Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.
The woe is Christ's rebuke upon the lawyers and Pharisees as leaders, charging that they build the sepulchres of the prophets while their fathers killed them. It was spoken to a nation whose rebellion and guilt increased from one generation to the next, which after deliverance from captivity forgot God's requirements and perverted what He had entrusted to them as sacred. Their tomb-building was only outward reverence for the prophets' memory, and those memorials testified to the fathers' deeds. That outward respect exposed hypocrisy, for while appearing to honor God's messengers they resisted the truth they brought and approved and continued the fathers' opposition and rejection of God's message.
The verse reveals a continuing pattern of honoring dead prophets by building their tombs and praising them while persecuting God's living messengers, a pattern that held in Jesus' time and continues whenever God's servants meet opposition and reproach from contemporaries. It therefore warns against setting oneself up as judge over people moved by the Holy Spirit to declare God's word. William Miller stands as an example of this pattern, a despised messenger whose preaching nevertheless blessed many.
The woe applies to leaders who prepare formulated papers to fasten and bind up means for medical missionary sanitarium work and urge God's people to sign them without surety that the signers know what they are attaching their names to. That course puts a deceiving power in the hands of men to take advantage of donors, whose sure result is perplexity and distress, confusion and disappointment, and loss of confidence in those who stand as leaders and in Dr. Kellogg.
The woe is Christ's rebuke upon the lawyers and Pharisees as leaders, charging that they build the sepulchres of the prophets while their fathers killed them. It was spoken to a nation whose rebellion and guilt increased from one generation to the next, which after deliverance from captivity forgot God's requirements and perverted what He had entrusted to them as sacred. Their tomb-building was only outward reverence for the prophets' memory, and those memorials testified to the fathers' deeds. That outward respect exposed hypocrisy, for while appearing to honor God's messengers they resisted the truth they brought and approved and continued the fathers' opposition and rejection of God's message.
The verse reveals a continuing pattern of honoring dead prophets by building their tombs and praising them while persecuting God's living messengers, a pattern that held in Jesus' time and continues whenever God's servants meet opposition and reproach from contemporaries. It therefore warns against setting oneself up as judge over people moved by the Holy Spirit to declare God's word. William Miller stands as an example of this pattern, a despised messenger whose preaching nevertheless blessed many.
The woe applies to leaders who prepare formulated papers to fasten and bind up means for medical missionary sanitarium work and urge God's people to sign them without surety that the signers know what they are attaching their names to. That course puts a deceiving power in the hands of men to take advantage of donors, whose sure result is perplexity and distress, confusion and disappointment, and loss of confidence in those who stand as leaders and in Dr. Kellogg.