Every Last Word

Mark (Guest): It’s often far too easy to compare ourselves to other people. It’s even easier to decide that we are better than others. But this sort of comparison doesn’t help us to become more like Christ. In fact, we learn a lot more about ourselves and our sinfulness. Let’s turn to the Gospel of Luke to see what Jesus has to say about such comparisons.

Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken, teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. Today we continue our study in Luke, investigating what the Bible says about the Pharisee and the publican. Each made a prayer to God, but only one was acceptable.

Well, Phil, today we’re discussing the familiar parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector. Now, the Pharisee, in his prayer, compares himself to the tax collector. Why is doing that so wrong?

Dr. Philip Ryken: Well, Mark, it’s tempting to do, isn’t it, to compare ourselves to others, particularly spiritually? I mean, usually you can find somebody that’s not as far along spiritually as you are, at least somebody you don’t think is as far along. But that’s really missing the point, and that’s what Jesus says in this parable. The truth is we are all equally sinful in the sight of God, and that’s what needs to concern us is our relationship to God, not our relationship or comparison to other people.

Mark (Guest): Well, how can our prayers be more pleasing to God, more like the prayer of the tax collector in today’s parable?

Dr. Philip Ryken: Well, it’s a great prayer, isn’t it, Mark? The man was a sinner, and he knew he was a sinner, but he did pray well. Unlike the Pharisee, he was not praying to himself but actually addressing God in his prayer, and not comparing himself to other people but just thinking about his own sin in the presence of a holy God. Here’s a man who really understands who he is and who God is and comes to God asking for mercy on that basis. It’s a great model for prayer, Mark, for all of us.

Mark (Guest): All right, thank you, Phil. Let’s turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 18, verses 9 through 14, and listen to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Ryken: Please turn in your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18, where we come in our weekly series to verses 9 through 14, the story of the Pharisee and the publican, which is just an old-fashioned way for talking about the IRS, I suppose.

In this parable, we encounter two men, two prayers, and two destinies. To show how different the prayers really were, the poet Richard Crashaw, when he heard the statement, "Two men went up to the temple to pray," gave this couplet in response: "Two went to pray? Oh, rather say, one went to brag, the other to pray."

You see, there is this great difference between the two prayers that are offered in this passage. One is true prayer offered for the mercy of God, and the other is a boastful commendation of a man’s own righteousness. You can see the importance of giving this parable when you see the context for the parable itself in verse 9, where we read that Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.

Then Jesus, in order to begin making the point that these men needed to hear, said that two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. Now, already the story contains a surprise because everyone knows that tax collectors do not go to the temple. And if they do, they certainly don’t go there to pray. Collect money, perhaps.

In the time of Christ, as you may know, tax collectors were really considered the scum of Jewish society. They were in the employ of the oppressive Roman government and therefore considered traitors to the people of God. Kent Hughes goes so far as to comment that in today’s culture, the closest social equivalent would probably be drug pushers and pimps—people who prey on society, who make money off other people and make a living from stealing from others.

So, make no mistake about it, this tax collector in the parable was a crook. And by contrast—and of course, we always need to be reminded of this—the Pharisee represented everything that was right and good in that society. The historian Josephus described the Pharisees as a certain sect of Jews that appear more religious than others and seem to interpret the laws more accurately. These were people who had a reputation for their religion, maybe nearly the best reputation in Israel.

And so it was only natural for this Pharisee then to go up to the temple to pray. I mean, he was the good guy, and the good guys pray, don’t they? In some ways, our respect for the man is perhaps increased when we overhear his prayer and we discover that he is not like other men. That’s what he tells us in verse 11. He’s not like extortioners, or the unjust, or adulterers. He’s not even like this tax collector. He fasts twice a week. He gives tithes of all that he gets.

