FROM this point on Jesus comes down to details in the self importance of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law, and pronounces woe upon them.

Woe in the Greek expresses grief and denunciation. The meaning here is mostly denunciation. Christ is denouncing the actions of the Pharisees and Teachers of the law as deserving judgement, and bringing on them God's wrath. He is also denouncing there actions as totally opposite and against what they were called to do according to the office they held. The denunciation expresses the harm they were doing, and the loss this brought on those to whom they ministered.

The Pharisees and Teachers of the law were the clergy of their day in the Jewish community. They were meant to teach and set forth in their living the truth of God which when received brings salvation to the soul. They were taken as examples of those who were approved of by God, and members of his kingdom. This is what they claimed for themselves. It is what they believed themselves to be. Any idea that God was not pleased with them never entered their head. There were two broad divisions in their thinking and practice. As always there were the sincere and earnest Pharisees that lived by the law of God as they saw it, and supposed that by this they were pleasing God and doing his will. The Apostle Paul was one such Pharisee before he was met by Christ on his journey to Damascus to persecute Christians. Then there were those, and possible the majority, who simply used their position and office to gain worldly glory and wealth. There are the same two general distinctions in the church of God, and the first category seems to be the largest, for the clergy on the whole are sincere in their ministry even though still doing harm.

Jesus denounced the Pharisees as shutting the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. In other words they were keeping people out by shutting the door into the kingdom. How is this to be understood? Surely it can only be understood in this way, that in there teaching and living they failed to teach the truth unto salvation, but something less which was not the truth that saves the soul, the truth which if believed reconciles a person with God.

There is only one way to be reconciled to God, and that is through faith in Christ Jesus as the propitiation for our sins. By this we understand that Jesus gave his life a ransom to pay the punishment required by the justice of God for our sins, and thereby cause God to pronounce the one who believes in Jesus as righteous in his sight.

The teaching of the Pharisees, and indeed all those who do not preach the truth, was based on human effort. For the Pharisees this was to keep the law rigorously as they interpreted it, and that only by such outward obedience could a person find God accepting them. This is a form of salvation by human merit and works, and this is the basis of all religion which departs from the truth, and it is a teaching which never can achieve the appointed goal, which is to become members of the Kingdom of Heaven.

This way can never succeed because as Paul tells us in Galatians, those who seek God's favour this way are under a curse, because by it they are obligated to be perfect, and perfection is beyond us sinful and fallen people.

The fact is that the Pharisees and teachers of the law, even though they supposed they were accepted by God, in fact were shutting the kingdom of heaven to themselves. Jesus points this out when he says in our verse that they did not enter. They thought they did. The example of the Pharisee praying in the temple shows this. He thanked God that he was not like other men, and told God all the good works he did, and in it all there was a confident assurance that God accepted him, and that he deserved not only the favour of God but reward from God. When he told this historical story Jesus pointed out that he was not justified before God, but rather was rejected. All his good works still fell short of the glory of God.

All ministers in the church of God, however good they are, and however devoted in their ministry, who teach that salvation is in any way by human merit, and in any way fail to teach Christ crucified as the one who has paid the ransom for our sins, and won everlasting righteousness for those who believe on him, like the Pharisees have not enter the kingdom of heaven, and by their teaching and example are keeping people out of the kingdom of heaven.

This denunciation by Jesus is just as apposite today as it was upon the Pharisees, and the teachers of his day. Where Christ is not preached as the one and only Saviour from sin, and that in love he gave his life a propitiatory sacrifice for the sin of the world, people are kept out of the kingdom of heaven, and so such ministry prevents earnest souls, who are seeking salvation and the assurance of heaven, from achieving their desire. The prevention is because the teaching is causing people to believe and depend on that which can't bring a soul into the kingdom.