently they forfeited salvation and they forfeited an entrance into the kingdom of heaven and they forfeited eternal life, missing forever what they had for centuries waited for.  Now how did they get so deep into a religious system that they could come to the conclusion that their very Messiah, Redeemer and the Son of God was an agent of Satan meant to distract them away from the truth and thus they needed to eliminate Him?

How could they be so wrong?  The answer is they were led astray by their trusted leaders, who had wrapped them up in the chains of a system of religion that doomed them to hell.  And who were these leaders?  Well, they’re Pharisees … 

They were good.  They were moral.  They were fastidious about God’s law.  They were religious, extremely religious, extremely moral, extremely on the outside righteous.  The people were sure they were the favorites of God and knew the way to heaven.  This is very informational historically, but it’s much more than that.  It’s very applicational in terms of our world today because the assumption today is that it’s the good people who can be sure they’re going to heaven.  You hear this all the time.  The good people are going to go to heaven, particularly the good religious people.  I mean, if you’re good you’ll probably get there, but if you’re good and religious you’re a shoe-in …

These people were well intentioned. They were driven by their religious beliefs.  And the Son of God came into conflict with them.  They were the fastidious architects of popular Judaism, which dominated the thinking of the people at the time of Jesus and before and after.  And when Jesus came and told them that the system was not of God and that it would not usher them into the kingdom of God, he became their archenemy.  The truth of the matter is that those religious leaders, as zealous as they were, as passionate, as loyal to their system as they were, as careful as they were, were driving people away from the kingdom of God …

… You have to understand this was a very, very compelling system.  Let me give you a little background.  Pharisees were devout.  They were religious.  If you saw one in the street, you hailed him.  They loved to be called father and teacher and rabbi and master.  And they cultivated that.  They cultivated it everywhere they went.  They expected people to revere them and honor them.  And they were easily identifiable, for they enlarged all the apparatus that they wore, whether it was the phylacteries on their arms or their heads or the tassels on their garments, they were clearly Pharisees and when people came across a Pharisee, they were expected to revere them.

And when there was an occasion to have a meal, they wanted the top seats.  They put themselves in places of prominence and demanded that people recognize their devotion and their extreme righteousness.  They are a classic illustration of how damning the most serious kind of religion can be, even Judaism.  And they illustrate for us why our Lord Jesus turned from Israel to the Gentiles. 

The Pharisees might have had good intentions in mind centuries before, as they championed a religious revival in opposition to paganism from the Greeks and then the Romans. However, they became too powerful in all the wrong ways:

As Greek and Roman culture began to seep into the land of Israel, they became concerned that the people were buying into these idolatrous fashions, these pagan superstitions, these ideas, these philosophies that were very seductive.  And so at a time in the history of Judaism when the Jews were being most influenced by the Greeks, first of all, and then by the Romans, the Pharisees began to collect themselves.  The term simply means separatists.

They were separatists. They wanted to separate from the culture, the world that was encroaching upon them and pull back into the purity of Judaism.  They became especially prominent in the period between the Old and the New Testament around 160 B.C. that we know as Maccabean Period.  This was at a time when the Greeks were dominating the land and Greek culture and Greek immorality and Greek thought and Greek religion was seeping in.  It was at that time that this movement began.  They were really a return to the…to the Old Testament.  It was a back to the Bible movement.  It was a fundamentalist movement.  It was a restoration movement.  It was a recovery.  Perhaps the two most notable of them would be Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai.  Both lived in the decades just prior to Christ.  They had a great influence.

So that their particular legacy shows up in some of the discussions and debates that Jesus has. And when He’s debating with some of these Pharisees, He knows that some of them are Hillelites and some of them are Shammaiites because of how they view the Old Testament.  These men had an immense effect.  So you have it about 160 B.C. right through the time of Christ.  These two rabbis being the dominant ones and their influence continued in two schools of thought that lasted for a couple of centuries after Christ.  But during the time of Jesus, these Pharisees were the recognized leaders of religion among the people.  They were a middle class movement, and they were laymen.