You see, here was a man with few obvious vices and many commendable virtues. He was thankful to God, in a way. He didn’t steal, which, of course, the tax collector everybody knew that he did. He didn’t run with a bad crowd. He was faithful to his wife. He was really trying to keep the whole law of God. Here was a man who was, in today’s context, perhaps a renowned theologian, maybe a respected elder in the church, a pastor of a congregation. This is the kind of man it was.

And furthermore, the Pharisee went well beyond the law in his devotional practice. Not only did he pray and tithe, but he also fasted twice a week. The law of God only stipulated a fast once a year as a requirement on the Day of Atonement. And so here was a man who was fasting a hundred times more often than the law required. And yet, for all his devotion, this man was unrighteous in the sight of God.

None of his pious acts improved his standing before the Almighty, who is never impressed with merely external religion. God does not base His judgment on outward acts of religious devotion, but on the inward disposition of the heart. And so it was that when the Pharisee went home from his prayers, he went home, as we will discover in verse 14, unjustified, unrighteous in the sight of God.

Now, what was wrong with the Pharisee and his prayer? Well, obviously his pride. Oh, he begins his prayer well enough. He begins by addressing God, and that is always the place to begin. But you’ll notice that in the rest of the prayer, he basically spends it talking about himself. In fact, in just two short verses here, he mentions himself five times. "I do this, I do that, I do the other thing."

One commentator remarks that his prayer is so laden with self-congratulation that it can hardly get off the ground, let alone wing its way to the listening ear of God. In fact, it’s possible the Pharisee even might be considered to be praying not to God at all but really to himself. "The Pharisee standing by himself prayed thus," or you could translate that a slightly different way: "The Pharisee standing prayed to himself," not really talking to the true God at all.

Prayer always reveals the quality of our relationship with the living God. And for the Pharisee, prayer was really just another way of reminding himself what a great person he was. He was so conceited, he would not even confess that he was a sinner. No, rather than confessing that he was as depraved as anyone else, he very contemptuously thanks God that he is not like other men. He distances himself from them and from their sins.

How little he understood about the way of salvation. How little he knew about the mercy and grace that a sinner needs. Instead, he expected to be saved in some way by his own good works. He thought that God would accept him on his merits. After all, he was a good person, I mean, better than most. Surely he was good enough for God. In other words, he was exactly the kind of person that Jesus was speaking to. He's the kind of person described in verse 9: somebody confident of his own righteousness, trusting in himself that he is righteous. With so much faith in his own ability, he has no real need for God.

Now, I suppose it is relatively easy to see how self-righteous the Pharisee was. Are you able to make the same judgment about yourself, to see yourself the way that God might see you? When is it that we are like the Pharisee? I am like the Pharisee when I compare myself to others and congratulate myself for being at least more spiritual than they are. I am like the Pharisee when I am impressed with how much I am doing for God or giving to God, especially in comparison to other people.

I am like the Pharisee when I can go all week or maybe all month or perhaps all year without confessing any particular sin. I am like the Pharisee when someone else’s sins seem much more important to me in life than my own. These are the kinds of attitudes that will lead to the prayer of the Pharisee, a prayer that God will not honor. But there is another way to pray. And if you pray this way, it will save your soul.

Remember that here we are given two men. And how typical this is, isn’t it, in the Gospel of Luke, to give us a contrast so that we will really see the point of things? And here you have two men going up to the temple and two men offering two different prayers. And whereas the Pharisee was counting on his own merits, the publican was begging for the mercy of God. This is what Jesus says, describing the man.

"The tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'" Now, that prayer is a very short prayer, but as far as confession goes, it is a complete prayer. You’ll notice even in those few words that there are three parts to it. You have God and that comes at the beginning of the prayer, and then you have the sinner at the end, and then there is the mercy that comes between them.

But let’s look at each part of the prayer. The first act of prayer is to approach the majestic throne of Almighty God, to address God directly in prayer. And unlike the Pharisee, when the tax collector did that, he had some conception of the God to whom he was praying. He knew that he was approaching the one true supreme deity who is awesome in His holiness.

