17.2 The Pharisees
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Because the Judeans sought to kill Him. – The world… hates Me because I testify against it that its works are evil (John 7:1&7). Jesus used the term “cosmos” here, but the context of the chapter and of His life shows that His “world” was dominated by the Pharisees who were already set on killing Him.
Let me expand on the meaning of “its works are evil.” Jesus did not simply mean that these people were doing bad things. In fact, these were people who excelled at obedience to God. He meant that everything they did came out from their own self-story of RIGHT-ness before God. Their “obedience” to the law was only to boast in their rule over the flesh of others.
“The world hates Me” is more profound than we can know.
[Because of the world in which we live, I have removed some of the content of this lesson from the web page. My purpose is not to be removed from the Internet, since the Word of Christ you receive from this website is of far greater value than one small aspect of that word. Thus to benefit from this lesson, please purchase a hard copy of Symmorphy III: Kingdom.]
Our Same Jesus
We are in no game. Our commitment to Christ as the only life we are is literally a matter of life and death.
HOWEVER – let me make something perfectly clear. Every individual person of Jewish descent on this planet is loved of God, just as He loves all, but also in His regard for Abraham. And every individual Judaic, when they give their story to Christ alone, as we are learning to do, will display a wonderful story of our same Jesus through them, including through all they have ever been.
Christ, entering into us, does not erase our own stories; rather, He becomes them and we now see that everything was He all along. Yet inside that seeing, all our sin vanishes. God never intended our sins, but He always intended us through it all.
Separating the Tare Roots
Our war is not against people, but against a false story of self. The temporal problem is that people are utterly invested in those false stories and will kill to keep tight hold of them. The separation between the roots of the tares and the roots of the wheat is a fine separation. The fine root hairs of the tares of false self-story must be pulled out, yes, but that same moment in that person’s life also contains a fine root hair of Christ, a root more valuable than all the universe. This is why Jesus said not to be pulling out tares; reckless gardeners will also destroy Christ.
Yet the love of Christ compels us to understand the difference between the two roots in the same human story.
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Babylon
The largest Jewish population center at the time Jesus walked this earth was the city of Babylon. Far more Jews lived in Babylon than in all the land of Israel. Babylon was their home, as God had instructed; Babylon was their city and remained the city of the Jews until it was destroyed in the eleventh century AD. The Babylon that came under the destruction of Jeremiah’s curse was entirely a Jewish city. But prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, many of the Pharisees escaped from Judea and returned to Babylon. They carried with them their perversion of Moses’ law and a new-found and absolute hatred of Christ and Christianity.
The Talmud
These same Pharisees, then, who had called for the death of Jesus and who had persecuted the Church of Christ, gathered new disciples in Babylon. Very quickly, they became the “voice of Judaism” to all the Jews of Babylon. And then they began to write down their teachings, a perversion of the books of Moses engendered by constant arguing among themselves, turning the very argument itself into their “relationship with God.”
For 1000 years the Pharisees wrote down their teaching, culminating in the writing of Moses Maimonides after Babylon was destroyed; that teaching is called, today, The Talmud.
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That He Might Have Mercy
For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all (Romans 11:30-32).
In the last lesson I said: The gospel is “Stop all self-effort – be silent before Me – and offer to me Christ as your only self-story.” This is a paraphrase of Romans 3:19 That every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Here is God’s problem. He can’t get anyone to shut their mouths, to stop speaking their own false story.
ALL the World Silent
I see little difference in the mind of Calvin and those who teach Calvinist thinking, and the minds of the religious Judaics in New York City as shown to us by Chaim Potok. It is an effort to know God out of intellectual argument over the meaning of good and evil, sin and not-sin.
Christians refuse to accept that they cannot please God or do His will just the same as Jews and all other humans. And thus God has to allow everyone on this planet to put their hand to this greatest act of iniquity, the triumph of Cain over Abel (by taking Abel’s place), so that He can, finally, get them, at least some of them, to shut their mouths. And to accept Christ as the only life they are.