<p>23:16&nbsp;<em>Woe to you, you blind guides, who say: Whoever swears by the temple</em>- Their blindness was a major source of criticism (:16,17,24,26). Paul uses the language of blind guides of the blind to the Jewish Christian believers in Rom. 2:19- showing again that the mentality of the Pharisees is likely to be a problem for us all; we are failing to get the point if we read these woes upon them and feel somehow isolated from those men by time and culture. Their blindness was self-inflicted, otherwise it would not have been cause for rebuke. If someone doesn't want to see God's ways, then they never can see them, because the darkness in which they have chosen to mentally move has blinded them. This is true for those who do not live in love (1 Jn. 2:9,11), homosexual sinners who go so far in their perversion that they conclude they were born gay blindness indeed, and those who are blind to God's existence because they have chosen such darkness.</p><p><em>It is nothing</em>- They were saying that an oath could be taken but breaking it was no problem if one &lsquo;only&rsquo; swore by the temple. Jews swore by the temple because of their belief at the time that the temple was eternal. Because they broke their oaths and considered the temple to effectively be dispensable, therefore the Lord goes on in chapter 24 to predict the destruction of the temple.&nbsp;</p><p><em>But whoever swears by the gold of the temple</em>- On the basis that that men swore by the greatest thing they could (Heb. 6:13,16), we have here an insight into their mind. For them, gold was paramount, for they were materialistic (Lk. 16:14). And it was even more important than the temple and the God who dwelt there.</p><p><em>He is bound by his oath</em>- This suggests that some oaths were binding and others were not. And thus a scale of honesty was created, whereby human words themselves were not significant, but were only given value according to how much they were underpinned by oaths. The Lord therefore taught that all such swearing was to be outlawed for His people (5:34-36). The word&nbsp;<em>opheilo</em>&nbsp;is used often in the Gospels but always in the context of the debt owed to God for human sin (18:28,34; Lk. 7:41; 16:7; 17:10), and the debt of others to us for their sin against us (18:30; Lk. 11:4). Instead of judging to what degree others are bound / obligated to us for their sins, we are to frankly forgive, just as God frankly forgives our debts.&nbsp;</p>