Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. Today’s podcast reminds me of one of my favorite Broadway shows called Fiddler on the Roof. In the show, we clearly see the character Tevye struggling with, but in true Broadway fashion, he sings all about it. What is it? Tradition. Sorry, I got carried away.

Paul, Mark chapter 7. Traditions. Does your family have any special traditions? I’m sure you do. I can’t say my family has a lot, but we have a few. For one, we go to the state fair together every summer and have since my kids were small enough that I had to pull them around in a wagon.

Friday nights also for many years were game nights at our house where they were welcome to bring any of their friends over, and we played group games all evening. Even though my kids are grownups now, when we get together, as we did over Christmas, they still want to play games like they remember doing as kids. So do I. I miss that. Of course, most families have some traditions around the holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know in some cultures, the Christmas traditions can get very complex.

Some Eastern European countries observe Christmas traditions handed down for nobody even remembers how long anymore. For example, the Christmas Eve meal has to include 12 prescribed dishes in certain countries in Eastern Europe. None of them sound very good to me, honestly, but then again, it’s not part of my traditions. Maybe if I was Ukrainian or Slovakian, I’d feel differently, but really, borscht made with prunes and mushrooms? I’ll pass. Although traditions can be a valuable link to a culture’s past, I’m glad that in America we have kind of the right to make up our own traditions.

We’re free to observe traditions or not to. No one’s getting into trouble if they prefer not to have turkey and watch the Lions play the Bears on Thanksgiving Day. But that was not true of the Jewish culture in Israel in Jesus’ time. Their traditions were a, maybe the, primary display of their national religion. And there were enforcers to be sure everyone kept them, not very unlike, say, the Taliban in Afghanistan, who try and enforce traditional dress codes and gender roles in their society. The enforcers of the traditions in Jesus’ culture were the Pharisees we keep reading about in the Gospels.

They didn’t use sticks to whack people who broke the traditions, but they had the authority to exclude people from the synagogue, which was the center of each community. To be put out of a synagogue was a great shame and had serious social consequences for a person’s life. I know this is hard for Americans, and probably for most other societies, to relate to today. But imagine if there were rule enforcers who could stop you and check to be sure your Christmas tree was the right variety and was of an acceptable length. Hard to imagine, I know, but things like that were part of the culture in Israel during the years of Jesus’ public ministry. And it leads to many confrontations we read about in the Gospels, like the one here in Mark chapter 7.

Listen to the opening verses. The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. Mark then explains for his readers, the Pharisees and all the Jews didn’t eat unless they gave their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the elders’ traditions. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat until they first take a bath, and they observe many other traditions such as washing cups, pitchers, kettles, even their dining tables. So the Pharisees and the teachers of the law asked Jesus, Why don’t your disciples live according to the traditions of the elders, instead of eating food with their defiled hands? I’ll explain more about this in a moment, but Jesus’ response was, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites.

As it is written, These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules. They have let go of the commandments of God and are holding on to their human traditions. This is the second time a delegation of religious authorities has traveled the nearly hundred miles from Jerusalem to northeastern Galilee in response to reports about Jesus and his growing popularity and unorthodox teaching. They knew by this time he was not one of them, and they feared his popularity with the common people. They were losing their grip over them.

The Pharisees and teachers of the law mentioned here wanted to show those enamored with Jesus that he was a false teacher and turn them away from listening to him. They believed one way to effectively do that was to highlight the fact that he and his disciples did not follow the traditions that for as long as anybody could remember in that part of the world were part of their religion and culture. So they surveilled them to try to catch them in the act of breaking the traditions. And on this occasion, Peter told Mark about, they pounced when they saw the disciples in the marketplace buy some bread and then eat it without first observing the traditional purification rite of the Jews.

Mark explains, for the benefit of his first readers who were not Jewish, that tradition of the elders, that is, a practice that had been passed down for generations and generations, was if you have been to a public marketplace, you should bathe yourself ritually to be cleaned from any defilement of unclean people you may have rubbed shoulders with. And before you eat, on any occasion, you must ceremonially wash your hands. This was not about hygiene. This was a religious ritual, a tradition passed down from the elders, meaning from long ago in the distant past. Nobody knew from when. It was what we’ve always done and what must be done to be a good religious Jew.

So they called Jesus out over this infraction because, after all, these were his disciples. Let me clarify what’s going on before we think about Jesus’ response. In the Old Testament law of God, which at that time was still binding on the Jewish people, there were rules written down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy about ceremonial cleanness and uncleanness, spiritual defilement and how to cleanse it. These Old Testament sections regarding the washings and the bathings and so on were rules for the priests to follow before handling food or sacrifices at the temple. But over time, centuries of time, the religious leaders had expanded and expanded the rules, both in who they applied to and the situations in which they applied.

