JESUS rounds of his censure of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law with a devastating exposure of their hypocrisy. The ability of fallen humanity for self deception is truly amazing. Here were people who were deeply religious and prided themselves on their righteousness. We have already seen how they had deceived themselves as Jesus shows the falseness of their claims to righteousness. In this closing woe, Jesus reveals how little these men understood or appreciated their blindness.

Apparently it was a practice for these religious leaders to erect monuments over the burial places of the murdered prophets. It was an act by which they sought to disassociate themselves from the crimes of their forefathers who killed and persecuted God's prophets. They made this claim that they would not have behaved as the fathers' did if they had been living in their time. By this they confessed it was their forebears that had behaved in this awful way towards the men God had sent to call them to repentance. What these Pharisees and teachers of the Law were blind to was that they harboured in their hearts the same spirit as their forefathers. It is because of this that Jesus speaks to them as he spoke to Judas when he said to Judas at the last supper 'what you are going to do, do quickly'. In essence this is what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees in verse 32. Fill up the measure of the sin of you forefathers simply means that Jesus saw into their hearts, and saw that they had the same spirit of evil against God in their hearts as their forefathers had shown, and was telling them to be honest with themselves and cease their self-deception.

In fact these Jewish leaders behaved just as badly as their forefathers. They behaved even worse. Their forefathers did not pretend to be godly but rejected God for idols. These Jewish leaders pretended to be servants of God, and obedient to God, while hating the righteousness of God. These Jewish leaders murdered their Messiah, the Son of God. Not content with this they continued to persecute and kill the servants of God, as the history of the Acts of the Apostles reveals.

God sent them the greatest prophet of all, his only begotten Son, and they rejected him, despised him, and then killed him. God sent prophets and teachers to them after Christ had risen in the persons of the apostles, and the witness of the early church. They flogged some; pursued others; and killed others. In this they behaved just as their forefathers had done.

The terrible thing is in the judgement Jesus says they will have to suffer. Upon them will fall all the righteous judgement of God for all the righteous blood shed all down the history of the Old Testament. In spite of the monuments to the prophets they had built to claim they were not like their forefathers, yet their hearts harboured the same sins and corruption, and so they would suffer the same fate.

Jesus ends these verse before us with the prophetic word that this judgement would fall on that very generation. These Jewish leaders would see it and suffer it. It happened in AD 70 when God used the Romans to bring it about in the sacking of Jerusalem. From that day the Jews have lost their special status before God. The nation of the Jews ceased to be the chosen people of God.

Our church generation needs to seriously meditate on this judgement of Jesus on the Jews of his time. Today the church at large is very religious just as the Pharisees were. We have well ordered churches and services. Priests and ministers are very religious just as the Pharisees were. All on the surface seems good and holy. However the church today generally does not appreciate the holiness of God, nor the evil of sin, not the corruption of the human heart. Like the Jews of Jesus day, the church today seems to claim the favour of God as a right, and believes itself to be holy, and that all is well. The church teaches a universal love of God which seems to have little conception of how much we fall short of the glory of God. Because of this the death of Christ for our sins is paid lip service to, but is almost largely ignored. Christ crucified is not much a subject for sermons. We say we honour Christ, but he does not seem to gain the deepest attention and love of our hearts. There are notable exceptions to this, but overall we don't seem to understand how much we need a crucified Saviour to give his life a ransom for our sins.