"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to."
Matthew 23:13
For generations, possibly millenia, the religious leaders of Israel had been holding the Law over the heads of the people - dangling it by a bloody thread, using it as a means to control others. Forgetting its purpose - a Fatherly contract of blessings and curses; a means of compelling all (including themselves) to depend on the God of All, for none could follow it in its entirety.
Here's a random thought: What if the people of Israel, including the religious elite, realized they could not adhere to this sweltering list of rules with a pure heart and cried out to God earlier on? Would Jesus have show up at an earlier age under an earlier under a different set of circumstances? But the question is moot, for "at just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." Romans 5:6
Instead, human nature took over and the religious leaders used the Law and their propensity for corruption to oppress. That was the system that had become entrenched in Jewish society, and nobody gave it another thought. Like crabs in a crab pot they pulled anyone who tried to relate to God into the boiling inferno with them.
And lest we judge this system as uniquely despicable, it replicates itself in all walks of society - not just religion. In politics, in business, in bureaucracy,,, the list goes on.
But Jesus was about to detonate the entire system with one epic explosion - the event of His sacrifice. And for the religious elite who chose not to embrace that sacrifice, their doom was secure. In this Jesus declared their sad, unfortunate condemnation.
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