Modern-day Pharisees? Yes. In the world we live in today the Church is being split into factions due to liberalism and “progressive” ideology seeping into her seeking to change doctrines and subvert the faith in the name of tolerance and “love”. This has produced the phenomenon of various people preaching the acceptance of the LGBTQ movement, preaching abortion as a right and various other subversions of the faith. Often the people who promote these beliefs behave similarly to the Pharisees in the Bible.
The word Pharisee is found throughout the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel’s. In the time when Christ walked on Earth, they were the teachers of the law who sat in the seat of Moses that is to say, the Religious authority. This means that the pharisees needed to teach the people the laws of the Torah and the words of the Prophets i.e. the Scripture. However, in the time of Christ the pharisees, Sadducees and Essences, who were different traditions of oversaw teaching the Scripture to the people, however, they instead distorted it and added unnecessary traditions given unnecessary burdens onto people, distorting the way the Law was to be kept. This kind of behaviour is termed pharisaic. To be pharisaic therefore is to expect people to keep to unnecessary commands not found in Scripture and to present keeping those commands as necessarily meritorious towards salvation.
To the pharisees, healing on the Sabbath was breaking the
Law and worthy of punishment, in the modern day we have people who have the same
mindset.
Christians who preach in favour of the LGBTQ movement, or in favour of abortion often create the expectation that the person who doesn’t participate in promoting or endorsing these heinous acts is not Christian, distorting the Gospel and adding an unnecessary (and honestly quite evil and satanic) tradition to it. They believe that to be Christian is to promote these things as they see it.
For them, a person who does not support murdering infants in utero cannot be Christian because they are not living up to the Christian principles because they are not supporting child murder. How insane is that? They will misuse Scripture to argue for transgenderism (usually quoting Galatians 3:28). On top of that, there is hypocrisy in the way that they think. They will promote the teachings of Scripture on issues like usury and love but ignore it on other issues of morality that directly contradict their views and opinions.
Much like the Pharisees of old, these people need to be rejected as distorters and enemies of the truth.