And that’s apparent, isn’t it, from his posture as he prayed? He keeps his distance from God. He’s standing apart. He’s not even looking up to heaven as people usually did in those days when they prayed. He had a right and proper fear of the burning holiness of God. And the reason for this, of course, is that he knew that he was a sinner. And that’s where his prayer ends. He begins with God and ends with himself, a sinner.

Or maybe we should say with himself "the" sinner, as if he were the only sinner in all the world, because here the Greek original uses the definite article. As far as he was concerned, the tax collector was "the" sinner, the only sinner that mattered. Rather than comparing himself to others the way that the Pharisee did, the publican was measuring himself against the perfect holiness of God. And by that standard, he saw himself for what he really was: nothing more and nothing less than a guilty sinner before a holy God.

Have you come to the place in life where you’ve taken your stand before God like this, recognizing that you can only stand before Him as a guilty sinner? Well, that’s the way the tax collector prayed. And his actions here, I think, speak as loudly as his words. He’s standing at a distance. He’s not approaching the most holy place in the temple. He has a sense that he’s separated from God, alienated by sin.

He doesn’t even dare to look up to heaven. He feels weighed down with his guilt. He is lowering his shameful eyes and all the while beating his breast, a sign of confession and contrition. Here he was, a self-confessed sinner. And when he calls himself a sinner, we should certainly take him at his word. This parable is so familiar to many Christians that sometimes we think of this publican as the sympathetic figure.

I mean, we already know the Pharisee is the bad guy, the publican’s the good guy, but recognize this guy was hardly a role model. No, he was every bit as bad as he said he was, that he was just a sinner, that’s all he was. One of the older commentators remarks what a great mistake it is to regard this publican as a decent sort of fellow who knew his limitations and didn’t pretend to be better than he was. No, this publican was a rotter, and he knew it.

He asked for God’s mercy because mercy was the only thing that he dared to ask for. And that raises a question for us, doesn’t it? What are you asking for from a holy God? What do you dare to intercede for in your prayers? Do you understand how bad you are in the sight of God, how much mercy you need from God? It is only when we understand the depth of our own depravity that we are ready to receive the mercy that God has for sinners.

And that really is the most striking feature of this prayer, that in between God’s holiness and his own sinfulness, he inserts a prayer for mercy. And the verb here, translated as "have mercy, be merciful," is a striking one. It’s a significant one. In biblical theology, it is the verb *hilaskomai*, which means to propitiate—in other words, to atone for sin by means of a blood sacrifice.

And I want to take a little time to explain what that really means, to explain what is really required before the justice of God in order for sinners to be saved. And I want to do that by just explaining a little bit of how atoning sacrifices were offered at the temple during the time of Christ. And let me encourage you to turn with me to Leviticus chapter 16 because we see there something very significant that will help us understand what the tax collector is really asking for in his prayer.

Leviticus chapter 16, I’ll be referring to a number of verses, but the chapter begins with a very serious warning that gives you an overwhelming impression of the holiness of God. These are words, we discover, that God spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near to the Lord and died.

And without going into all the details of that story, these men thought that they could pretty much approach God any way that they pleased. And rather than doing it in the prescribed biblical way according to the word of God, they offered unholy fire in the temple, and they were immediately destroyed by the holiness of God.

And so here God is giving through Moses a warning to Aaron, which I’m sure he took very, very seriously, not to come into the most holy place, the place inside the veil, the most holy place in the Tabernacle. Not to come into the very presence of God at the Ark of the Covenant, not to do that in any other way but in God’s way. And the reason, you see at the end of verse 2, is because God is there. He is there in a cloud over the mercy seat in all of His awesome righteousness and holiness.