As practiced in Jesus’ day by the Pharisees and the religious Jews, these rules about ceremonial cleansing were required of everyone and in every circumstance of handling food. Jesus’ disciples were not priests, and they were not acting in any kind of official religious capacity at the temple. They had just purchased some bread at the marketplace and were eating it because they were hungry. When I say religious authorities in the past had expanded the scope and application of the Old Testament laws about ritual cleanness and other things, I mean really expanded them. The Jews living about 200 years after Jesus’ time codified their traditions in a number of books called the Mishnah. This is like the Encyclopedia Britannica of Jewish religious rules.

I remember as a kid, my parents purchased those Encyclopedia Britannicas, and we had them in a long bookshelf in our living room. Many volumes. They were the official books of knowledge in our house. Well, that’s sort of what the Mishnah is like, but in the religious realm, volumes of applications of the Old Testament law for every conceivable situation. While the Old Testament laws given to Moses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy have about 10 regulations regarding cleanness and uncleanness, the rabbis over the centuries had multiplied those many, many times over. There are, I’ve read, more than 30 chapters in the Mishnah dedicated just to regulations about cleanness and uncleanness.

So although in Jesus’ day these had not yet all been written down in book form, they were traditions passed on orally, and the Pharisees had memorized them all. He sees additional religious rules called here the traditions of the elders that the critics of Jesus’ disciples that day were referring to when they questioned him over why they were eating without washing their hands first. Again, these rules weren’t about hygiene, being clean on the outside. They were religious rituals, supposedly keeping somebody clean on the inside, pure before God. The Jews practiced hundreds of such regulations, believing that obeying all of these traditions passed down from the past would keep them acceptable to God, keep them pure in God’s eyes. But Jesus didn’t participate, and he didn’t expect his followers to comply either.

In fact, he was very clear and pretty harsh when he replied to the Pharisees, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites. These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. They teach as doctrine the commandments of men. They have let go of the commandments of God and are teaching as doctrine human traditions. Wow, that was a serious slap in the face.

These are the experts in the law of God he is speaking to here, or that’s how they perceive themselves. Yet Jesus called them a bunch of hypocrites who had substituted man-made rules for the commandments of God. Can you imagine someone saying to Jeff Bezos, You know nothing about marketing, or to Warren Buffett, You know nothing about finances and investing. These guys were the religious rules experts, and Jesus said they were clueless. What had gone on in Judaism over the centuries of time was that the word of God was replaced by layers and layers of man-made traditions. And whether you’ve ever thought about it like this, the same thing has gone on in some branches of Christianity since then.

Traditions are fine, as long as we understand they are man-made and voluntary. But when religious traditions are impressed on people as if they are from God and are made mandatory to believe and practice, especially if the religious authorities are telling people they are ultimately the way to be pure in God’s eyes, to be saved, we would say, then you’ve developed a completely different religion. It’s not Christianity any longer. That’s a different gospel, which is no gospel at all, as the Apostle Paul once said. Hmm. Can you give us some examples of that, Paul?

Well, yes, I can. And so that we are very clear here, I’m going to do it. The religion I’m most familiar with that had done this over time is the Roman Catholicism, although it is only one of many that are guilty of what Jesus was pointing out here. Catholicism also has tons of traditions, which to them are as important as God’s Word, maybe more important in some cases. Take the issue, for example, of confession. Jesus taught that we are forgiven and made clean before God when we believe into Him.

John stressed this over and over in his Gospel. And we saw in Romans, Paul spell it out very clearly as well, that when we put our faith in Jesus, God justifies us, makes us judicially clean before Him, declares us innocent, forgives our sins for Jesus’ sake because He paid for them on the cross, and accepts us into His family. Now, let me add that Jesus and the New Testament writers do teach that when believers sin subsequently, after we have come to Christ, we should seek forgiveness from our heavenly Father by confessing our sins to Him. Jesus is our mediator and advocate with God from then on, once we become Christians. He’s on our side, like our lawyer, and we can come into God’s very presence through Him, confess our sins, and be forgiven.

And it’s important to do that, not so we stay saved, but so our relationship with God stays unhindered and our lives are pleasing and useful to Him. The Apostle John promises when we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But realize, there is no example in the New Testament in confessing our sins to a priest. In fact, there is no such thing in the New Testament as priests, men who stand between us and God. There is only one mediator between a believer and God, and that is Jesus Christ, who has reconciled us to the Father through His death on the cross and who ever lives to make intercession for us. I’m quoting these things from the New Testament.

The practice of confessing sins to a church official, that began in about the fourth century, hundreds of years after Jesus and the apostles’ time. And over time, that practice became mandatory. In fact, it became one of the Roman Catholic Church’s seven sacraments. They call it the sacrament of penance. In Roman Catholicism, the sacraments, including regularly confessing one’s sins to a priest, are the stipulations good Catholics must perform to have a chance at being saved one day. If you ask an observant Roman Catholic why they confess their sins to a priest, they would say, That’s part of my religion.

