The End of Phariseeism

By Fred Pruitt

Oneness with Christ wipes away Phariseeism. When the veil is gone, you find that you are not only ONE with God, but you are ONE with all your brothers and sisters as well, and your brothers and sisters are everybody.* They are in you and you are in them, and ALL are ONE in Him . To find “oneness” finds your individuality in right harmony with all the other “individualities.”  ALL are one in Him, as the One Person manifesting Himself through and as all the myriads of created existence.

“Phariseeism” means, “I’m not like those other guys.” In other words, those “other guys” over there are not “me,” and therefore “I” have nothing to do with whoever “they” are. It means they are over there and I am over here, and since I have my vantage point, which of course is better than their vantage point over there, then “I’m not like those other guys,” becomes my motto and justification for self separated unto itself, holding itself aloof lest it might be “tainted” by something or someone “unclean.“

It’s taken me a long time to really love the Pharisees. They were such jerks, always giving Jesus a hard time and being hardhearted and worrying about healing on the Sabbath. BAD Pharisees!!!

But I have a kinder view of them now. I’ve made peace with them, you might say.

God BLESS the Pharisees!!!

I certainly have sojourned in the land of the Pharisees. It certainly crosses my mind: “I’m not like those other guys.”

But oneness with Christ (and oneness with all whom He is “one”) swallows that up and says: “You ARE those guys!”

I say, “But Lord, my eyes are too pure to behold evil. I cannot think such a thing.”

“You ARE those people!” says the Lord. Their thoughts are your thoughts. Their mind is your mind. What they experience, you experience. You ARE “those” people!

“But Lord” ….

”You ARE those people …. “

A few years ago they held the Billy Graham Crusade when we were living in Louisville KY. It was nothing but wonderful for Louisville, because it stirred the entire community. For weeks ahead of the Crusade they ran advertisements, billboards all over town, and the TV stations started doing all kinds of special reports and interviews and discussions about Christ. It was unbelievable, how the gospel of Christ became a major point of conversation all over Louisville, positive or negative. I couldn’t help but think what a wonderful thing just that alone, was.

I got to attend one night, and there was no doubt of genuine movement of the Spirit. The actual Crusade services were technically masterful but simple in presentation, and Billy said the same wonderful, wonderful thing he has always said, that to get your “life,” you have to “give your life to Christ.”

At the altar call, they came by the hundreds, streaming down from every part of the stadium, moved by the simple cry of a weak and failing voice, lacking the strength it once had, yet exuding Another Strength, a Voice within a voice, calling His sheep to His pasture, and they individually “heard” His voice and came to His call, where they were met and told, “You shall find rest unto your souls.”

The TV news ran a report one night of the Crusade, about a group of demonstrators outside the stadium. They were a group of “Christians,” mostly all from one church nearby, who were carrying placards saying “God hates fags” and others denouncing Billy Graham’s departure from their ideas of fundamentalist basics.

When I saw the placards saying “God hates fags,” it made me want to go to a gay bar and say, “I’m with YOU guys!”

Ah, but, here is the rub. At the same time that I saw that I am as much the “fag-hatin’ Christians” as I AM the gay guys!

To end Phariseeism is to understand myself to be as much one as the other and YET over and above and beyond all that, is the unbounded Reality of Him Who IS ALL in all, working everything after the counsel of His own will.

To end Phariseeism is to have eyes opened to the lack of separateness between myself and my brothers. We are one person, one human tree, all with Adam as our father.  When my brother shoots up heroin across town, it is into My Body he injects it. I am living in the grief and sorrow of his acts, and cannot separate myself from them.  I AM that junkie! I can claim no glory that “i’m” on this side of town, not shooting up. What goes on “over there” occurs “in here.” In ME.

Therefore knowing my depths as “junkie,” “swindler,” “liar,” “fornicator,” “whore” and “Pharisee,” the Life again swallows up the death …. ALL is resolved in Him, who is ALL in all.

Oneness means that there can be no more judgment of our brothers because the old saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” changes to “There go I!” It works death in me, but life outpoured for others, since “mortality is swallowed up of life.”

In this destruction of Phariseeism – i.e., “I’m apart from others” – I am thus FREED to love ALL in God. God is no respecter of persons, and neither are we.

To end Phariseeism is to “love my neighbor as I love myself” because I see that “my neighbor” is my self. What happens to him happens to me. Because Christ is in me, I cannot escape the sorrow and sin of the world, because they are still in the world, and like Caleb and Joshua accompanied the unbelieving generation back into the wilderness to be faith for their brethren who didn’t yet have faith**, Jesus has called on us to be Who He is, an outpoured life completely spent for others. And as such we are still in the world, acquainted with its griefs and sorrows, reconciling the world to God.

“ He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

 

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”

*When I say “everybody,” one might ask, aren’t you a brother to only those who are in Christ? To me the answer is I don’t really know for sure who those people are, so I just lump everybody into the “my brother” basket and leave it to God.

**Joshua and Caleb, though they were not in unbelief, nevertheless had to endure the next 38 years in the wilderness, because in suffering the same sufferings as they, and yet not in unbelief, they are like Jesus, who knew no sin, but took ours upon Him. We share in that same life and commission. Joshua and Caleb didn’t sin, but nonetheless walked for 38 years with those who had, until the day came when the whole camp would cross the Jordan on dry land. And we are of the same stuff!