Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and this is epilogue week. This has been the week where we track down what happened after the book of Nehemiah. So we looked at the fall of Persia. We looked at the rise of Alexander the Great and his Greekish hordes. We looked at the decline of the political descendants of Alexander and the rise of Rome in the far west on the Italian peninsula. And we looked at the momentary restoration of a Jewish kingdom from the 160s B.C. to the 60s BC, where after a great rebellion, a revolutionary war, the Jewish people made a kingdom again, but the kingdom flopped, it fell on its face. And last time around, we looked at how they decided to look west and call in the help of a great superpower, much in the same way that their ancestors had tried to do the same thing with the great superpowers of Yor, but unfortunately, the Jewish people got the same result as the other times they called in the help of a great superpower. It backfired, it blew up on them, and Pompeii and the Romans took over the Hasmonean dynasty, established their own leaders there, divided it up into a couple of provinces, and that was that. But Rome wasn't impervious to corruption and problems either. And we talked about how Julius Caesar got stabbed to death in 44 BC, and there's a big Roman Civil War after that. And in the end, it's a guy named Caesar Augustus who wins out and sets in motion the events that lead to the beginning of the New Testament and the birth of Jesus. But yesterday, we were talking specifically about all the different responses amongst the Jewish people who had recently been friendly conquered by Pompeii and the Romans and are now occupied by the Romans, are now subjects to the Romans, are now taxpayers to the Romans. It wasn't a unified response amongst the Jewish people. Groups of full-throated Roman supporters were like, just forget it, guys. Let's just be Roman now, emerged. Groups of appeasers emerged who maybe also were kind of sneaky double agents. Groups of people who wanted to violently overthrow the Romans emerged. Groups of people who said, forget it. I'm just moving out to somewhere in the desert where everybody will leave me alone and I can just practice my culture and religion the way I want emerged. But there is one group that emerged that plays a very important role in the New Testament. And we talked a tiny bit about them yesterday and today. I want to talk about them a bunch. And these are the Pharisees. I want to tell you on the front end, the Pharisees are a very important link between our stories of Nehemiah and the story we're going to be looking at next in the book of Galatians, because these are people who were trying to take the ideas and values of Nehemiah, for better or worse, I'm not saying they executed on it perfectly, and trying to enforce them rigorously in their day and age for reasons we're going to discuss here in a minute. And when Christianity happened, when Jesus went to the cross and was resurrected and people started to acknowledge Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah and as the King of kings, there were a whole bunch of people who had been heavily influenced by the Pharisees who didn't quite know what to do with that. We're going to try to unpack that a little bit today, and then a lot in the next season on the book of Galatians. Understanding the Pharisees is something that has direct implications to who we are and how we live and how we think even today. So I think this Pharisee thing is really interesting. The Pharisees, of course, are the bad guys of the story of Jesus. They are the super conservative, rule-oriented, religious, political leader types who conspire and weasel to make sure Jesus goes to the cross, that he gets executed. They can't beat him with words and ideas. So they just use dirty tricks to manipulate the Romans into putting him to death. The Pharisees don't look good in the New Testament at all, and they don't appear by name in the Old Testament because, again, they emerged between the two. But now that we've looked at the whole Nehemiah thing, we get a way better sense of how the Pharisee phenomenon happened. The Pharisees were a people of similar ideological orientation to Nehemiah and Ezra. Now they came to different conclusions and they handled their business in different ways. But the Pharisees, like Nehemiah, looked at the whole story of the Old Testament and saw what you and I see when we look at it. And it was a conditional covenant. He made it through Moses. And the deal was that if we obey him, he's going to bless us, and if we disobey him, he's going to punish us. And either way, all the nations are going to know that he is the one true God. And he's done exactly that. But throughout the whole Old Testament, the Pharisees concluded, we never could get it right. So since we never could get it right, we must just need stricter rules. So the Pharisees are running the same equation you and I have run a couple times in our conversations. The Old Testament has all these different attempts to solve the human problem, all these different techniques to try to get the people to obey, to get the heart of the people aligned with God for the long haul, and none of them end up working. Well, the Pharisees have a constructive proposal of their own that they want to try out. And it kind of catches on in the time leading up to the period of the New Testament, the time of Jesus. Their strategy for addressing the human problem and making sure that people