You cannot approach a holy God as a sinful person unless you do it in the way that God has allowed in His mercy. And that’s what this passage describes. It describes a merciful way for a sinner to approach a holy God. And so God gave these instructions to Aaron. He wasn’t supposed to worship God any way he pleased; he was supposed to come in the proper way. And once a year, he would make atonement for his own sins, first of all, and that’s described beginning in verse 6. He offers a bull for his own sins, and then as well—and we see this in verses 11 to 14—for the sins of his household.

And then beginning in verse 9, this is mentioned: that he takes a perfect male goat and sacrifices it as a sin offering. And then God down in verses 15 and 16 tells him what to do with it. He shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat.

Now, what was he doing when he did that? He was taking the blood of the sacrifice, he was sprinkling it on the mercy seat. And God goes on to say this: "Thus he shall make atonement for the holy place because of the uncleanness of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins." And it goes on to say in verse 17 that in this way the High Priest makes atonement for himself and his house and for all the people of Israel.

Now, what was really going on here? What did this signify? Well, the goat rather obviously is a representative for the sins of God’s people. And in this symbolic way, the sins of God’s people are transferred over to the goat. This often, in many sacrifices in the Old Testament, was signified in a very tangible way: the guilty party would place his or her hand on the sacrifice.

And that was a way of showing that the sins were being charged to, or imputed to, or transferred to that sacrifice. And then the sacrifice was killed because, you see, it now was bearing the sin. It now was under the judgment of God, and therefore it had to die as a substitute in the place of sinners.

And so this sacrifice offered on the Day of Atonement reminded everyone that the life of every sinner is forfeit to God, that the proper penalty for sin is death. And let me just say, this is emphasized all the way through the Bible. People generally are very dismissive of sin, but in biblical terms, sin, the proper wages of sin is death. We see it very vividly in these arrangements for atonement.

Now, once that sacrifice had been offered, the blood of the animal now was the proof that the penalty for sin had been paid. I mean, you could look at the blood and you could see that a sacrifice had been offered for sin, that the guilt now had been taken away. And what the priest did with that blood was to sprinkle it on the mercy seat, that is to say, on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, by way of reminder, this was located in the most holy place at the very center of the Tabernacle or later the temple. And that was the earthly location of the divine presence. That’s where the divine glory was. It was above the cherubim, above the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant.

And that place was also a place, in a way, of divine judgment, because inside the Ark, of course, was the law of God, the law that the people had broken, the law that condemned them, the law that declared now that they were sinners and that their lives were forfeit to God. And now, the sprinkling of the blood on the mercy seat showed that an atoning sacrifice now had come between the holiness of God above the mercy seat and the sinful people of God who in a way were represented by the law of God, the broken law of God underneath.

You had a blood sacrifice, a sprinkling of blood that came between a holy God and unholy sinners. One of the words that the Bible uses to describe the effect of that sacrifice is the word propitiation. Now, that’s probably not a word you’re going to hear in elementary school. It’s not going to show up on your spelling list probably next week. You probably won’t hear people talking about propitiation in the grocery store, although it might be a good thing if you did.

But it is an important biblical term for understanding what is happening in a sacrifice of atonement. Propitiation refers to the turning away of the wrath of God. And it shows what an atoning sacrifice accomplished with respect to God. Now, let me just say that the wrath of God is one of His perfections, one of the most frequently mentioned attributes of God mentioned in the Bible. It’s not a violent emotion as it would be for us, not an uncontrollable passion, but rather God’s holy opposition to sin, His personal determination to bring it to justice.

And since it is right—surely it is right—for God to hate every evil and sinful thing, wrath is one of His divine perfections. And that wrath is really the whole context here in Leviticus 16, isn’t it? It explains why the High Priest couldn’t just come into the presence of God without a sacrifice. It’s because God is a holy God who has wrath against sin.

If a priest came just on his own merits, he would surely be destroyed. But you see, once the sacrifice had died in the place of the sinner, there was no more punishment that remained. The priest would sprinkle the blood. That would show that God’s justice was satisfied, that His wrath, in a word, was propitiated.

