Criticising People of the Past for Their Sins While Practising Them Yourself

Criticising People of the Past for Their Sins While Practising Them Yourself

Bro Edward Low  |  22 March 2026  |  Matthew 23:29–33

Matthew 23:29–33

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?"

This is the final woe in the Sermon of Woes — the seventh and last in Jesus' great confrontation of the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23.  

This final woe touches something that is deeply familiar — not just to the Pharisees of the first century, but to us today.  We all know what it is to look at the failures of others — past or present — and say, quietly or loudly: I would never have done that.  I would have known better.  And yet, the very sins we most confidently condemn in others are so often the ones silently at work in our own hearts.

Something We Can All Recognise

Think of politics.  In any country, in any generation, the pattern repeats itself with almost mechanical regularity.  A candidate campaigns on the promise of reform — promising to be nothing like the predecessors they so eloquently condemn.  They take power.  And then, slowly or quickly, the same compromises begin.  The same hunger for position.  The same rationalisation of decisions that once would have horrified them.  What they said and what they do become two entirely different things.

But it is not only politicians.  Religious leaders have fallen into this same trap throughout history — evangelists and ministers of great public profile whose private lives told a story that directly contradicted their public message.  They thought they could compartmentalise.  They thought that what was done in private could be camouflaged by what was performed in public.  They were wrong.

A simple illustration.  Imagine reviewing a bad loan decision made by a colleague years ago, shaking your head and saying, "I would never have recommended or approved this."  And perhaps in that moment, you genuinely believe it.  But the reality is that it is always easier to criticise from a distance.

Why do we do this?   Why do we look for the failures of others?  Because when we make others look bad, we make ourselves look good — at least in our own eyes, and in the eyes of those watching.  We are creating a picture, cultivating an impression, constructing an image of ourselves as the ones who would have done better.  It feels like wisdom.  It feels like discernment.  But Jesus calls it something else entirely.

The Illusion of Purity

Matthew 23:27–28

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

Full of hypocrisy and lawlessness — on the inside.  But the outside tells a different story entirely.  This is the illusion of purity.

An illusion is, by definition, a false appearance or a deceptive impression of reality.  The facts have not changed.  The reality has not changed.  But the way it is being presented — the angle, the framing, the light — has been carefully arranged to produce a different conclusion in the mind of the observer.

Think of how a skilled illusionist works.  David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear — not by moving it, but by moving the audience's frame of reference.  The statue was there the whole time.  The illusion was in the positioning.  A sleight of hand.  A different angle.  

The same technique operates in the construction of a false spiritual image: nothing about the underlying reality changes, but everything about how it is presented is carefully managed to produce an impression of holiness that the reality does not support.

Genesis 3:6

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate."

The serpent did not change what the tree was.  It reframed how Eve saw it.  Reframed as sin is actually harmless; It is empowering; It is wise; It is good.  Because the angle shifted, with it, the decision. 

This is precisely what the Pharisees were doing with their own sin: reframing it, presenting it differently, managing the picture so that the outside appeared clean and the inside could stay exactly as it was.

The Illusion of Honour

Matthew 23:29–30

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.'"

We would not have been like them.  We are better than that.  This is the declaration the Pharisees make with such confidence — and not entirely without sincerity.  They genuinely believed it.  They built the tombs.  They adorned the monuments.  They invested real time and effort honouring the very prophets their forefathers had killed — and in doing so, told themselves and the world: look at us.  We are nothing like the men who did this.

This is the illusion of honour — using visible acts of reverence to create a false separation between yourself and the sin you are simultaneously committing.  And it is one of the most sophisticated forms of self-deception, because the performance is real.  What is false is what it is meant to prove.

Think of the well-known minister whose public ministry shines with apparent devotion — while behind closed doors, a private life directly contradicts every word preached from the pulpit.  The thinking goes: look at all I have done for God.  Surely that is proof of where my heart really is.  But monuments erected to our own goodness do not cancel what lies hidden beneath them. 

The irony, as Jesus points out, is devastating: by building those tombs, they are actually confessing their own lineage.  They are sons of those who murdered the prophets.  And at the very moment they are adorning those monuments and claiming moral superiority over their fathers, they are plotting to murder the Son of God Himself.

Nehemiah 9:29–30

"And testified against them, that You might bring them back to Your law. Yet they acted proudly, and did not heed Your commandments, but sinned against Your judgments, 'Which if a man does, he shall live by them.' And they shrugged their shoulders, stiffened their necks, and would not hear. Yet for many years You had patience with them, and testified against them by Your Spirit in Your prophets. Yet they would not listen; therefore You gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands."

Jeremiah 26:8

"Now it happened, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, that the priests and the prophets and all the people seized him, saying, "You will surely die!""

2 Chronicles 24:20–21

"Then the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest, who stood above the people, and said to them, "Thus says God: 'Why do you transgress the commandments of the LORD, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the LORD, He also has forsaken you.'". So they conspired against him, and at the command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the LORD."

