Luke 11:47 Commentary and Bible Study

The next five verses form a single argument. While masquerading as a friend of God, the religious hypocrite shows his true credentials when he persecutes God’s genuine children. There is deep deception in all of this, and Christ succinctly exposes it, and with devastating clarity. ‘Woe unto you’ – it has not come yet, but it is inevitable that it will come soon: the heavy judgment of God upon you. You live under the threat of that judgment, and all that you do confirms the fact that you deserve it. ‘For ye build the sepulchres of the prophets.’ This was intended to be a sign that the lawyers honoured the prophets, but that was far from the case. Yes, they pretended to themselves that they honoured them, but it was yet another act of self-deception. The lawyers occupied the seat of Moses, the place of authority in the Jewish nation, and they were therefore obliged to pay lip service to the prophets. Although the prophets were persecuted in the past, no one could deny that God spoke through them, for their writings formed the Holy Scriptures of their religion, and without them, they had no religion. The lawyers depended on their religion for their status in society, and for their place of honour. So they needed their religion and the prophets that delivered it to them, but at the same time they hated them. They needed therefore to perform a neat trick: they had to turn the prophets into their accomplices. They needed to feign honour for the prophets, while keeping their actual doctrine well out of sight. Conveniently they put out of mind what the prophets actually taught. That would have stirred up their resentment against the prophets just as much as Christ’s teaching did. This redefining of the prophets was accomplished, no doubt, by misinterpreting them, and making their message palatable and consistent with their own man-made doctrines. But they were only partially successful. There was still a lingering clue to their real thinking on the matter, a clue which they had failed to spot, but which the Lord draws attention to.‘And your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres.’ Matthew expands on this: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, ³⁰ And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. ³¹ Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. ³² Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers’ (Matthew 23:29-32). What the lawyers (and the scribes and Pharisees) had failed to spot was that they inadvertently called those who had persecuted the prophets ‘their fathers’. That gave the game away. By giving them that name, they accepted them as their spiritual predecessors, and yet they had done this terrible wickedness. How could any true believer refer to the murderers of the prophets in this way? His instinct would be to disassociate himself as strongly as he could from the evil deeds of those men, not to call them his spiritual forefathers. This was another aspect of the deceitful thinking of the lawyers. Here was a corner of their nakedness that they had not properly covered. It is hard for a man to be a consistent liar. They hadn’t fully thought through the situation, for they ended up trying to make friends of the prophets and the persecutors of the prophets at the same time, and that was impossible.