The top of the mind awareness about the Pharisees is that they insisted they were “Abraham’s seed” (John 8:33). To this, the Lord Jesus agreed, saying; “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill Me, BECAUSE MY WORD HATH NO PLACE IN YOU” (John 8:37). When the Lord Jesus said that they did the deeds of their father, the Devil (John 8:44), the Pharisees became infuriated. They said to Him that they were not born as a result of fornication. But rather, they said, “WE HAVE ONE FATHER EVEN GOD” (John 8:41). Notice, they self-righteously insisted that God was their Father. They professed to belong to God; they claimed to belong to the family of God. They were so persuasive that most of the children of Israel thought the Pharisees were “sons of God.” The Pharisee’s outward “devoutness” and their strict adherence to “the Tradition of the Elders” [the Oral Law] reinforced their claim to be “sons of God.”

All of the teachings in Israel at the time of Christ were rigidly controlled by the Pharisees. No-one dared teach without the approval or authority by the Pharisees. It did not matter how ridiculous or unfair their teaching became; no-one dared to question, or criticize.  By the same token, whatever the Pharisees compelled others to do, no-one insisted that the Pharisees be bound by the same rules.

Our last study concluded by remarking on the part of the Satire/Irony story the Lord Jesus was telling in which He said, in His own words, that the rich man died, and was buried; and in hell he was being tormented, so he lifted up his eyes …
 
“And [the rich man] seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.” These were the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, BUT He told the story as it would have been told by the Pharisees. The story was according to the doctrine of their “Oral Law.”

“There was a certain beggar named Lazarus.” This character is brought into the story to point to the poor in Israel. Many passages of Scripture show that the poor were those who were oppressed by the high-handed and cruel aristocracy (see Amos 8:4; Isaiah 3:14-15, 10:1-2, 32:7; Ezekiel 16:49, 22:29). In much of the writings of the Prophets, we find that the wealthy ruling class was constantly being criticized for their cruel and unjust treatment of the poor. This had not changed in the least by the time the Lord Jesus Christ showed up in the midst of the Israelis.

Whenever the unmitigated Truth concerning “Hell” is taught, preached, or heralded, there is a knee-jerk reaction by those who have been reared on Sunday School Theology—the Theology of Children. Those who have graduated from Sunday School have, sadly, been brought up, for the most part, on man's books instead of the Bible. People draw their theology from hymns written by men who were saturated with tradition who, when they did write a good hymn, generally spoiled it in the last verse by setting “death” as the church's hope instead of the Appearing of Christ (Colossians 3:4). As a result, hymns are solemnly sung which contain such absurd, paradoxical teaching as the singing of God's praises while our tongues are singing lies, and while the dead “lie silent in the grave.” (In this paragraph, we have expressed a few of Dr. E. W. Bullinger’s classic thoughts which he expressed in his article, “The Rich Man and Lazarus”).