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| Long's statement is true to Luther's sermons. "The closer to Luther, the better the theologian." That is why we have so-called Lutherans repudiating him, which makes them bitter theologians all. They are only fighting over their Thrivent scraps now. |
From Rev. Long:
(1) How often I have heard Sunday-school teachers talk about the Pharisee as though he were a mean, low man. I have heard ministers of the Gospel hold up the Pharisee as if he were the lowest of the low. No wonder that the people are misled in understanding the Scriptures. You take all the argument away from Jesus, if that were true. The real truth is that the scribes and Pharisees were considered the best people that lived on God's earth in the days of Christ. Who were the scribes? Why, they were the men of God who copied the Old Testament for the people; they were the men who interpreted God's Word, and read it in the synagogues; they were the people who taught theology; they were the people to whom every one looked for advice in the things that pertained to sacred things. And who were the Pharisees? When I study the history of the Pharisee closely, I discover that he got his name from the enemy and did not give it to himself. The Pharisees were a people who dated back to the Babylonian captivity and became national in reputation between the second and first centuries before Christ; they were a people who had the utmost respect and love for God's holy law, written and oral; they were a people who were so far above the average in their piety that the enemy looked at them, and said, "Look at the separatists" – and that is the very meaning of the word Pharisee; they were a people who felt that they were too noble and too good to associate with the low trash of the country; they were a people who were educated and had no use for ignorance, and tried their best to lift the people up to their own level; they were the people who were orthodox, in opposition to the Sadducees, who were infidelic, who did not believe in the resurrection of the body, what we would call in this day agnostic. The Pharisee did believe in the resurrection of the dead; he did believe in the holy angels; he did believe in a Judgment Day to come. They were the preservers of God's holy law, and the only reason that the Lord Jesus Christ called them hypocrites, was because they did not live according to the spirit of the law, as much as they did according to the oral form handed down by tradition, for in many respects the law of Jesus Himself commends the thing the Pharisee did, and the real truth is that Paul himself, one of the greatest of all men, was a student of Gamaliel, the Pharisee, and he called himself the Pharisee of Pharisees. Let us therefore not lose the argument that the Lord Jesus Christ gives us in this lesson today. He says this, "I am now talking to you, My disciples, in the presence of people known as the scribes and Pharisees; a people that are looked up to as the best people on God's earth, and I want to tell you, my dear friends, that this thing is true, that they are the best people on God's earth, as far as human righteousness is concerned; nevertheless, unless you have a righteousness that will exceed the righteousness of the best people that today are living, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." There is a force in that argument that every man should take home to himself.
