A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on October 12, 2025.
One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, in saying these things you insult us also.” And he said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ so that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.” As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say (Luke 11:45–54).[1]
Legalism is one of those terms often labeled but rarely understood. I’ve been accused of it, and maybe you have too, but what exactly is it? Is it, for example, loving God’s law? If so, count the psalmist guilty, who sang, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97), but loving the law is not legalism. Or, is it heeding the law? If so, he who said he came not to abolish “the Law of the Prophets” but to “fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17) was a legalist. But he wasn’t.
I think R.C. Sproul gets it right when he says, “Basically, legalism involves abstracting the law of God from its original context,”[2] which we see, for example, in Jesus’ dinner with the Pharisee, who was astonished that Jesus did not wash his hands before eating (Luke 11:38). Does the Mosaic law say anything about washing hands? Yes, it does: According to Exodus 30:19-21, the priests were to wash their hands (and feet) to maintain ritual purity and avoid death before performing their sacred duties. But does the Mosaic law say anything about washing hands before eating? No, it does not. By abstracting the law of God from its context the Pharisees created their own law for hand washing, among many other things. And it disgusted Jesus, so much so, that he called his dinner host and his fellow-Pharisees “fools” (Luke 11:40), confronting not only their man-made rules for washing hands but their hypocritical, censorious, self-righteous[3] hearts.
But it wasn’t just the religious sect, known as the Pharisees, that was guilty of legalism. Israel’s lawyers were too, as we see in our passage today. As scribes of the Torah, they went far beyond it, building unbearable burdens that no one could keep, including themselves. Their penchant for distorting God’s law led them to repeat the sins of their fathers, serving as stumbling blocks to the truth and leading a nation astray. And when faced with the living logos, the Word of God incarnate, who came to fulfill the law, they didn’t love him but hated him for it, undermining his works and word. And so, we see in Israel’s lawyers an insidious legalism leading not to righteousness but sin, including murder of the Son of God.
Building Unbearable Burdens
Lest we wonder how Jesus’ accusations against the Pharisees were received, a lawyer voiced his offense, saying, “Teacher, in saying these things you insult us also” (Luke 11:45). These “things” refer back to Jesus’ confrontational woes spoken to his astonished dinner host and the rest of his pharisaical lot. Apparently, this lawyer was at the dinner table too. Whether he too was a Pharisee, we do not know; some lawyers were Pharisees (but not all Pharisees were lawyers). Luke simply titles him a “lawyer,” which refers not to a prosecutor or defense attorney but a scholar of the law, a Torah-expert, who by profession interpreted, and applied the Mosaic Law to everyday life.
To be clear, Jesus was insulting the Pharisees, or more precisely their hypocrisy.And to this, the lawyer took offense, leading Jesus to add lawyers to his woes, saying, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers” (Luke 11:46). Abstracting God’s law from its context, they added to it, and to it, and to it, building man-made “burdens hard to bear.”
For example, consider the Fourth Commandment and the Sabbath, a day that is, according to Isaiah, to be a “delight” (Isa. 58:13), a day made by God for man, as Jesus said.[4] Here is the commandment in context:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:8-11).
The example given is God’s rest from creation, teaching us to remember this one day in seven and keep it. Six days are for work and one day is for rest and worship, for ourselves and everyone under our influence. Pretty simple and straight-forward, but for the lawyers, it wasn’t good enough, work needed to be legally defined, so the people would know what it is (or how to work around it), and so the Jewish Mishnah explains, “there are thirty-nine kinds of work from sowing, plowing, reaping to making two loops, weaving two threads, separating two threads, tying a knot, or putting out a fire, and lighting a fire.”[5] And this extended all the way down to how things were to be carried, commanding that a man could not carry “in his right hand or in this left hand, in his bosom or on his shoulder. . . . [But he could carry] on the back of his hand, or with his foot or with his mouth or with his elbow, or in his ear or in his hair or in his wallet (carried) mouth downwards, or between his wallet and his shirt, or in the hem of his shirt, or in his shoe or in his sandal.[6]” So much for the Sabbath being a delight! What a burden! And that’s what the Sabbath became, a burden so hard to bear that the lawyers who created the laws would not, could not carry the load they had created.
Few today have such cultural influence, but the influence of legalism did not die with Israel’s lawyers. It is alive and well today, because we are all legalists at heart. When faced with our sin, we would rather fix it than confess it. Rather than seeing ourselves as sinners justified as righteous before God through faith, we compile our lists to get right with God, making our vows to try harder. (Maybe your motivation for coming to church today was a secret form of penance for past sins.) And as a result, we become secret lawyers, building unbearable burdens of our own making, that deafen us to Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30). But it’s hard to take Jesus at his word when we are busy building unbearable burdens to answer our guilt and seemingly please God.
We often deceive ourselves with legalism, believing that what God wants is for us to do better, when what God really wants is for us to look to and rejoice in what he has done for us:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).
When we live by God’s grace through faith in Christ, we find life to be not a slavish adherence to rules and regulations but a life motivated by God’s rich mercy and great love, enjoying the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness to us in Christ, knowing that even the good works we do are evidence of his presence and work in us.[7] The Christian faith then is not a law that we keep but the gospel we believe and so live.
