Sermon Tone Analysis
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More than 200 years ago, Edward Gibbon wrote a six-volume series called, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He spent 20 years studying the Roman Empire to find out how a nation that was so great suddenly imploded.
Interestingly, the first volume was published in 1776, the year our country was born.
Gibbon listed five primary reasons for the collapse.
1.
The rapid increase of divorce, with the undermining of the sanctity of the home, which is the basis of society.
2. Higher and higher taxes; and the spending of public money on bread and circuses.
3. The mad craze for pleasure, with sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal.
4. The building of gigantic armies to fight external enemies, when the most deadly enemy, the decadence of the people, lay within.
5.
The decay of religion; faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, and becoming impotent to guide it.
People in our culture really struggle with the idea of the authority of the Bible.
In today’s text Jesus teaches two remarkable truths about the Bible.
Let’s look at these two truths he tells us.
We must . . .
ADJUST TO ITS AUTHORITY
Jesus five times in this passage criticizes what he calls the traditions of the elders.
Jesus is not against tradition altogether.
You can’t really have a life without tradition.
You can’t have a human community.
You can’t have emotional health without traditions.
Jesus is not criticizing tradition per se, but he is criticizing the tradition of the elders.
The tradition of the elders was a set of rules and regulations that, over the years, had grown up around the Bible.
They weren’t in the Bible.
Teachers and scholars had developed these traditions, these rules about the Bible.
They had added them to the Scripture as binding authoritative regulations for life.
For example, in the Bible, you read we are supposed to rest on the Sabbath.
The teachers said, “What does it mean?”
You know, it’s natural to ask, “What does it mean to rest on the Sabbath?”
The answer of the tradition of the elders was a couple hundred rules you did.
Then there were all these other things in the Bible like, “What is ritual purity?
Why do we have to be pure when we go into the temple?
What does the Passover mean?
How are we to observe the Passover?”
In every case, the tradition of the elders answered, “What this means is …” and gave a bunch of very detailed rules and regulations.
The problem was the rules and regulations weren’t in the Bible, but they grew up around the Bible.
They became equal in authority (that is what Jesus is criticizing), equal in binding authority on people.
Because the rules and regulations were considerably more detailed and concrete than the principles of the Bible, they tended to distract people and sometimes even contradict the actual original biblical principles.
Jesus gives two examples to illustrate what I’m saying.
The first is the washing.
If you go back to the Bible, where does the Bible talk about ritual washing for purification?
Now this is not hygiene.
This has nothing to do with why we wash our hands before eating.
The idea here was ritual purity.
In the Bible, the only people who were told to wash their hands are the priests.
According to the law of Moses, the priests had to wash their hands before they went in and led worship.
This was a very important symbol.
It was a way for God to say, “I am holy.
If you who have sin are going to approach me, it has to be cleansed.
It has to be dealt with.”
In Jesus day the tradition of elders required everybody to wash constantly with water.
Wash before eating.
Notice all the references.
Sometimes washing clothes, washing furniture.
Why?
Because you might have touched something unclean.
Just to be sure, even though it wasn’t in the Bible, there was this obsession with ritual purity.
In his second example Jesus teaches on Corban and honoring one’s parents.
The word Corban means offered or offering.
You could say, “I have dedicated, I have offered, this property up to God.”
This means that God’s claims supersede anyone else’s claim.
The tradition of the elders had developed a really wonderful little loophole as it relates to Corban.
For example, you could take a piece of property, and you could declare it Corban.
This meant that if somebody in your family even your own parents, got into economic trouble and came to you and said, “You’re the kinsman.
Would you help me get out of trouble?” you could say, “I would like to but I can’t use any of my resources because it’s all God’s.”
Jesus says, “Look.
By complying with the tradition of the elders, you’ve actually contradicted the whole spirit of the biblical principle, ‘Honor your father and mother.’
Notice what Jesus says in verse 7
This is a remarkable statement.
Failure to honor the authority of the Bible is failure to worship God.
If you let human traditions, your heart, what the experts say, or anything else have equal authority with the Bible, then you fail to worship God.
The authority of the Bible and the authority of God stand or fall together.
You can’t have one without the other.
This is a remarkably astonishingly high view of the Bible in which Jesus is seeing the Bible as not a human product but something that’s divine.
To fully understand Jesus teaching here, we need to do a little survey of the other teachings Jesus has about the Bible.
Jesus ACUMEN came from the Scripture.
Whenever Jesus had a problem, an issue, a question, some intellectual issue or ethical issue, the final word for Jesus was gegraptai.
“It is written.”
When he said that, it didn’t matter what the experts said.
It didn’t matter what the culture said.
It didn’t matter what the tradition said.
It didn’t matter what your heart said.
It was settled.
In
which means it can’t be disobeyed.
In
“Not a jot or tittle,” which means not a letter or a part of a letter.
Jot was the smallest of the Hebrew letters.
Tittle means a part of a letter.
Not a letter or a part of a letter will pass away from the Word of God till it all comes true.
He based his thinking on the Bible.
It was the supreme authority intellectually.
His ACTIONS came from the Scripture.
He based his actions on the Bible, his plans, his decisions.
We see this in the garden of Gethsemane.
The soldiers arrived to arrest him.
Think of all the chaos of that.
As they’re arresting him and grabbing him, Peter pulls out his sword.
At a time like that, he based everything in his life on the Scripture!
He did everything according to the Scripture … all of his decisions, all of his plans, all of his actions.
I think the most moving thing is to see that if you read the life of Jesus, you will see the main fortification for his heart was the Scriptures.
He did not handle the cosmic challenges of his life with willpower, but with the Scripture.
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