The Unflinching Law of God Text: Luke 16:14-18
Introduction: The Stench of Piety
There is a certain kind of piety that stinks in the nostrils of God. It is a self-justifying piety, a religious posture that meticulously polishes every external detail while the heart is full of dead men's bones. This is the religion of the Pharisees, and we must understand that Pharisaism is not a dead first-century sect; it is a perennial temptation of the human heart. It is the default setting of all man-made religion.
Jesus has just finished teaching a parable about money, the parable of the unjust steward, concluding with the thunderous declaration that you cannot serve both God and Mammon. You cannot have two masters. You will love one and hate the other. This is not a suggestion for a higher level of discipleship; it is the fundamental spiritual reality of the universe. And right on cue, the Pharisees, who were listening in, begin to scoff. Why? Because Luke tells us plainly they were "lovers of money."
Their derision was not just a dismissive chuckle. It was the visceral reaction of a threatened idol. When the Word of God gets too close to the secret idol of the heart, the idolater has two options: repent or ridicule. The Pharisees chose ridicule. Their laughter was the sound of a worldview defending its god. They had constructed a sophisticated religious system that allowed them to be seen as righteous in the eyes of men while their hearts were thoroughly devoted to Mammon. They had found a way to serve two masters, or so they thought. Jesus is about to dismantle their entire project, showing that their love for money was just one symptom of a much deeper disease: a contempt for the unyielding authority of God's Word.
In these few, tightly-packed verses, Jesus confronts their hypocrisy, declares a monumental shift in redemptive history, reaffirms the absolute permanence of the law, and then provides one pointed, practical example of that law's authority that cuts them to the quick. This is not a disconnected series of pronouncements. This is a single, coherent, devastating broadside against all who would seek to domesticate the Word of God.
The Text
Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were scoffing at Him. And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts, for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.
“The Law and the Prophets were until John; since that time the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone is forcing his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail.
“Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman who is divorced from a husband commits adultery.”
(Luke 16:14-18 LSB)
The Inverted Value System (v. 14-15)
We begin with the reaction and the diagnosis.
"Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were scoffing at Him. And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts, for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.”" (Luke 16:14-15)
The Pharisees' scoffing reveals their hearts. Jesus had just said you cannot serve God and money. Their sneering response was their way of saying, "Oh yes we can. Watch us." They had mastered the art of religious performance. They tithed their mint and dill and cumin. They made long prayers. They wore their piety like a sandwich board. And because of this, they were "highly esteemed among men." They had good reputations. They were the respected religious leaders. But their entire system was built on a lie.
Jesus gives the diagnosis in two parts. First, "You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men." Their standard of righteousness was horizontal. They were concerned with public relations, not with divine approval. Their righteousness was a carefully curated image, managed for public consumption. But the second part of the diagnosis is devastating: "but God knows your hearts." This is the great terror for all hypocrites. You can fool your neighbor. You can fool your pastor. You can even fool yourself for a time. But you cannot fool God. He sees past the robes and the long prayers and the solemn faces. He sees the greed, the envy, the lust for power, the love of money. He sees the real god being worshipped on the throne of the heart.
And this leads to the great inversion. "That which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God." The Pharisees thought their wealth was a sign of God's blessing and their piety was a sign of their righteousness. They had it exactly backward. Their love of money, which the world respects and even admires, was an abomination to God. An abomination is not just something God dislikes; it is something that is ritually and morally repugnant. It is the stench of idolatry. Their very righteousness was a form of rebellion because it was self-righteousness, a way of justifying themselves before men instead of humbling themselves before God.
The Violent Kingdom and the Enduring Law (v. 16-17)
Jesus now seems to change the subject, but He is doing nothing of the kind. He is explaining the new reality that has crashed into their corrupt system.
"The Law and the Prophets were until John; since that time the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone is forcing his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail." (Luke 16:16-17)
What does it mean that "The Law and the Prophets were until John"? It does not mean they are abolished. The very next verse will make that utterly impossible to argue. It means that the period of prophetic anticipation has ended. The Law and the Prophets were the long period of promise, pointing forward to the Messiah. With the arrival of John the Baptist, the forerunner, the era of fulfillment has begun. The King is here. The kingdom is being proclaimed, not as a future hope, but as a present reality breaking into the world.