Whereas the Sadducees ran the temple in Jerusalem, the Pharisees ensured they were among the people in local synagogues:

They were not those that ran the temple, the Sadducees.  They were the religious liberals.  They were the elite.  They were the ones who denied angels, denied the resurrection, denied the spiritual realm.  And so they had cut themselves off.  They…the Sadducees were the religious elite, they compromised with Rome.  They were the politicians.  They went to bed with the Romans which caused them to be disrespected by the people.  And they basically ran the temple operation, the ritual, the sacrifices, the great festivals that occurred there, but the Pharisees were a grass-roots movement.  They were a middle class movement.  They were lay people, they were not priests, and they had a strategy.  If we want to bring the people back to the word of God, if we want to bring the people back to the law of God, if we want to separate from the world, the only way to do it is to have influence at every local point.

And they did.  They basically dominated the synagogues.  There’s one temple in Jerusalem.  The Sadducees oversee that.  That’s ritual and ceremony, but in every city and village and town all throughout the land of Israel, there were synagogues.  There were synagogues and in every community and neighborhood there was a synagogue, synagogues, a gathering place.  They were born really out of the Babylonian captivity when they didn’t have a temple and they gathered and when they came back to the land, they still had that idea of gathering together in smaller groups.  And so the Pharisees began to take over at the local level and to communicate their teachings at that level in every community.  Some of them rose to very prominent positions and became members of the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Israel …

This is how they influenced the ordinary Jew of the day:

As Jewish society had moved toward worldliness and secularism and paganism and materialism and idolatry, these were the fighting fundamentalists who called the people to be faithful to Scripture and in order to help them be faithful to Scripture, they created all kinds of additional laws and rules and regulations to put big fences and insulation around them.  In other words, worrying that you might break a law that God gave, they made five other laws so you couldn’t even get close to breaking that law.

But everything they taught centered on their revering the law of God.  Synagogues, as I said, really invented religious education on a local level.  They took Judaism to the people and the people bought it.  They were the influencers of Judaism at the time of the Lord.  They took Judaism out of the hands of the priests, who were just the ritualists in one sense.  Although the scattered priests certainly did function in the synagogue, the Pharisees were the dominant force.  They made the law accessible to the people.  You know, they did in a sense what the Reformation did.  They moved…They moved the religion from being sacerdotal, sacramental, ritual, and ceremony into the hands of the people.

They took the Scriptures to the people and taught and explained it.  And they were against any corrupted form for Judaism such as Sadducees, and Zealots and even the Essenes.  Summing it up, they were characterized by strong doctrine; strong doctrine.  When they engaged in questions with Jesus, they were questions about doctrine.  Which is the greatest commandment?  Their questions were doctrinal questions.  In fact, they were so committed to the teaching of the law of God and its doctrine, that in Matthew 23, where Jesus denounces them, He begins by saying, “The scribes and Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses.”

They’ve taken the posture, the authoritative posture regarding the law; they are strong on the law. Therefore all they tell you, do and observe.  When they tell you what Moses said, when they tell you the law of Moses, you observe it.  You do it.  Their doctrine was strong and Jesus’ theology was closer to theirs than anybody else’s.  Not only were they strong in doctrine, but committed to scriptural authority.  They didn’t equivocate on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.  In fact, every time a synagogue meeting occurred, somebody read the word of God.  It was taken out, it was unrolled, it was handed to someone, it was read and then the teacher sat down, the rabbi sat down, and explained it.  That’s what they did.  It was about the authority of the word of God.  They were also committed to moral living.  Strong doctrine, scriptural authority and moral living; they had a righteousness.  They had a level of morality.  Paul says according to his own life measuring it against the law of God, he was blameless, at least externally.

… They prayed, they prayed daily, they prayed routinely through the day many times.  They were engaged in evangelism: According to Matthew 23:15, they went across land and across sea to find one convert. In the end they made him more a son of hell than themselves.  But they were aggressive in evangelism.  They were fasting as the one in Luke 18 claims.  They were charitable.  That same Pharisee said he gives a tithe of everything he possesses away.  So here you have the good people; the good religious people; the good, religious people worshiping the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the creator God of Israel.  They are rejecting paganism.  They are rejecting superstition.  They are rejecting false religion, immorality.  They’re strong on the family.  They are the guardians of the faith.  They see themselves as the protectors of the truth. 