But why? Because it’s a practice that has come down to us from antiquity. Which is why Jesus called in our passage a tradition of the elders, a tradition that has become wrongly doctrine. I found sadly that usually when a Roman Catholic is questioned on these things like this, they always revert back to, I do it because it’s part of my religion. If you ask even a priest, he will say, It’s a tradition that’s been passed down for centuries, as if doing it for a long time makes it the truth or makes it necessary. They have let go of the teachings in God’s Word in favor of traditions that have developed over time, exactly what Jesus criticized the Pharisees for doing.

The parallel to the religion of the Pharisees is striking. Over time, the many added traditions of the Pharisees surpassed and obscured the original truth buried well beneath them, and the traditions became the more important thing. What the Old Testament said was less important than the traditions. In the very same way, although the New Testament teaches our relationship with God is settled when we place our faith in Jesus, and that we can confess our sins as His children through the one and only mediator, Jesus Christ, the religion says, No, you have to come and confess your sins to one of our priests. That’s required of you to be purified so that God will accept you. They prescribe how often it should be done and which types of sins are serious enough one needs to do this, and have prescribed penance the priest requires after confession for the penitent to be forgiven.

These things are all teaching as doctrine traditions of men. Men came up with the idea of a confessional booth and the idea of official church priests who could forgive sins and the classifications of sins and the penance required to forgive them. None of these things are biblical. None of them. I had a Roman Catholic friend who went to Mass every day and confession every day. He was taught and believed that the more times he performed these church sacraments, the better chance he had of going to heaven.

I told him many times the New Testament insists Jesus has already done everything necessary to save you, and urged him to put his trust in Jesus. But his trust was in his religion and his own efforts at being religious. He believed the men in black robes who told him to keep the traditions in order to keep himself pure in God’s eyes. That’s exactly what the Pharisees told people in Jesus’ day. And Jesus said, No, no, no, no, no. You have to let go of the commandments of God to teach these doctrines, which are human traditions.

Boy, I hope I’m being clear enough here. I’m trying. I’m used to Catholic religion because it was such a prominent one where I grew up. I knew so many people who were Roman Catholics. But what I’m telling you is true of many other groups as well. I was talking to a Catholic priest not long ago about this very point.

He was insisting to me that Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church and that the church, therefore, has the authority to decide what is true and what is false. In essence, that the church’s authority is over top the Bible. My answer to him was, You can trust the traditions of men if you choose. I’m going to trust the unchangeable Word of God. Your church decided at some point that Peter was a pope. Nothing in the New Testament about Peter demonstrates he ever imagined that.

Your religion decided that Mary was sinless and that people can pray to God through her. And nothing in the New Testament says Mary was anything like that or that anyone ever practiced that. Your church came up with the idea that at some point we need priests to confess our sins to and to forgive us, but you’ll find no evidence of that in the early church in the New Testament. It was never practiced then. Your church contrived an entire system of seven sacraments and tells people faithfulness in practicing them is the way to save yourself. But the New Testament says we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus.

It’s nothing that we could accomplish through our own efforts. So, you can trust in the traditions of men, or you can trust in the Word of God. But it’s one or the other. When you opt for trusting in the traditions of men, you cannot do that, Jesus said, without nullifying the Word of God. Returning to Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees to wrap this up, he told them, Everyone listening to me today, listen well and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into their body.

Rather, it’s what comes out of a person that defiles them, or it is what’s within, out of a person’s heart, that evil comes: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, and so on and so on. Biblical Christianity teaches, because this is what Jesus taught, that what is wrong between God and us is inside of us. The real defilement is sin and has infected our hearts. Nothing we can do on the outside is going to change that. Religious practices cannot change that. Trying to obey a church’s rules cannot touch that.

Keeping traditions has no effect on that. Only God can change what’s wrong with us on the inside. Spiritual transformation always happens from the inside out, never the outside in. We cannot make ourselves clean before God by doing anything on the outside of us. What we need is for God to cleanse and change us on the inside, what Jesus called being born again, what the apostle Paul described as the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ point that day, when he contradicted the religious experts, was, You can wash your hands until they’re raw.

You can bathe your body multiple times a day and faithfully keep all the other hundreds of religious traditions you have developed over the centuries. But none of that will cleanse your hearts. None of that will remove the defilement of sin within you. And that’s because only Jesus can do that. Only He has the authority to do that. So my strong advice today to religious people: trust Jesus as your Savior.

Believe into Jesus to forgive your sins and cleanse your heart. Follow Jesus by learning and applying His Word to your life. And remember that religious traditions are just that, traditions, nothing more. The word of men and not the Word of God. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul.

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And as always, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.