Two dangers facing the church

“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’a and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,’ he is not to ‘honor his fatherc’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’" (Matthew 15:3-9 NIV) "Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow. Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: 'Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!'? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. (Colossians 2:16-23 NIV). Modern Christians tend to misjudge the Pharisees. From a human standpoint the Pharisees were not evil men disguising themselves as good, they were religious men desperately trying to be good. Unfortunately that desire became the bait of the trap of self-righteousness that they found themselves entrapped in. Let's take a quick look at how Pharisaism developed. While in the Babylonian captivity, the religious leaders began to rightly reason, "We are in this mess because we broke the Law of God." Moving forward from that premise, they devised a strategy to rectify the problem. That strategy resulted in erecting fences around the Law of God in an effort to keep people from breaking that law. Historically the process resulted in the work we know as the Talmund. By Jesus' day there were some 724 volumes of rabbinic interpretations all designed to keep the Jews from stepping over the boundary of the Law. Unfortunately, the very fences these rabbinic leaders erected to protect the Law became the very obstacles that obscured the Law and elicited Jesus scathing rebuke, "Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition." Modern Christians are not immune. How sad when we as believers allow our traditions to trump Biblical truth! A number of years ago I was at a conference of Baptist churches where the speaker asked the youth leaders, "Who would you tell your older teens to marry if they asked you? One leader proudly answered, "I'd tell them to marry a Baptist first and a Christian second!" That my friend is a prime example of tradition being held as the authority of truth! As I see it there are two very real dangers facing the church today. One is modernity, a view that is constantly altering the Word of God in hopes of staying relevant. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, those who follow such a tack have a very weak view of Scripture. They do not view the Bible as the Authoritative Word of God, rather they se it as the creation of fallen and often misguided men who wrote from a standpoint of cultural bias. By and large we recognize this danger as that of theological liberalism, unless we are in the Baptist tradition, then we call such people "moderates" A second danger, one we don't quickly or easily recognize in our churches, is the danger of Pharisaism where traditions become mistaken as truth. Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to tradition, but I am opposed to any tradition which is elevated to the status of Biblical truth and supported by Scriptures purposefully misinterpreted as the frame of tradition is forced upon what we allow the Scripture to say. We need to be careful students of the Scripture. We need to carefully guard the Truth of God's Word, and avoid the dangers inherent in either liberalism or Pharisaism. Rev. Dr. John Pearrell, Gateway Community Church (SBC) Covington, GA