Matthew 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance; 9 and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. 10 And the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

John the Baptist, preaching to the crowds in Matthew 3, notices that several members of the Pharisees and Sadducees had come to hear him and see what was going on out there in the wilderness. John’s preaching is not a welcoming, seeker-sensitive, meet your felt needs kind of sermon. He begins by addressing the crowd of religious leaders and calling them a “Brood of vipers,” literally, “You baby serpents.”

They are of their father, the devil. They are the offspring of the serpent. He’s not mincing words here. He’s calling them the devil’s children. This is a direct confrontation to them as the religious and spiritual leaders of the day. Those who were entrusted to keep and to know and to teach and to pass down the traditions of the Word of God and to apply the Word of God to daily life. Those who were serving even in the highest court and as the priest and the high priest in the land. Brood of vipers!

The Bible talks more about the Pharisees than the Sadducees. It only mentions the Sadducees 15 times. It mentions the Pharisees almost 100 times, 31 of those in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has some things to say to them as He takes John the Baptist’s sermon and expounds upon it and drives it home, talking to them about their responsibility to know and teach the Word of God. His accusations against them are the things that they are teaching while they wrongly believe that they are upholding the Word of God.

He tells them that they are making their disciples, their converts, twice the disciples of hell that they themselves are. You see, often with false teaching, false teachers will mix in just enough truth that it sounds interesting. It sounds good. What we really need to look for to discern is to look for the fruit being produced in the lives of these teachers and those who are being taught. Look at where the teaching leads. False doctrine breeds false doctrine and it gets worse and worse and worse until finally it’s blatantly sinful and heretical. This is the nature of false teaching.

These Pharisees and Sadducees are not mentioned together except for a few times in the book of Matthew because they did not get along. These are two different groups. How different? Let me tell you, these are Trump Republicans and Biden/Harris Democrats. If these two groups of people agree on something, it’s serious, because they were dead set on stopping one another from having power, from having influence, from doing anything. They tried to balance each other out on that Sanhedrin, and they tried to tried to influence others by the work of the high priest to the point that by the time Jesus comes, we have Ananias and Caiaphas, two high priests during the same time, a father and son. They had so much work to do to try to push forth their agenda that they said, fine, let’s have two, let’s do it together.

So as the minority party, Sadducees wanted to push back and have some control. Spurgeon refers to these two groups as “the proud separatists and the skeptical moralists.” And this really is a good description of them because the very root word of the word Pharisee means “to separate.” And their separation here was because they believed they were God’s special people. If you met a Pharisee, it’s the old joke about when you are traveling and you meet a Texan. “You can always tell a Texan, you just can’t tell him much.” This was the Pharisee. The Pharisee is the Texan of the religious world. They’re just better than everybody. They do it bigger and better, they know it all better.

These are proud, self-promoting people. As we look at the way the scriptures explain them to us, in Luke 18, “9 And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood and was praying these things to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’”

This is the Pharisee’s prayer and he believes this is his humble duty to God to remind God how great he is, because he is separate. And God has said, “Come out from among them and be separate.” The Pharisee says, “I am separate. I am so separate.”

“13 But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his chest, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

These separatists, they weren’t the scribes. Another term for scribes is the attorneys. They were the ones who knew all of the in and outs, all of the loopholes, all of the points. They handled the law, especially the rules of the laws of the Word of God, that they expounded by oral tradition. Jesus, when he addressed them in Matthew 23, He said, “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; 3 therefore all that they tell you, do and keep, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them. 4 And they tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger. 5 But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments.”

These are the men who love the attention. They love for people to come to them with questions because they know all of the answers. They know all of the rules. They carry on this oral tradition. They were so concerned with the keeping of the Word of God that they would put layers of rules over the Word of God so you couldn’t break the Word of God. He is directly addressing the oral tradition of the Pharisees that added layers upon the Word of God and He strips it away and He goes even deeper because He goes to the Word of God and reveals that the Word of God and the law of God was written to deal not with the outward actions of men but with the motives of our heart.