obey is to write more rules. But you write strategic rules that prevent people from ever actually violating the actual rules. So you ever done the thing where you got a friend who is habitually late and you discover eventually that if something is happening at 3:30 and you just say it's getting started at 3, well, then they'll probably show up at about 325 and they'll accidentally be five minutes early. Then gradually, through some light deception, you get good results out of them that you can work with. Well, the Pharisees have the same strategy. You got all these rules in the Old Testament that God has laid out and that God evaluates the obedience of his people based upon a lot of that came up in Nehemiah. I mean, you got the intermarriage thing, you got the Sabbath stuff, you got the temple life stuff, all the things that came up in the renewal of the covenant that we've talked about so much. And the Pharisees figure out that, well, if you can just get people to accept an even more robust list of rules religiously, then they'll be hesitant to violate those rules, which aren't the actual rules that God actually put in place. And they'll never even get close to touching the metaphorical stove or violating the actual rules. And maybe this buffer realm will keep the behavior in check in such a way that then God will bless his people once again because they aren't breaking any actual rules. But here's why I think that doesn't work out as we get into the time of Jesus and we see what Jesus says to them. These rules don't take into account the heart. They forget that what God seems to want from his people is for their hearts to be drawn to him, to be close to him. He doesn't want people who honor God in a perfunctory way with their lips, but their hearts are far from him. He wants their hearts. And so the Pharisees' strategy, in my opinion, and my opinion, I would like to think is rooted in the stuff that Jesus said, and I'm not just totally making it up, but you can go and listen to the Matthew season and decide what you think for yourselves. The Pharisees' strategy, on one level, I get it, and I understand that they were trying to save their people. They're trying to come up with a strategy to protect the people from themselves and from their own dark impulses. They're trying to learn from the mistakes of history, but their solution still couldn't solve the actual problem, which is the failings of the human heart, which is the fact that sin and brokenness and evil, it's a disease and it's contagious. And as you've no doubt learned in your own life and in the institutions you're a part of, you can't really ever fully rule away or posted notices or sign away or policy away or best practice away the human ability to screw things up and act selfishly and dishonestly. We just, I mean, we have the capacity to do really awesome, beautiful, good redemptive things, but we have the capacity to make gigantic messes as well. But whatever you make of it, this was the most popular strategy, the most popular lesson learned coming out of the time of Ezra and Nehemiah at the time of Jesus. The next thing I'm about to say here is not an opinion statement, it's just a fact based on how the Bible presents Jesus' response. But I'm gonna say it. Here you go. Jesus completely rejected the way the Pharisees responded to the lessons from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. He unequivocally says, You're getting it wrong, you're leading the people improperly. This is not what my father had in mind. This was never the idea. You are bad leaders, you are leading people away from God, not toward him. And Jesus pronounces gallons of judgment upon the Pharisees for missing this so completely. And frankly, he doesn't give them credit for accidentally missing it. Maybe in the beginning the Pharisees accidentally missed the point. But Jesus of Nazareth, explicitly, toward the end of the book of Matthew, for a whole chapter, says crystal clearly, you're not just making a mistake in your bad leadership. This is willful. It's not a competency issue on your part, it's not a misunderstanding. You're doing this on purpose. You are false, and you know you are false. Paraphrases mine, but honestly, my paraphrase is probably nicer than what Jesus actually said in that condemnation of the Pharisees. And mentally, it's probably a good idea here to put a pin in that because when we get into Galatians, the whole Pharisaic and first century Judaism response to the lessons of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Persian era of the Bible that we've been looking at, a whole lot of that is going to come into play in the book of Galatians. I mean, in a lot of ways, a lightly Christianized version of Pharisaic assumptions is what's getting criticized in the book of Galatians. The fact that the Pharisees had such an influence even on Jews who converted early on to Christianity, their lingering influence is what Paul is trying to ultimately crush and snuff out in the book of Galatians. So again, the stuff that we've been looking at is really going to pay off over there. Look at that. We're getting our through line, we're getting our chain of custody, we're getting our cohesive connective tissue all filled out between what we've been doing in the Persian era, the Old Testament, and what we're headed toward in Galatians. We'll round out that process tomorrow. Thanks so much for being game for this. I really enjoyed this weekend. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.