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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadWilliam Burkitt Notes and Observations - Luke 12:1 - 12:1
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In this chapter our blessed Saviour furnishes his diciples with many instructions for the worthy discharge of their function in preaching the gospel; particularly he recommends unto them two gracious qualifications, namely, uprightness and sincerity, verses 1,2,3. Secondly, courage and magnanimity, verses 4,5.
1. He recommends unto them the grace and virtue of sincerity: Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
Learn hence, that hypocrisy is a dangerous leaven, which ministers and people are chiefly to beware of, and to preserve themselves from. Hypocrisy is a vice in vizor; the face is vice, the vizor is virtue: God is pretended, self intended: hupocrisy is resembled to leaven; partly for its sourness, partly for its diffusiveness. Leaven is a piece of sour dough, that diffuses itself into the whole mass or lump of bread with which it is mixed. Thus hypocrisy spreads over all the man; all his duties, parts and performances, are leavened with it.
Again, leaven is of a swelling, as well as of a spreading nature; it puffs up the dough, and so does hypocrisy the heart. The Pharisees were a sour and proud sort of people; they were all for pre-eminence, chief places, chief seats, chief titles, to be called Rabbi, Rabbi; In a word, as leaven is hardly discerned from good dough at first sight, so is hypocrisy hardly discerned and distinguished from sincerity. The Pharisees outwardly appeared righteous unto men, but within were full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Observe next, the argument which Christ uses to dissuade men from hypocrisy: There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed. As if he had said, the day is coming, when a rotten and corrupt heart shall no longer pass under the vizor and disguise of a demure look. In the day of judgment hypocritical sinners shall walk naked; God, angels and men, shall see their shame.
Learn hence, that God will certainly, however long, wash off all the varnish and paint which the hypocrite has put upon the face of his profession, and lay him open to the terror of himself, and the astonishment of the world.