To Encourage You

Mark 7:9 “And he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!’”

It’s interesting how people will justify their sin by substituting their obedience to something other than the Word of God.  Everyone has some standard of right and wrong.  What that standard is becomes evident when that standard is violated, typically by someone else.  People, and in particular those who have rejected Christ and His Word, tend to see the way that they live their lives as “good” or acceptable, but will rail against those who live in some way that they find offensive.  They will vigorously object to those who may speak out in some way against their own way of life.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were good at this.  They were fastidious at going to the synagogue and adhering to rules that they had made up to give them a feeling of self-righteousness because they “obeyed” themselves, so to speak.  Yet, they hated Jesus for pointing out the many ways in which they were violating the true Word of God.  They tithed of even their herbs, while they “devour(ed) widow’s houses” (Luke 20:47), i.e., invented schemes to get even the poorest people to put the little money they had to live on into the temple treasury.  They sold animals at exorbitant prices to get wealthy from others’ efforts to observe the ordinances of worship in the temple.  Jesus overturned their tables and chased them from the temple, rebuking their sin and exposing their flawed self-righteousness.   

We are no different when our own sense of morality is based on anything other than the Word of God.  If we attempt to justify ourselves by doing other things we think are “good” or supporting some cause we view as righteous, while at the same time disobeying the clear commands of God that He has given us in His Word, we are just like the religious Pharisees of Jesus’ day.  We may not attend a church, or we may not view ourselves as religious, but there is some standard we are following, even if it’s one that we’ve created on our own.  Or we may be those whoobey some parts of God’s Word that appeal to us, while giving no regard to other parts that we just don’t like or have any interest in obeying.  Either is described by Jesus as nothing more than “a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.”   

May God keep us from substituting some man-made ideas for the eternal, infallible, and true Word of God.