And this gets very visceral.  I mean this gets right down into your soul.  When you see yourself as a protector of the truth and along comes someone assaulting what you think is the truth.  That’s why, like the apostle Paul, you go out and you catch these Christians who you think are assaulting your truth and you throw them in prison and you kill them if need be to protect the honor of God and the law of God and the true religion.

A few Pharisees believed Jesus was the Messiah, men like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, but most despised Jesus because He was pouring ice cold water on all their strongly held rules and beliefs. They were false teachers, and Jesus called them out as such:

For the most part, they despised Jesus.  Back in chapter 11 of Luke and verse 53, when He left there the scribes and the Pharisees — scribes again are their scholars who undermine their system — the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile and to question Him closely on many subjects plotting against Him, to catch Him in something He might say.  They were hostile, they were hateful, and they were after Him.  Jesus called them blind, Matthew 23.  He called them snakes.  He called them sons of hell and He calls them hypocrites.  But they were religious and devout and zealous and moral and studious and serious and vigilant and protecting Scripture.  They were charitable.  They were righteous.  All those things; and it meant absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing.

As for the Pharisee who hosted the sabbath meal, we know nothing more, but MacArthur gives us a few possibilities:

The word “leader” or “ruler” means a prominent Pharisee, maybe the ruler of a synagogue maybe even more prominent than that, higher than that, maybe a member of the Sanhedrin, we don’t know.  But they loved to have meals.  They loved to have dinners and that was a part of life in the ancient Near East and they did it all the time and they were times of hospitality and times of fellowship and of course, for these guys it was a time for them to get with their cronies and to re-enforce and reaffirm themselves in the eyes of the people.  So they would only invite those people that would elevate them.  So this would be a meeting of the rich and the elite scribes and Pharisees.

For whatever reason, the Lectionary excludes Luke 14:2-6, which I wrote about a few years ago in Forbidden Bible Verses:

Luke 14:2-6 – Jesus, miracle, man with dropsy, oedema, Pharisees

Whilst being a guest at the house of a leader of the Pharisees, Jesus healed a man of dropsy — oedema.

Once again, He questions the Jewish hierarchy on the validity of healing — working — on the Sabbath. They have no answer.

I do not know what harm it would have done churchgoers to hear five more verses from Luke, but that’s the Lectionary for you.

We do not know what relationship the man with oedema had with the Pharisee.

Henry says that they could have been relatives:

probably he was some relation of the Pharisee’s, that now lodged in his house, which is more likely than that he should be an invited guest at the table.

MacArthur thinks that the Pharisee purposely brought the man in to see if Jesus would heal him, which would have constituted work on the sabbath, in his eyes:

It’s pretty clear what the set-up was.  Drop him right in front of Jesus.  Why?  So Jesus could heal him.  Isn’t it amazing?  Do a miracle so we can for sure not believe in you.  This is like counter intuitive.  This is like backwards.  But there he is right in front of Jesus.  They know exactly how Jesus feels about their ridiculous laws.  They know exactly what He is capable of doing and they want Him to break their law.  Therein lies something of their duplicity and hypocrisy.  They’re supposed to try to keep people from breaking the law.  They want Jesus to break the law by healing the man.

MacArthur says that the man with dropsy was unlikely to have been a guest at the meal because everyone would have considered him unclean and suffering from divine judgement:

Dropsy is edema.  Dropsy was water retention.  Accumulation of serous fluids in a tissue and in the body cavity, bloating.  In itself it’s not a disease, but a symptom of a disease.  It could be a number of things, serious compromises in the liver or the kidneys or the heart or all three.  It’s kind of a bloating, indicates perhaps congestive heart failure.  It could be liver disease.  Alcoholism was a reality in ancient days and alcoholism can fill the abdomen with gallons of fluid.  When pumped out they will return.