And the response to this proclamation is violent. "Everyone is forcing his way into it." This is not talking about a polite, respectable decision. The Greek word here implies force, violence, a desperate pressing in. Publicans, prostitutes, soldiers, the unclean, the outcasts, they are all hearing the good news and are violently, desperately, clawing their way into the kingdom. They are like the woman with the issue of blood pushing through the crowd. They know they are unworthy, they know they are unclean, but they are desperate for the King. And who is standing outside, scoffing? The "highly esteemed" Pharisees, who think the kingdom is their birthright, who believe their resume should grant them VIP access. They don't see their need to press in violently because they don't see their own spiritual bankruptcy.
But in this new era of the kingdom, some might think that the old rules no longer apply. This is the constant temptation of antinomianism. Jesus immediately smashes this idea to pieces. "But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail." The "stroke of a letter" refers to the smallest decorative flourish on a Hebrew character, a jot or a tittle. Jesus is saying that the entire created order will collapse into nothingness before the smallest detail of God's moral law becomes irrelevant. The coming of the kingdom does not abolish the law; it establishes it. Christ came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, both in His perfect life and His atoning death. The good news of the kingdom is not that we are free from the law, but that we are forgiven for breaking it and empowered by the Spirit to begin to keep it from the heart.
The Law Applied (v. 18)
After this high-level declaration of the law's permanence, Jesus provides one sharp, specific, and deeply uncomfortable example. He is showing them what it looks like when the law is not explained away.
"Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman who is divorced from a husband commits adultery." (Luke 16:18)
Why this example? Out of all the commandments, why pick this one? Because the Pharisees had become experts at twisting the law of God concerning marriage to suit their own lusts and convenience. They had followed a lenient interpretation of Deuteronomy 24, allowing a man to divorce his wife for almost any reason, for "some indecency," which they had defined down to burning his toast. It was a system of serial, legalized adultery. It treated women as disposable property and made a mockery of the covenant of marriage.
Jesus is not introducing a new law here. He is restoring the original meaning and intent of the law. He is stripping away their self-serving loopholes. He says that to divorce a wife and marry another is not just a legal transaction; it is adultery. To marry a divorced woman is to participate in that adultery. He is applying the unflinching standard of God's Word to their lives, right where they lived. This was not an abstract theological point. This was a direct shot at their hypocrisy. They loved money, and they loved the sexual autonomy that their casual divorce doctrines gave them. They justified themselves in the sight of men, calling their adultery a "lawful divorce," but God knew their hearts. He knew it was adultery.
This verse is a concrete illustration of verse 17. The law has not failed. Your clever interpretations, your cultural accommodations, your desire to be esteemed by a corrupt generation, none of it can make a single stroke of God's law fall to the ground. God's standard for covenant faithfulness in marriage remains, just as His standard for financial stewardship remains. You cannot serve God and Mammon, and you cannot serve God and your own autonomous sexual appetites.
Conclusion: The Unchanging Standard
The message for us is as pointed as it was for the Pharisees. We live in an age that is drunk on self-justification. Our culture is one giant project of esteeming what God finds detestable and finding detestable what God esteems. And the church is not immune.
We have our own sophisticated ways of serving Mammon while pretending to serve God. We have our prosperity gospels and our consumer-driven ministries. We measure success by budgets and buildings, things highly esteemed among men. But God knows our hearts.
We have our own ways of setting aside the clear teaching of Scripture on marriage and sexuality in order to be esteemed by the world. We soften the Bible's teaching on divorce, on homosexuality, on the roles of men and women, because we do not want to be scoffed at. We want to be seen as reasonable and compassionate by a world that hates the law of God. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of that law to fail.
The good news of the kingdom is not that God has lowered His standards. The good news is that a King has come who met those standards perfectly on our behalf, and who died to pay the penalty for our every failure. The only way into this kingdom is to abandon all self-justification, to see our own spiritual poverty, and to violently press in, clinging to Him alone for righteousness. When we do that, we do not learn to despise the law. We learn to love it, for we see it as the perfect law of liberty, written on our hearts by the Spirit of the King.