From Matthew 15:1-10 / Slaves to Tradition.

This exchange with the scribes and Pharisees in vss. 1-20 is filled with crucial principles for living in Christ’s Kingdom. We see His reasoning on display in a most wonderful fashion. And, in the process, He frees Believers from so much that man-made religion imposes.

Note first: How this exchange proves to be Jesus’ own exposition of Matthew 7:3-5. There, in the parable of the speck in a brother’s eye versus the log in our own, Jesus appeals directly to the priorities of weights. Some things are more important than others.

Jesus will come back to this principle in Ch. 23: ““Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!”

Some matters, even of God’s Law are weightier than others. Failure to make this distinction flattens God’s Law so as to utterly distort it.

One thinks back to the issue of circumcision. It was given to the Israelites as a unique sign of the Covenant. And yet, we read in Joshua that for the entire 40 years Israel wandered in the desert, they failed to circumcise their young. And did God abandon them? Did He charge them with gross sin? Did He fail to meet them every step of the way? No. But when they finally crossed over the Jordan, He told them to do what they had neglected before they were to begin their campaign.

Think now how some would make water baptism the equivalent of circumcision, and lay such stress upon it as to make one who is not baptized to remain in gross sin and perhaps not even saved.

Passages such as this bid us to think in the broader construct of Biblical Theology rather than in narrow patterns of mere proof texting.

Not every sin, not even every heresy is – damnable. Indeed, some are, but not all. And for lack of understanding this, the Body of Christ is often needlessly divided.

Just recently I heard from 2 different sources that some have made a major issue over whether or not the angelic host sang as Jesus’ birth, or only made a proclamation.

And will any be asked of they were correct in this when they reach the courts of Heaven, or be denied entrance, or lose rewards over it? Nonsense.

Note second then: Those who make every deviation from their own considered opinions into rank heresy, commit a terrible error.

Here, it was the tradition, the mere human opinion of some which actually overrode the commandment of God! So the appeal to “honor” in vs. 4.

And it bids us examine ourselves, even in the New Covenant regarding what “traditions” have come to have more impact upon us than the commandments of God Himself.

As a young man coming out of a strongly Pentecostal tradition, the practice of some women wearing open-toed shoes was considered salacious. Can you imagine that in Jesus’ day when all wore sandals or went completely barefoot?

On Sundays, we could not read the color comics in the newspaper until after the Sunday morning service. Or turn on the TV until after the evening service.

Wednesday service was a sacrosanct as Sunday’s.

Those who were not Pentecostal were – in the words of a Pastor cousin of mine: “driving a Cadillac with a 4 cylinder engine” – and were barely saved, if at all.

Communion had to be unfermented grape juice and unleavened crackers. Real wine and leavened bread were to be eschewed. Neglecting not only the Scripture examples, but the historical debates over the same.

In the mid-second century, the entire church nearly split over what day to celebrate Easter on, if not for the intervention of Irenaeus.

And today, some Christians will celebrate Christmas and others consider it pagan. But when such traditions actually govern or disturb the unity of the Church, we are following the Pharisees as our exemplars.

Note third: Jesus’ most excellent definition of hypocrites. The Pharisaical hypocrites put on the mask of righteousness in washing their hands, while their real face is the one of creating loopholes around God’s commands.

No one defines hypocrisy better than Jesus in this place: Playing righteous by what one says, but living in sin in direct contradistinction to that profession. Actors playing a role.

Note fourth: Every doctrine or teaching of the Word is a commandment of God and is to be heard as God’s voice to us. But to leap to assigning the same authority or statute to our extrapolations or implications of those doctrines is a grave error. And soon, our extrapolations take the place of the doctrines themselves, morphing into doctrines. When we make our extrapolations equal to or even above Scripture – we have usurped God’s voice with our own. And we will not be found faultless. Teachers and preachers, beware. Church leaders, beware. Every man or woman who desires to serve Christ – beware.

Note fifth: How freeing all of this is. It is so blessed and free to serve Christ, in that we are not called to nit-pick everyone else all the time. And freeing that we can step out of our own bondage to tradition.

The old adage, wrongly attributed to Irenaeus or Augustine, comes to us from the 1th century German Lutheran theologian Rupertus Meldenius, and emerges from the principles of passages like this: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. May it be so.