“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either."
We tend to think of the Pharisees as the bad guys because they often opposed Jesus and because they ended up having Jesus killed. In the culture of the time, however, the Pharisees were considered the best of the best. They were experts in God's Law. They even added new laws to interpret the old laws. And they kept the very letter of the law. Unfortunately, in the process of keeping the letter of the law, they sometimes violated the principle of the law. And ultimately, even though they diligently kept God's laws and believed that they were honoring God by being so strict in their interpretations, they became enemies of God.
Understand that the Pharisees did not consider themselves to be enemies of God -they assumed that they were favored by God because of their keeping of the laws and rules. But God considered them enemies because their opinions ended up being more important to them than God's opinions.
The spirit of pharisee-ism is still alive and well today. Bible teachers often teach their own theological bent instead of teaching people to love Jesus. This causes people to embrace religion without having any real relationship with God. In essence, they shut the door of the Kingdom in people's faces, refusing to go in themselves and not allowing others to enter either. We don't really need systematic theology to live in the Kingdom. What we need is to love God more, forgive others more, and do good as the Spirit prompts and leads us. More relationship. Less religion.
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