Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadPaul Kretzmann Commentary - Matthew 23:27 - 23:28
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The seventh woe:
v. 27. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
v. 28. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
It was a custom among the Jews, derived by the Rabbis from Eze_39:15, and said to extend back to the time of Joshua, that every year on the fifteenth of Adar, one month before the Passover, the graves of such as were buried on the hillsides or near the highways had to be whitened with a sort of chalk. They thus became conspicuous both by day and night, and the pilgrims to the great festival that were not acquainted with the country could avoid Levitical contamination by going around such graves, for the contact with a grave would defile a Jew. Exactly like such graves, according to Christ's judgment, are the scribes and Pharisees. Their life, as they present it in the view of the multitude, was fair, inviting nothing but commendation, but its actual loathsomeness, when one penetrated beyond the outside shell and examined the heart, was so great as to provoke nothing but condemnation. Hypocrites they are, whose very boast of the Law is resolved into lawlessness and opposition to the Law.