But the point I think you need to know is that in Jewish rabbinical view somebody who had this condition was seen as a vile sinner and they thought that this was related to sexual sin, that this betrayed the judgment of God upon a person for their immorality, or that it was a serious uncleanness because it was related to the body’s failure to eliminate.  In either case, this is either a wicked, immoral man or a very unclean man.  Serious uncleanness related to this condition …

Verse 4: “He took hold of him and healed him and sent him away.”  That verb took hold of him really strong, very, very strong verb, [???] epilombano. It’s used in Acts, I think it’s chapter 19 or chapter 16, verse 19 and in that particular passage it says, “They seized Paul and Silas and dragged them to jail.”  Very strong word, it’s used in the gospels of Jesus taking hold of a child and setting them in the midst.  He literally wrapped this man up, this bloated man with sick organs manifest in this edemic condition.  Why did He do that?  He did it without hesitation.  He did it forcefully.  He did it unmistakably.  He did it defiantly.  Instead of keeping His distance in healing the man out of compassion in such a way as it might not be clear what had happened, He just grabs the man, seizes him, crushes him in His arms as if to squeeze the fluid out and gives him a new heart, and a new liver, and a new anything else he needed, and creates in the man a whole new set of internal organs.

And then He says, “You can go.”  That’s an interesting little note.  “And sent him away.”  We know that if He sent him away, He knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.  He wasn’t one of the guests.  The purpose for which you came is done, now go home.  And truthfully that was the kind thing to do, right?  Because if He said, “Stay for lunch,” the guy’s going to be sitting there saying I need to tell my wife what happened.  Can I get out of here?  Right?  I’ve got to tell my family what happened.  I don’t want any lunch, let me out of here.  So it’s as if Jesus says I understand you want to go.  Go.

And that’s betraying the fact that the man was never a guest for any purpose other than this.  And so He healed him, instantly, completely.  Miracles, by the way, are rare in this section of Luke.  Jesus spends most of His time teaching and preaching.  There’s just a few…Just a couple of miracles really from here on out.  The simplicity of the text is staggering.  The ease with which He creates, no effort, no fanfare, this is the power of God.  And at that moment Pharisees had what they wanted, they thought.  A healing violating the Sabbath, forget the healing idea, He violated the Sabbath.  And He did it to an unclean, sinful man under divine judgment.  What a law breaker He is.  What a law breaker.

When Jesus noted how the guests chose their places at table, He told them a parable (verse 7).

Naturally, they would have been scrambling for the best seats.

MacArthur tells us about dining at table in that era:

Now, if I can just give you a little bit of a background in terms of Jewish history.

In later years, they wrote a lot about this.  Typically the table would be in the middle.  It would be a long table.  And around the table would be people seated in a U-shaped fashion.  There was only one head of the table and then down both sides to the far end.  It could be a long table or a series of tables so that it could be a long way.  The host would sit in the middle at the head of the table and then in importance the guests would sit on his right and his left and then it would begin to flow all the way down to the least important people being way down at the other end.

That’s pretty much how it still is at important events.  The places of honor were not marked with a sign.  They were determined by the host.  But the nearer you were to the host, the more honor you had … 

By the way, they had interesting seats in those days…a little reading about that…called triclinium; it seated three people.  It was a couch and it seated three people on each couch.  So there’d be one couch at the head with the host in the middle and the most important dignitaries on either said.  And then those couches would go along.  They reclined on their elbow and ate at leisure as you know.

Eating in a partially propped up position was thought to aid digestion.

In His parable Jesus used the example of a wedding banquet, possibly out of courtesy, so that it did hit not home too much for those assembled; He advised them not to sit too close to the host in case someone more deserving came along (verse 8) and the host asked them to move down in disgrace to the lowest place (verse 9).

Jesus said that a guest should take the lowest place so that, when the host comes along, he might be moved up to a better place and be honoured in front of everyone (verse 10).

He ended by saying that those who exalt themselves will be humbled but those who are humble will be exalted (verse 11).

MacArthur says that Jesus was not giving etiquette lessons but reminding them of Scripture and, more importantly, talking about the kingdom of God:

These guys were experts in the Old Testament.  They were experts in the law of God.  They probably remember Proverbs 25:7.  “It is better for it to be said to you come up here than that you should be put lower in the presence of the prince whom your eyes have seen.”  Just built on that Proverbs 25:6-7.  It’s a lot better to be told to come to the front than to be told to go to the back.  Is that all it’s about?  No, it’s way more than that.  This is all about the kingdom of God.  This is all about clamoring for the chief place in the kingdom of God, rushing in a display of pride and arrogance to the front only to be told by God, get out of that seat.

