"CAMEL SWALLOWERS"

CAMEL SWALLOWERS

Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
Matthew 23:24 - NKJV

Matthew 23 could easily fall into the category “hard sayings of Jesus.” Few times we witness the Lord so clearly and directly attacking hypocrisy as seen here.

In the eyes of our generation, because of what we abundantly read in the Bible, Pharisees and hypocrites are almost synonyms of lies, traps and deceit. Even though some Pharisees were honored men - like Nicodemus, who ended up receiving and believing in the message of the Kingdom announced by Jesus (it is said that the most beautiful verse of God’s love - John 3:16 - was not preached to the multitudes, but shared with one person only, at the calmness of the night: Nicodemus), and also helped with the burial of our Lord, nevertheless, most of them were more concerned with traditions (which are not a bad thing per se) and more preoccupied with the intricacies of the Law of Moses than with mercy, kindness and love which were actually the way in order to fulfill those same laws. Pharisees, Sadducees and other religious groups made the life of Jesus difficult and were openly denounced by Him for one main reason: they did not live what they preached.

The Pharisees already existed for 200 years before Jesus' birth, but hypocrisy goes way, way back. There is a main breach in our character by which hypocrisy gets in the way of our relationship with God: our sinful and prideful nature. We tend to do things that make us comfortable and those which are adjusted to our culture, way of life and convenience, and in order to look good and “please the crowd”, we often conveniently become “actors”, which is the real meaning in the roots of the word hypocrite.

Jesus never compromised on sin, and He never will, but the Master showed compassion, love and attention even to the foxy Pharisees, because He knew the difficulties and corruption inherent to the human heart (John 2:25), but He also vehemently condemned the attitude of every person who tried to impose heavy burdens on someone else, when they couldn’t bear it themselves.

Yes, we fail, and yes, sometimes it is not easy to recognize our weaknesses and flaws, but the best way to deal with it is depositing everything at the feet of Jesus, confessing our sins and asking Him to help us to live a genuine life where what we teach is also what we live: no masks, no acting, no hypocrisy. Our standard must always be the Word of God, the Bible is the scale and paradigm by which we should see ourselves, qualities and blemishes, and the pattern to whatever we allow into our lives, so we do not have the risk to be frantically filtering tiny gnats, while silently swallowing big camels through the nets of hypocrisy and self justification. Let us be the same, absolutely dependent on God’s grace, everywhere we go, to whomever we relate with, in every circumstance.

Wishing many blessings to you and your family!

Pastor Joshua