<p>23:13&nbsp;<em>But woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees. Hypocrites-</em>&nbsp;The Lord now utters seven woes, just as Isaiah had uttered seven woes after telling Judah the parable of the vineyard (Is. 5:8-6:5)- which the Lord had also recently done. Isaiah's woes were likewise uttered as a reflection of genuine Divine anger, but they were also a last ditch appeal to the Judah of Hezekiah's time to repent, lest the Assyrian invasion come and destroy them. Isaiah&rsquo;s woes largely concerned the extremely fleshly behaviour of Judah at his time; the Lord&rsquo;s woes concern religious hypocrisy of the apparently zealous, Torah-obedient Jews. The point is that religious hypocrisy, even if it involves careful obedience to some Divine principles, is just as wanton and fleshly as drunkenness and theft, the kinds of things criticized in Isaiah&rsquo;s seven woes.<br /><em>You lock up</em>- The same figure of the door of the Kingdom being shut but by the Lord, not men is found in 25:10. The similarity is such that we may be intended to understand the foolish virgins are those who were locked out of the Kingdom because of the Pharisees. Their lack of oil, of personal spirituality, was because their religious leaders had not inculcated this in them, nor any sense of their own fallibility and frailty- in that the reason they ended up locked out of the Kingdom was because they had not considered that their oil would likely fail. The Pharisees had &quot;the key of knowledge&quot; (Lk. 11:52) in a spiritually ignorant and illiterate society which depended upon them for knowledge of God's word. Likewise if the elders / judges of Israel had been wise, the entire people would have entered the land (Dt. 16:20). The whole of Israel would&rsquo;ve stayed in the wilderness and not entered the Kingdom / land if Gad and Reuben hadn&rsquo;t initially gone over Jordan (Num. 32:15). Wrath would come upon all Israel if the Levites weren&rsquo;t encamped around the tabernacle (Num. 1:53). We really can cause others to not enter God&rsquo;s Kingdom by limiting their access to God&rsquo;s word a sin of omission, or by making demands on them in the name of His Kingdom which are too heavy for them to bear a sin of commission. This imparts an urgency and eternal importance to all our interactions with others. No longer can we see the community of believers as a mere social club, nor the world around us as simply the dead furniture of our lives. We have their salvation or stumbling away from it within our power. This fact also denies us from assuming that whether we fail or not in our interactions with others, God will somehow make good our failures and save others anyway. He has delegated His work into our hands, and to some extent the degree to which it prospers or fails is our responsibility. Otherwise the whole language of delegation of His wealth into our hands is somehow meaningless.&nbsp;</p><p><em>You shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves</em>- As if they slammed the door in the face of ones eager to enter the Kingdom.&nbsp;If we believe that we ourselves will be there, we will spark off an upward spiral of positive thinking in the community of believers with whom we are associated. Think carefully on the Lord&rsquo;s words to the Pharisees: &ldquo;For ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in&rdquo; (Mt. 23:13). If we don&rsquo;t believe we will be there, we end up discouraging others.</p><p><em>Nor allow those who would enter to go in</em>- The Greek&nbsp;<em>aphiemi</em>&nbsp;translated &ldquo;allow&rdquo; more commonly carries the idea of loosing, setting free, and is translated &lsquo;forgive&rsquo;. There may be a hint here at what the Lord also taught in chapter 18- that unforgiveness of others makes them stumble from entering the Kingdom. And the Pharisees with their endless demands upon men were indeed unforgiving. There is a sense in which we will enter the Kingdom at the last day (5:20; &ldquo;Not every one that says Lord, Lord shall enter into the Kingdom&rdquo;, 7:21; 18:3; 25:10 s.w.), and yet in another sense we are entering now through the gates (&ldquo;enter in at the narrow gate&rdquo;, 7:13; 19:17,24). Our lives now are on a path, a journey, which is entering the Kingdom. The significance of life and living could not be more intense.</p><p>Earlier when speaking these words, the Lord had said that the lawyers were &lsquo;hindering&rsquo; those who were in the process of entering the Kingdom (Lk. 11:52). The same word is used about how the disciples &lsquo;forbad&rsquo; children to come to Jesus (19:14) and about &lsquo;forbidding&rsquo; baptism (Acts 8:36; 10:47). This is exactly how people can be hindered or not &lsquo;allowed&rsquo; to enter the Kingdom today- by refusing them baptism because of some inadequacy of knowledge or behaviour, or because they are simply felt to be in a category like &ldquo;children&rdquo; were by the disciples who are inappropriate for the Kingdom. These reflections make us realize that the Pharisees were not a mere phenomenon in history, but have their direct equivalents today.</p>