Distorting God’s Law
In his second “woe” to the lawyers, Jesus mentioned their practice of “building the tombs of the prophets” (Luke 11:47), referring to memorials built to the prophets of old, notably the martyred. Ironically, theses memorialized prophets were originally sent to confront the sins of Israel and were murdered for it. Building memorials to the past only helps us if we are willing to open our eyes to the present. The lawyers could build tombs to memorialize the prophets, but they could not see the greatest of prophets before them, the Son of God. Jesus said, “you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs” (11:48), meaning they were repeating the sins of their fathers despite their memorials to the contrary. Building tombs (or burdens) may give the sense of doing something for God, but like going to church without faith to appease God, it warrants not commendation but condemnation.
While Israel, and her lawyers, were in a long line of sinners who responded to God’s Word with hatred in their hearts and blood on their hands, there is also a foreshadowing aspect to Jesus’ condemnation. Pointing back to the beginning in Genesis, he reminded them of Abel, the son of Adam, who brought his faithful sacrifice to God, and was murdered by his brother Cain for it.[8] And then fast-forwarding to the end of the Hebrew canon, he reminded them of Zechariah, who was stoned to death for delivering God’s Word and confronting Israel’s sin.[9] From the first to the last, God’s prophets and messengers were received with persecution and execution in Israel, but “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4) . . . to a “generation” who murdered him.
The eternal Son of God entered his creation, in time and space. He was born in Bethlehem, detoured to Egypt, raised in Nazareth, worshiped in Jerusalem, and died upon Golgotha. Prior to Christ’s coming, the apostle Peter explains, “the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Pet. 1:10-11). And though the prophets were persecuted and many martyred, they continued to hope in the coming of the Christ, at the “fullness of time.” And so, foreshadowing his own passion and death, Jesus said “this generation” would be charged with the guilt of the death of every prophet “from the foundation of the world,” because every prophet that came before him pointed ultimately to Christ.
After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Peter would preach at Pentecost confronting the sins of his generation but also explaining that it was according to “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). It was according to the Wisdom of God that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). And though he was murdered at the hands of lawless men, he fulfilled the law in himself, atoned for sin through his death, and resurrected from the dead that we might have eternal life through faith in him. And this gospel, this Good News, serves as the “key of knowledge” that unlocks our reconciliation with God, our justification, adoption, and sanctification, that sinners saved by grace may call him “Father.” But when God’s law is distorted into a means to salvation, and rules and regulations become the burdens to bear to get to God, the key that unlocks life is lost, as it was to the lawyers of Israel.
Jesus said, “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering” (Luke 11:52). And this is one of the most sinister aspects of legalism: It not only hides the gospel but also hinders others from believing. The burdensome rules and regulations of the lawyers kept many focused on compliance, leading them to miss Christ. And we can be guilty of the same, such as when we add to the simple gospel of Jesus Christ when telling others about him; when we talk around the gospel instead of sharing the gospel; when we add good works to faith as the basis for our standing before God; when we emphasize outward religious rituals rather than the inward transforming work of the Holy Spirit; when we treat the Bible as a book to be analyzed rather than the Word of God to be believed and obeyed; when we think arguing is a form of sharing the gospel; when we distort the clear message of the gospel with social commentary; or, when we confuse Christianity with politics.[10] The list goes on, of course, because we are legalists at heart.
We must be on guard then against sharing legalism rather than the gospel with others but also be on guard against our own susceptibilities. Look at her: She fasts twice a week. Watch him: He gives tithes of all that he gets. Of course, there is nothing wrong with fasting or tithing; in fact, both are good, but both were the boasts of the Pharisee while the tax collector, of Jesus’ parable, “would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” (Luke 18:12-13). Legalism gives the sense of religiosity but delivers only slavery, as Paul explained to the Galatians, but “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1) that we live not as slaves to legalism but live by God’s grace through faith in Jesus, “the key of knowledge” and Savior of sinners.
Undermining Christ’s Word
Revealing the condition of their hearts, Luke records, “the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say” (Luke 11:53-54).The statement is as ironic as the strategy is laughable.The lawyers and the Pharisees, like hunters in pursuit of a wild animal, were “lying in wait” to catch the sinless Son of God and Word incarnate “in something he might say.”It was just plain silly; it still is. Many will come, and many will go, seeking to undermine the Word of Christ, but be sure of this, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa. 40:8).
Sifting through the Bible trying to find fault is a fool’s errand, because “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Some will argue that there are remnants of truth within these fallible writings of man, but they are wrong, because “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1 Pet. 1:21).Do not heed those who seek to undermine the Word of Christ, “let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4 KJV).For, it is faithfulness to the Word that keeps us from legalism and tells us the Good News: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15), like you and like me.
[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/3-types-legalism
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pharisaical
[4] Mark 2:27
[5] Dale Ralph Davis, Luke: The Year of the Lord’s Favor (Fearn: Christian Focus Publications, 2021), 211.
[6] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 1 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 633.
[7] Eph. 2:4-10
[8] Gen. 4:1-8
[9] 2 Chron. 24:20-22
[10] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 1 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 640.
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