Then Jesus addressed his host, the Pharisee, by saying that, when he gives a luncheon or a dinner, he should not always invite those who can repay the favour (verse 12).

Henry explains:

This does not prohibit the entertaining of such; there may be occasion for it, for the cultivating of friendship among relations and neighbours. But, (1.) “Do not make a common custom of it; spend as little as thou canst that way, that thou mayest not disable thyself to lay out in a much better way, in almsgiving. Thou wilt find it very expensive and troublesome; one feast for the rich will make a great many meals for the poor.” Solomon saith, He that giveth to the rich shall surely come to want, Prov 22 16. “Give” (saith Pliny, Epist.) “to thy friends, but let it be to thy poor friends, not to those that need thee not.” (2.) “Be not proud of it.” Many make feasts only to make a show, as Ahasuerus did (Esth 1 3, 4), and it is no reputation to them, they think, if they have not persons of quality to dine with them, and thus rob their families, to please their fancies. (3.) “Aim not at being paid again in your own coin.” This is that which our Saviour blames in making such entertainments: “You commonly do it in hopes that you will be invited by them, and so a recompence will be made you; you will be gratified with such dainties and varieties as you treat your friends with, and this will feed your sensuality and luxury, and you will be no real gainer at last.”

This happens all the time. Whom do we entertain? People who can return the favour.

Jesus told the Pharisee to invite instead the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind (verse 13).

The Pharisee must have found that shocking, because they did not associate with whom they would have considered as the ‘lower orders’, even able-bodied people.

Yet, we see at the end of this story that the penny began to drop, that at least one guest understood what Jesus was saying.

Jesus ended by saying that inviting those less well off to table expressly because they cannot return the favour will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous (verse 14).

Henry has a marvellous analysis:

There will be a resurrection of the just, a future state of the just. There is a state of happiness reserved for them in the other world; and we may be sure that the charitable will be remembered in the resurrection of the just, for alms are righteousness. Works of charity perhaps may not be rewarded in this world, for the things of this world are not the best things, and therefore God does not pay the best men in those things; but they shall in no wise lose their reward; they shall be recompensed in the resurrection. It will be found that the longest voyages make the richest returns, and that the charitable will be no losers, but unspeakable gainers, by having their recompense adjourned till the resurrection.

I do wish that the Lectionary compilers had included verse 15, which ties everything together and shows that Jesus succeeded in getting His point across:

¹⁵ When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, “Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”

That’s important, especially as a lot of churchgoers don’t really bother to listen to the readings that closely.

MacArthur tells us how the meal ended:

I don’t think it was what they had planned. It’s what they got.  And it doesn’t get any better.  Doesn’t get any better.  While they’re having lunch over in verse 15, the statement is made, “Blessed is everyone who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.”  But down in verse 24, Jesus says, “I tell you none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.”  By the time this lunch is over, they’ve been told they aren’t coming to the big banquet in the kingdom of God.  You can be devout, you can be dutiful, you can be outwardly good, you can be serious about God, you can be a defender of your religion, you can be a fundamentalist.  You can be a protector of God’s will.  You can be the best of the best of people and you can reject Jesus Christ and your life is a blasphemy to God.  It is a slander to His name and you are left in spiritual death and eternal judgment.

And they are the great illustration of that.  They had no signs of the life of God in them.  They lacked compassion.  They lacked mercy.  They lacked kindness.  They loved money.  They were spiritually proud.  They were hypocrites.  They were self-righteous.  And they sought to kill the very Son of the living God.  Folks, there’s only one way to heaven and that’s through faith in Jesus Christ.  No other religion will get you there, but they will all keep you from getting there.  Reject Jesus Christ and there never will be a place for you among the forgiven in God’s eternal heaven. 

And, after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, MacArthur tells us what happened:

With the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. and the destruction of the city, the Sadducees disappeared from history, because they basically were concentrated in the temple.  They were concentrated in the leadership of the nation and when the temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was destroyed it was the end for them.  That left one other somewhat well-known group called the Zealots.  They were the terrorists.  They went around stabbing Rom