“you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” Jesus to the Pharisees in Matthew 23:33
"One of my biggest concerns was how people use…their religion as a banner…They go, 'I'm a good Christian…and this is the way you should live your life.' And I'm like, do not give me a lecture on how to live my life when you go to church every week, but I know you're still sleeping around on your wife.” (Sandra Bullock explaining why she initially rejected the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy, a born-again Christian, for the movie, The Blind Side; www.crosswalk.com, Nov. 16, 2009)
“Do not look on his appearance or the height of his stature…For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)
It is days before the crucifixion of Christ and Jesus is proclaiming the sixth woe to the scribes and Pharisees, (v. 29). These hypocrites have polluted the Law of Moses and are trying to destroy Jesus. It is also days before the Jewish feast of Passover (see Matthew 26:2). It had become a regular practice to have the tombs whitewashed and thus outwardly appear beautiful. But still within they were full of dead people’s bones. The hope is no one would accidentally touch the tombs and become guilty of uncleanness (v. 27) and thus be unable to participate in the Passover (see Numbers 19:16).
And Jesus, being the Master Teacher, takes this scene, which was very familiar to His Jewish audience, and uses it to illustrate a spiritual reality. He says that like the whitewashed tombs, the scribes and Pharisees outwardly appear righteous to others but within are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (v. 28). Imagine hearing that if you were a Pharisee!
Jesus continues with the seventh woe of chapter 23: “For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in the shedding the blood of the prophets’” (v. 29-30). However, contrary to the opinion of the Pharisees, the gospels record several occasions when the scribes and Pharisees sought to destroy and kill Jesus (Matthew 12:14, Mark 11:18, Luke 4:29, John 8:59). And very soon they will be successful in crucifying Him. Therefore Jesus says, with a taste of the prophetic, “Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets” (v. 31).
Thus the hypocrites among the scribes and Pharisees will fill up then the measure of the wrath of God poured out on their fathers (v. 32) because of their disbelief, idolatry and bloodshed (see 2 Chronicles 36:15-19; Ezekiel 9:3-11). This prophetic command to fill up then the measure of your fathers was fully realized in Jerusalem in AD 70 when the Romans destroyed the city and killed over 1 million of its occupants (Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, VI.9.3).
Jesus then calls the hypocrites of the scribes and Pharisees serpents (Genesis 3:1) and a brood of vipers (Matthew 3:7). A common way for farmers of that day to rid themselves of these poisonous snakes was to start a grass fire. The vipers, trying to escape, would be consumed by the fire. Jesus, using that imagery, asks rhetorically, “How are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (v. 33). And, according to the New Testament Jesus, hell is a very real place.
The danger in a passage like this is that we may put ourselves above the scribes and Pharisees; we want to think we would believe in Jesus from the first miracle if we lived then. Not necessarily true. We are of the same nature as they. The sins of the Pharisees and scribes are our sins; their woes, our woes. How often do we put on our “Sunday best” to go to church yet have unconfessed sin in our heart? The warning of being a whitewashed tomb still applies to us today. Only through God’s grace through the atoning work of Jesus on the cross do we escape being sentenced to hell (v.33).
The movie The Blind Side is based on a true story of a Christian family adopting a homeless boy who goes on to play football in the NFL. After rejecting the role, Sandra Bullock hesitatingly decided to meet the real life Leigh Anne Tuohy in person, the main role in the movie. Sandra saw that Leigh Anne’s faith was genuine. Sandra changed her mind, took the role and said, “I finally met people who walked the walk.” Are we whitewashed tombs or are we walking the walk?
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