Or to put it another way around, the sacrifice now made God propitious. It made Him well-disposed. It made Him look with favor on those who had sinned—favor on them because now their sins had received their atonement. And when the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on the mercy seat, the sinner was protected from the wrath of God.

And do you see that this is what the tax collector was really asking for when he said, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner"? There he was, praying in the temple, the very place where the sacrificial blood would be sprinkled on the mercy seat. He knew he was under the judgment of God because of his sin. The only thing he could do was ask for mercy somehow to come between his guilt and the holy wrath of God.

And to be more specific about what he’s asking for, he’s using this propitiation term in its verbal form. He’s asking for God to be mercy-seated to him. That’s what he’s saying. He’s saying, "I need that kind of mercy, the very mercy that is provided for sinners through the mercy seat in the temple." He was asking God to atone for his sins, to cover his guilt, to protect him from eternal judgment.

And when you see the whole Old Testament understanding of the sacrifice, you can see what he was really asking for. First you have God in all of His holiness, last you have the sinner in all of his guilt deserving to die for his sins, but what comes between them is the mercy of God. What comes between them is the blood of that propitiating sacrifice, which takes away the sinner’s guilt and turns away the wrath of God.

Now, do you understand that every one of us is in need of this kind of mercy? This is the mercy that every sinner needs for his or her sins. We’re really in the same condition as the tax collector. We can only come to God with our sins. We don’t have anything to recommend us to Him at all. All we have is our sins and the guilt because of that. And the Bible says that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

So, where is the blood? Where is the mercy seat? Where is the atoning sacrifice? Where is the forgiveness? We don’t keep herds of sheep and goats here at the church. I don’t spend the time it would take me as a pastor to atone for all of the sins of all the people of God, to say nothing of my own sins. We don’t have the whole messy, bloody system of sacrifice as it was in the Old Testament, and we don’t even have a temple where we could go to make a sacrifice. We don’t have a mercy seat in the physical sense where we could sprinkle the blood.

Where is the mercy seat? Well, I think of something that the great preacher and hymn writer John Newton once wrote. He was weighed down with the sense of his sin. He recognized that he was a guilty sinner. He felt the way this tax collector felt. And he said, having at length lamented his lost and sinful condition, he said, "But I must do this, I may do this, I will do this. I will mention the atonement. I have sinned, but Christ has died."

And you see, that is the hope of the sinner before a holy God. Newton understood that God is mercy-seated to the sinner through the cross of Jesus Christ. His death is our substitute. His cross is our mercy seat. And the blood that He sprinkled there is our salvation.

And when we say that Christ died for our sins, as we so often do say, what we mean is that His sacrifice accomplished what this blood on the mercy seat accomplished. That like those sacrificial animals in the Old Testament, Jesus died in our place. Our sins were transferred to Him, they were imputed to Him, they were charged to Him. And so the Scripture says: "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree."

And there, through the death that Christ died on the tree, our sins were punished—punished on the cross. And no further penalty remains for our sin. And so, as the Scripture says in another place: "Christ has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."

Or to use the proper technical theological term for it: Christ’s death on the cross was for us a propitiation. It was the performance of a sacrifice that turns away the wrath of God. That’s the kind of sacrifice that Jesus offered. And let me just emphasize, so that you understand it, it’s not as if God the Son was persuading God the Father to think differently about the situation. No, God the Father was the one who took the initiative to provide Jesus to be the propitiating sacrifice. It all comes from the love of the Triune God.

On a number of very significant occasions, the New Testament describes the death of Christ specifically as a propitiation. God presented Jesus—this is Romans chapter 3—as a propitiation by His blood. Why did Jesus come at the first Christmas? Why did He come in human nature? Well, it was, Hebrews 2 says, because Jesus needed to be made like us in every way so that He could make propitiation for the sins of the people. He’s the propitiation for our sins, John said it very simply in his first letter. God loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

The blood of Jesus has turned away the wrath of God. Have you received that propitiation? Have you received that mercy? Have you asked for God to be mercy-seated to you, the sinner? Has your guilt been covered, or do you as yet remain under the wrath of God?

