Religious Leaders (1)

Most Christians assume that the religious leaders that Jesus encountered were practising a works-based religion. They were trying to satisfy God’s righteous standards by obeying the law. This view is misleading. The law is not a tool for proving righteousness. God had different purposes for giving the law.

Jesus actually criticised the religious leaders for a number of different reasons. We need to understand them, because we are in danger of falling into the same mistakes.

A key problem that Jesus challenged was that the religious leaders had made the law into a burden. God had given the law to bless his people His main purpose was to provide them with spiritual protection and to allow sinful people to live together in relative peace.

God gave the sabbath to allow people to get the rest they needed. He rested, because rest is good. The teachers of the law had turned the sabbath into a burden, by giving them lots of rules to obey. This was unnecessary. All of us know how to rest. We know when are resting. We don’t need rules to help us know how to rest.

This was the point Jesus made when he healed the crippled woman (Luke 13:10-16). Her spine was so bent that she could not stand up straight. But it also meant that she could not rest, because the pain always remained. She could not even lie down flat and rest.

Jesus healed her to set her free from the bondage of the devil. He also freed her to enjoy a Sabbath rest for the first time in decades. She could lie down without pain.

Jesus called the synagogue leader a hypocrite (Luke 13:15) because he wanted to keep her in pain and unable to rest, in order to keep his sabbath rules. He had lost touch with the purpose of resting.