Generation after generation — the same response to the voice of God.  And now, here stand the scribes and Pharisees, building the tombs of those very prophets, declaring their own innocence.  But Jesus will have none of it.  He sees through the illusion of honour to the intent of the heart beneath.

God Sees the Intent of the Heart

This is the truth that makes the illusion unsustainable.  It does not matter what words we choose, what monuments we build, what image we curate.  God sees the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

"But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.""

Jeremiah 17:10

"I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."

1 Kings 8:39

"then hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and forgive, and act, and give to everyone according to all his ways, whose heart You know (for You alone know the hearts of all the sons of men),"

Luke 16:15

"And He said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.""

It is not what you say that matters to God.  It is not the picture you are working so hard to create. What matters — what has always mattered — is the intent of the heart. 

We can construct whatever image we choose.  We can say all the right things and be seen doing all the right things.  God is looking at what drives it — the motive behind the action, the truth that lives underneath everything we present to the world. 

The evil intent of the scribes and Pharisees was not hidden from Him, no matter how many public declarations of righteousness.  

Because beneath the performance, the intent of the Pharisees' hearts was already laid bare by their actions. They had plotted against Jesus at every turn:

Matthew 12:14

"Then the Pharisees went out and plotted against Him, how they might destroy Him."

Matthew 21:45–46

"Now when the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking of them. But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitudes, because they took Him for a prophet."

Matthew 26:3–4

"Then the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders of the people assembled together to the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, and plotted to take Jesus by trickery and kill Him."

John 8:37

"I know that you are Abraham's descendants, but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you."

John 8:44

"You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."

Stephen, said the same thing plainly, you always resist the Holy Spirit — as your fathers did, so do you.:

Acts 7:51–52

"You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers."

The same stiffness of neck.  The same resistance to God's voice.  The same willingness to remove whoever stood between them and their own agenda.  And this is what Jesus means in verse 32 — fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt.  It is not that they bore responsibility for what their ancestors had done.  It's their heart.

The Hypocrisy of Condemning Others While Blind to Yourself

Power does something to a person if the heart is not anchored in God.  The higher you climb — in politics, in corporate life, in religious influence — the easier it becomes to lose sight of your own failings while growing ever more articulate about the failings of those beneath you.  

The Pharisees had been in positions of religious authority long enough that they had become genuinely deluded — not merely dishonest, but truly blind to the plank in their own eye.  Jesus had already named this pattern:

Matthew 7:3–5

"And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

They could see the smallest wrong in others with perfect clarity.  But the plank — the massive, obvious beam of their own hypocrisy and self-intent — they could not see at all.  This is not unusual.  It is, in fact, one of the most consistent features of a heart that has been given over to the maintenance of an image rather than the pursuit of truth.  The energy that should go into self-examination goes instead into the examination of others.  Talking about the bad in others becomes the mechanism by which we avoid looking at the bad in ourselves.

And it feels righteous.  That is the most dangerous part.  It feels like discernment. I t feels like standards.  It feels like holding the line.  But it is, at its root, a defence mechanism — and one that Jesus will not let stand.

The Anger, the Anguish, and the Aftermath

"Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?"

These are the strongest words Jesus uses in all of Matthew 23 — and they are the words that close the entire Sermon of Woes.  There is a difference, between anger and anguish — and they are not the same thing, even when they sound similar.

Anger is reactive and outward.  It responds to an offence in the moment — sharp, immediate, and often short-lived.  Think of a parent who looks at a child's failed report card and erupts: "What is this? You are useless!" That is anger.  It is about the parent's frustration.  It looks at the result and reacts.

Anguish is different.  Anguish comes from within.  It carries pain — the pain of someone who loves deeply and is watching the one they love walk toward something terrible.  The parent who looks at that same report card with anguish is not thinking about their own frustration.  They are thinking about the child's future.  They are asking, with genuine grief: how is this child going to face the future?

When Jesus calls the Pharisees serpents and a brood of vipers — when He asks "how can you escape the condemnation of hell?" — it is anguish, not mere anger, that drives those words.  

He is not simply expressing disgust.  He is grieving.  

These are men who were appointed as guides to God's people.  They were supposed to lead others toward the Kingdom.  And instead, they had shut the Kingdom against the very people entrusted to their care, and were walking — eyes open, hearts hardened — toward condemnation themselves.

"How can you escape?" is not a rhetorical dismissal.  It is a father's desperate question to a son standing on the edge of a cliff.  How do you get out of this? What will it take for you to turn around?

The aftermath, if they do not turn — if the heart does not change, if the pretence is never laid down, if repentance never comes — is condemnation.

The Invitation — Turn, and Be Saved

If we are honest, that the patterns Jesus named are not foreign to us.  We have all criticised someone's past failure while quietly repeating a version of it.  We have all constructed a picture of ourselves that is a little more flattering than the reality.  We have all found it easier to see the speck in another's eye than to reckon honestly with the plank in our own.

We need to turn our lives around and there is a way.  God sent His Son precisely because He wants us to find the way.  And his Son paid the price so that we can be reunited with God.

God sees the heart. Let yours be one that is truly turned toward Him.