Understand how urgent these things are, and you can see it from the conclusion to this parable in Luke 18. Two men went to the temple. They offered two different prayers. And they went home to meet two entirely different destinies because, you see, in the end, the tax collector got what he asked for. His prayers were answered. God was mercy-seated to him. And so Jesus says, "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified." And then He goes on to say, "Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted."

To be justified is to be counted righteous. It is to be declared righteous before the bar of God’s justice. Justification is the legal declaration that an unrighteous sinner has been made right with God. And by that declaration, he is acquitted of all charges. He is spared from all punishment. He is accepted by God. And that’s what this tax collector received. God declared that he was righteous. He vindicated him. Not justified by anything that he had done—I mean, all he had done was to sin—but justified rather by the mercy of God on the basis of an atoning sacrifice offered on his behalf.

But God did not justify the Pharisee. You see that in that little phrase in verse 14: "This man went down to his house justified rather than the other." And what a shock that would have been to anyone who was there that day, anyone who was listening—probably including some of the Pharisees. I mean, people were there listening to Jesus who were trusting in themselves that they were righteous, and Jesus was saying, "You are not righteous, you are not justified, if you are coming to me on the basis of your own righteousness."

The Pharisee declared his own righteousness, but he was never declared righteous by God, even after all his, in a manner of speaking, righteous acts. He was still considered unrighteous, and in a way, his righteous acts were part of the problem—at least his attitude towards them was—because he was so busy being self-righteous that he couldn’t receive the righteousness of God which only comes as a gift.

"Here was a man," said Charles Spurgeon, "who was too good to be saved," or at least he thought he was too good to need to be saved. Sinners cannot be saved by what sinners do. Sinners can only be saved by what God has done in Jesus Christ. Or another way to say it: sinners can only be saved by grace because that’s what grace means; it’s something God does for you that you can’t do for yourself.

It’s interesting to see the Pharisee’s prayer is all about what he can do for God, and all his verbs, therefore, are active verbs. These are the things that he does: he thanks, he is not like, he fasts, he gives. This is what the Pharisee says over and over again. And the tax collector’s prayer is very different because he’s asking God to do something for him. The only verb in his prayer is a passive verb, that is something that is done to him, something done on his behalf: "God, be merciful to me."

You see, he understood that although there is nothing a sinner can do to get right with God, God makes sinners right with Himself through the perfect sacrifice of His only Son, which we receive simply by faith, and even our faith is a gift from God. We will never be saved by thinking about how righteous we are as if we were any better than anyone else, but only by acknowledging that we are unrighteous the way that the publican did.

Listen, if you want to be saved from sin, you must go to the mercy seat. You must approach God this way. You must offer the kind of sinner’s prayer that the publican offered and say, "God, be merciful to me, be mercy-seated to me. Give me the sacrifice that You have provided in Jesus Christ." Lay by faith your hand on that sacrifice, that substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ who offered Himself for your sins.

Claim the promise of the blood sprinkled on the cross and offer this prayer for your salvation. And you know, it’s not just a prayer you offer once at the beginning of the Christian life; really, this is the sinner’s everyday prayer. Is there ever a day when you don’t need to pray like this, when you get up in the morning: "God, be merciful to me, the sinner"?

Father, we come to you and pray that way now. Father, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we have seen this really is our condition. We are sinners in need of a Savior. And Father, perhaps some here who have never offered this kind of prayer ever before, but how easy it is to do. All we need to do is come to you, say, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner. Be merciful to me through Jesus Christ."

And Father, help us never to take confidence in our own righteousness, but to hold on only to the righteousness of Christ given to us on the mercy seat of the cross. And it’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.

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