Hey, my friends. Yesterday we started looking at Matthew chapter 15 verses 8 and 9, which

is a reference back to Isaiah 29 and a withering, unfun passage for the people of Israel to

look back on and remember. And so we're in the middle of unpacking what is really just

another one of these brutal verbal beatdowns that Jesus gives to the religious leadership

where he's making the point that our two visions for how to resolve the problem between

God and man are really incompatible. This is one of those ratcheting tension passages,

one of these look back at the Old Testament passages. And well, we didn't quite pick up

exactly where we left off because I just said all of this stuff, but mostly as promised

yesterday. Here's a little bit of music and then we'll just jump right back into it

where we left off.

It's now back to Matthew 15. What Jesus is saying and what the original audience would have

caught here is that the Pharisees have misplayed the game of one away. They've whiffed on this

gambit they've made to step into these positions of spiritual leadership and be like, we have

this covenant with God who is the one true God and we did not get things right in the first

temple period. Disaster befell us, but we are going to provide disciplined, strategic spiritual

leadership with rules and details. We're going to expand the tradition. We are going to get

it right this time. Listen to us. They make this play and what Jesus is saying is you had

a couple things right. You had a couple numbers wrong and you didn't know which was which.

So you took the things you were maybe getting right and flipped those to wrong, but the things

you were getting wrong. You didn't understand that you were getting wrong. So you left

those things alone and kept doing it. Now you're getting everything wrong. Paraphrase

is very boldly mine. But come on. I mean, look what little clip Jesus grabs out of Isaiah 29.

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