Why pharisees opposed jesus

Many people saw that His work and word had authority and power and could show man the way to practice, from which they recognized that the Lord Jesus was the coming Messiah and thus began to follow Him. The Bible records that on the Sabbath, the Lord Jesus led His disciples to work, and that when they got hungry, they plucked and ate ears of grain.

The Lord Jesus struck back at their evil plans with truth and wisdom. Do you wish to know the essence of the Pharisees? They were full of fantasies about the Messiah. What is more, they believed only that the Messiah would come, yet did not seek the life truth.

And so, even today they still await the Messiah, for they have no knowledge of the way of life, and do not know what the way of truth is. How could they behold the Messiah? And since they had never seen the Messiah and had never been in the company of the Messiah, they made the mistake of clinging in vain to the name of the Messiah while opposing the essence of the Messiah by any means possible.

These Pharisees in essence were stubborn, arrogant, and did not obey the truth. The principle of their belief in God was: No matter how profound Your preaching, no matter how high Your authority, You are not Christ unless You are called the Messiah.

Are these views not preposterous and ridiculous? These words have clearly revealed the root of why the Pharisees resisted the Lord Jesus. They in substance were arrogant and stubborn; they neither sought the truth nor obeyed the truth, but delimited God within their own conceptions and imaginations, and within the letters of the Bible, holding on to the view that when God came, His name must be Messiah, and that anyone who was not called the Messiah was not God.

That is why they refused to acknowledge the Lord Jesus as the Messiah no matter how profound and correct His preaching was, how much authority and power His words had, or how beneficial they were to people. The Pharisees had no real knowledge of God, and they were so arrogant and conceited that they took their own conceptions and imaginings as the truth and only obeyed the God conjured up by their imaginations without the slightest intention to seek or pursue the truth.

Second, the Pharisees loved status, and to protect their status and livelihood, they frenziedly resisted the Lord Jesus. When the Lord Jesus was preaching and working, He expressed many truths, bestowed upon man the way of repentance, and performed many miracles, which led to more and more people following Him.

Seeing this, the Pharisees harbored hatred in their hearts, because they clearly knew that if the Lord Jesus continued what He was doing, then all Jewish believers would soon be following Him. In that case, no one would enter the temple to offer sacrifices or a tithe, much less would anyone worship and look up to them or revolve around them, and soon all of Judaism would be paralyzed and shut down, or even worse, be overturned.

As a result, to protect their own status and livelihood, the Pharisees did their utmost to resist, condemn and frame the Lord Jesus, spreading all kinds of rumors to block people from following Him, and were itching to crucify Him. The gospels line up for us the many times they and their "cousins" the Sadducees and the experts on the law would oppose Jesus, and in those same accounts we also see Jesus oppose them. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why Jesus and the Pharisees just wouldn't get along?

Nowadays, throwing the "Pharisee card" is just so easy. Many believers just carelessly call anyone who stands up for righteousness a Pharisee. Having an clear understanding of what it was about the Pharisees that Jesus did not agree with can help us better understand how we should conduct ourselves today. Jesus had nothing personal against the Pharisees, but opposed their beliefs and teachings instead. Here are three principles from the Pharisees that Jesus opposed and why He also opposes modern-day legalism.

Ephesians says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. You clean the outside of the platter, but the other side, the inner side, is filthy. You do everything possible to hide that impurity, that grime, and that filthiness from public view. You pretend to be righteous, and you major in that pretense of being righteous. The Pharisees started in the intertestamental period as a group who were upset because the people were abandoning the purity of the covenant that they had made with God and were being lax in their morality and in their obedience to the commandments of God.

So the Pharisees sought to draw together and draw apart from the masses and to set a moral example. These were the conservatives of the day. They had a high system of honor and virtue, and they committed themselves to obeying God. In fact, one sect among the Pharisees believed that if they could keep every law that God gave in the Old Testament for just twenty-four hours, then that would prompt God to send the Messiah to Israel.

In a word, they were counterfeit. They were fake. And nothing reveals a counterfeit like the presence of the genuine. When Jesus walked this earth, true righteousness and holiness was manifested by Him before the eyes of the people. There is a common idea out there that God must grade on a curve. Grading on a curve happens when an instructor gives an exam and everyone flunks it. It must therefore be a bad or unfair exam, or the teacher has failed in teaching because the students have failed to learn.

The instructor then grades on a curve, so that an F might be counted as a C and a C as an A, and so on. Jesus only loses his cool a handful of times in the New Testament just ask the moneychangers in the Temple , but he unleashes one of his fiercest tirades in Matthew 23 against the Pharisees and other "teachers of the law. He also calls them "blind" five times , "children of hell," "a brood of vipers" and compares the false piety and posturing of the Pharisees to "whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.

The Pharisees of the New Testament are clearly cast as the bad guys, the perfect ideological and spiritual foils to Jesus and his followers. The Pharisees are portrayed as nitpicky enforcers of Jewish law who are focused so intently on the letter of the law that they miss the spirit entirely.

As Jesus says:. But does this picture of the Pharisees — as legalistic hypocrites — jibe with what historians and religious scholars know about the actual Pharisaic movement, which gained prominence during the Second Temple period of Judaism?

We spoke with Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College and co-editor of " In Quest of the Historical Pharisees ," to better understand what the Pharisees really believed and why they clashed with the early Christians. During the first century C.

The Temple still stood in Jerusalem and it was the center of Jewish life. One of the greatest concerns of Temple rites was purity — that both the people who entered the Temple and the animals sacrificed there, were "pure" enough to satisfy God.

The Torah the first five books of the Hebrew Bible starting with Genesis contains written commandments that explain the proper way to conduct Temple sacrifices, but the Pharisees claimed they had additional divine instructions that had been passed down through centuries of oral tradition. What was distinctive about the oral tradition of the Pharisees was that it expanded the question of purity to life outside of the Temple. Even if a Jewish person lived far away from Jerusalem in Galilee, for example and wasn't planning to make a pilgrimage to the Temple, they could conduct their lives in such a way as to be pure enough to enter the Temple.

The Pharisees were not, however, the powerful elite of first-century Judaism. Those were the Sadducees, the priestly class that controlled Temple worship and held the most political influence with the Roman Empire, which ruled over Palestine. The Sadducees rejected the oral tradition in favor of the written law Torah.

The Pharisees were a working-class movement concerned with establishing a clear and consistent Jewish identity in everyday life.