He drives the point home. He said of the Pharisees that they were so concerned with the minutia of the law keeping that they actually missed the weightier matters of the law. He says in Matthew 23, 23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.” Jesus didn’t say don’t do what you’re doing. He said they have missed the big things. They have made a major deal out of a minor thing, and they missed what really matters.

So these are the proud separatists. They’ve come to see John the Baptist, hear this message of repentance, to hear a prophet speaking and preaching because this is a representation of the law of God and they want to make sure probably that he’s right.

Then you have the skeptical moralists. These are the liberal power brokers, actually priests in the line of Zadok, who was the high priest under David. In 1 Kings 2:35, “And the king appointed Benaiah the son of Jehoiada over the army in his place, and the king appointed Zadok the priest in the place of Abiathar.” So he was a high priest under David and those in his line. In fact the root word for the word Sadducee is that name, Zadok, they are the sons of Zadok. So they are there serving as the high priests. So you have lawyers and priests.

The lawyers are all about the law and the priests are liberal and wealthy power brokers. They actually weren’t there to uphold the law at all. In fact, the Sadducees didn’t believe in miracles or the supernatural. They were downright agnostic. Most of the time when you read the term Sadducee, it’s modified by this phrase, “Who did not believe in the resurrection.” Another verse says they didn’t believe in angels or spirit. They were the first naturalists. They believed matter was all it was. They were trying to be obedient to God but denied the supernatural, denied miracles and the resurrection. They were so gnostic in their thinking it was all just about matter and making the most of what you could here and now.

They were all about political power. They worked very closely with Rome, and their threat from Christ was that Christ was there being touted by the people as a Messiah who was going to overthrow Rome. Well, they couldn’t have that. Their power came from Rome. The Pharisees, of course, had their teaching, and Jesus stood against them in their oral tradition, so they had to have Him removed. So both of these groups wanted to have Him killed.

One standing on the Word of God and oral tradition, and the other, the Sadducees, only accepted the Pentateuch as written scripture, nothing else, and they didn’t hold any oral tradition. And as you look at these groups and you realize they went to test Jesus, to try Jesus, to try to trip Jesus up, to try to trap Him. And it got to the point where they were absolutely certain that the only solution was to kill Him.

We are told in the scripture several times, “From that point they sought to find a way to kill him.” And they didn’t care if it was legal or not. We know this because the trial that the Sanhedrin put Jesus on after He was in the garden, that trial was illegal. It was not held according to the rights and the rules of the court. They completely threw their own rules out so that they could condemn him, so that they could kill him.

Josephus in writing about the Sadducees said they had the confidence of the wealthy alone and found no following among the people. None of these groups were liked by anybody except those who were in the groups. So John addresses them. “You brood of vipers. You sons of Satan.” He is saying, by the way, he preaches here, that you who are the lawyers, religious leaders, keepers of the law, and the priestly class, you are by nature dead, blind, and bound. And not only that, you are driven by lies and murderous intent. It’s not just that you’re harmless or that you’re wrong. It’s that you’re intent on doing evil.

In John chapter 8, starting in verse 40, “40 But now you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do. 41 You are doing the deeds of your father.” They said to Him, “We were not born of sexual immorality; we have one Father: God.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come of Myself, but He sent Me. 43 Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. 46 Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me? 47 He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.”

By nature, they are blind, dead, bound, and a proof of 1 Corinthians 2:14, “But a natural man does not accept the depths of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually examined.” So John is asking why they have come out to hear him? Are they fleeing the wrath to come? Then he says that they need to “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves.”

Will they? Can they? For now, we know that we can know who the false teachers are, who the offspring of Satan are, who the wolves are, by their fruit. The fruit of their lives and the fruit (the outworking) of their teaching. When you spot them, avoid them!

Romans 16:17 Now I urge you, brothers, to keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and stumblings contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. 18 For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own stomach, and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting.