Believe the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is korban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the Word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do.” Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible Word. Thanks be to God.
And it will please the Lord by His Spirit to transform His Word into our lives in service for Himself. Amen.
Jesus is the incarnate revelation of the covenant God of Israel. Now that covenant God of Israel is our God, too, but we place it in the historical context as we study today. In coming to earth, the Lord Jesus has left much to God the Father, and this is not always easy to comprehend, because if He is fully God, how come He can’t do everything the Father does? And why does he also depend on the work of the Holy Spirit? There’s a lot of mystery about the Trinity, the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But we accept the way that this is presented to us in the Scriptures.
We do know that Jesus is the Son of God. has been tasked with clarifying many things and with correcting serious errors found among the Israelites, and may I say among us too, though the pronouncements of the leaders such as the scribes and the Pharisees have much to be thankful for, yet there’s also much to correct. This correcting is what we encounter in today’s passage as we look at the continuing conversation between the Lord Jesus and the Jews who put great stock in tradition.
The lesson for us is, when in doubt about how to please God, always go back to the Bible. Now, our points today have to do with the fact that there is an overarching principle that we must attend to. We note also that Israel had a problem because they were leaving whatever commandment bothered them and substituted tradition or something that they made up for themselves. We’ll also consider the fact that Jesus chose an example, and that has to do with honoring Father and Mother, but He chose an example of leaving, that is, in this case, avoiding the fifth commandment or some of its ramifications. And thus they had a predicament to solve. What about respect or disrespect for parents? And then finally, God has a solution. And that solution, simply put, is prompt obedience. Prompt obedience and thereby the restoration, the fellowship with God.
Well, that’s what we’re going to try to cover this morning in the short time that we have together.
I grew up in children’s homes, not because I needed to be there personally, but my parents worked either as employees of a children’s home, or in the latter days, my father was a superintendent of a couple of children’s homes. Well, in one of these situations, everyone ate in a common dining room, and there were rules to follow. And it was a way of teaching manners to the kids, to me too. But learning manners, so forth. And so there was, let us say, a rule about how you ate. You used a knife and fork, you used your napkin, all these kind of things. But there was one little boy who was new to this particular gathering of youngsters. And when we sat down to eat our eggs at breakfast, He looked up and said, at home we sop our eggs. Well, that kind of broke the rule, you know, of eating carefully and with manners and so forth.
Well, God’s commandments are firm and unchanging. Although sometimes there are specific situations that move them a little bit this way or a little bit that way, Overall, God’s commandments are firm and unchanging, and that’s really the overarching thing that we have to keep in mind always.
Tradition comes into play, of course, and that’s where we get into trouble often, because tradition is influenced by the flesh. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that our sinful natures say, well, think of it this way, or try it a different way. Tradition is influenced by the flesh and can only be relied upon when and if the Bible affirms it. Nothing wrong with tradition as such, but it has to be affirmed by the Bible.
So therefore, let us always search the Scriptures. Remember the people in Berea. They searched the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. When we build traditions, how should we build them? On what our parents tell us? Or on what our friends do? Or what the family has done for centuries? No, we look again to the Bible. We build our traditions using scripture. And in that case, tradition is a good thing.
Invariably, tradition alone will push God’s commandments aside or they’ll compromise them in some way. So remember, the overarching principle is commandments over tradition. Tradition always has to come under the direction and by the instruction of God’s word. Commandment over scripture.
Which brings us then to ask about Israel. Israel had a problem leaving whatever commandment bothered them. That’s what the scripture says in today’s passage. Jesus said, you’re leaving the commandment. You’re leaving it, going off somewhere else. There’s an old joke that passed around among Christians anyway, that God hasn’t given us the 10 suggestions. has given us the Ten Commandments. But it’s indicative of our sinfulness that we leave the command, you see, and try to make things work for us as we see fit.
So Israel, you see, not just in one case, although that’s the illustration here, but Israel had left the commandments behind and decided to move on to other things. They held to things deemed more important than commandments. Well, I’m not going to obey my father and mother because that’s not convenient, or that’s difficult for me, or I can’t do something that I’d like to do because I have to attend to my parents. That’s really not a big problem for us, is it? Most of our parent situations are gone. I remember there was a sign in a store I saw one time that said, credit freely extended to all persons over 90 years old accompanied by their parents.
But we have a tendency to leave the commandments behind. Now how did Israel leave the commandments behind? Well, they left the commandment unstudied. That is, They didn’t really say, what does God mean by this? How are we to apply this in our lives? And that’s really indicative of the fact that they really didn’t take most of Scripture that seriously. They didn’t study it. Now, there were groups, of course. There were rabbis and people that met in the synagogue, and they read and studied the Scriptures and so forth. But most of the people, we must say, didn’t really give that thorough study as they should. And of course, without the Lord Jesus and without the help of the Holy Spirit, we’ll never understand the scriptures as we should. These people should have been very thankful that the one who knew the Word of God most perfectly, the one who actually spoke that Word, the Lord Jesus Himself was in their midst.
But this was a problem for Israel. They left the commandment, and we’re talking about this one that Jesus will bring up, but it could apply to any of them. They left the commandment unstudied. Don’t you make that mistake, okay? Study the Bible. Study the Scripture. Study the commandments. If God says don’t do this, don’t say, Lord, isn’t there a way for me to get out from this? But say, Lord, what does this really mean? How can I live by this in my life?
Another thing was, and I kind of referred to this, is that they left the commandment unapplied. If you had asked them, say the Ten Commandments, most of us here probably could remember most of the Ten Commandments, but applying them, Well, no, because really, we choose to apply tradition instead. Well, my mother said, or my brother said, or my pastor said, but not really from the Bible, but just said, this or that’s a good thing to do. They left the commandment unapplied. That’s how you leave the commandment. You leave it unapplied.
And then they left the commandment since it made life difficult when it came to oneself, that is, my yearnings, my interests. Or even for others, they said, well, I want to try to apply that in any situation where I have a say. That’s what tradition, you see, accommodates. You have a tradition that’s passed down, you’re following that tradition. Well, in that case, tradition seems to dominate, seems to take over. God says, just read the Word. It may be difficult, but I’ll give you the strength, I’ll give you the ability to keep My commandments if you look to Me.
Well, Jesus chose, as we’ve indicated, An example of leaving, and that is the avoiding of the fifth commandment. And again, I want to emphasize, you could probably put this with any of the commandments, not just the ten, but any of the adjacent commandments that God had given in His Word. They found a way to leave. You know, if you’re in a building, you wanna leave, you look around, where’s the exit sign? Where’s the way I can get out of this?
They say about P.T. Barnum, I think I’ve used this illustration with you before, but P.T. Barnum had too many people in one of his circus-like exhibitions, and so he took a sign and put it over the door out, the way out, and that’s what they say in England. They don’t say exit, they say way out. But it said, this way to the egress. Nobody much knew what an egress was. But they all went out that door and that got them out of the building and alleviated the crowdedness to a certain extent.
Jesus uses this example. And he says, if you want to think up a reason for not keeping the 10th commandment, You can find help in that. You can think up your own, but you can get a lot of help. Let’s say a man wants to buy a donkey. He has a lot of use for a donkey. And of course, I’m putting this in the context of the ancient world here. But he wants to buy a donkey, but he has some money that normally he would use to support his parents. and maybe some other things, the church or whatever, but he wants that donkey. And so he thinks up a reason why he’ll spend that money and use it for the glory of God with the donkey. Well, God says, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And His righteousness has to do with the commandments, you see. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. All these other things will be added to you. If you need a donkey, God will give you money for a donkey, but seek His kingdom first.
Don’t help your parents. Yes, that was the way they thought. But you should obey the commandment. Obedience is necessary to undermine Satan’s lies. Satan comes to us and says, well, has God said… This was the Garden of Eden, of course. Has God really said, you shall not eat of the fruit of this tree? The woman Eve, she tried to explain it a little bit, and then she said, well, maybe you’re right, and she got her husband to eat, and so forth. Satan undermines God’s truth, you see.
But obedience, doing what God says, undermines Satan and what he has to do. Keep that in mind. Obedience is learned first in the home, and that’s why this is an important commandment. It’s right in the middle of all the Ten Commandments. You go this way, you go that way, but this is a very important commandment, honor your father and your mother, which means also obey authority that God has put over you. And you learn this in a home, and especially in homes where God is honored. If you have a home where God is hardly ever mentioned and church is rarely attended and so forth, you can’t expect that the children of that home are going to turn out to be good. There’s exceptions, of course, but really obedience is learned first in the home.
Jesus honored his parents. Now you say, how do you know that? Well, first of all, the Bible says that he committed no sins. So he must have kept that commandment. But just in the few instances we have of his dealing with his parents, we see that he did indeed honor his father and his mother. His father probably passed on early in Jesus’ life. Nevertheless, he did honor his parents and he was acutely aware of the neglect of this fifth commandment. And you can understand this. If he kept it and there was hardly anybody around him who was keeping it, or they had found reasons to get around it, and I’ve entitled the message today, Skirting the Commandment, then you can see why he might have been upset that people were not keeping commandments of God.
He was a man who promoted and defended righteousness. And you see, when He died on the cross, He died to make us good, the hymn sings, but died to make us righteous. How can we be righteous before God? By having our sins taken away and having His righteousness, Jesus’ righteousness, applied to us, you see. So He was a man of righteousness always and in connection with this example, this fifth commandment. He’s putting it before the people. And it was also where there’s a connectedness from this commandment to all the others. He said it was right in the middle, but it can have an effect on obeying God, having no other gods before Him, or it can have the effect of loving your neighbor as yourself and not lying and cheating and stealing. It’s all right there in obeying God.
But he uses this because it’s evidently such an egregious breaking in that society at that time, and may I say, it is in our time as well. Notice at the end of the passage, he says, I’m not talking about just this commandment. How does he put it? He says, and many such things you do. Meaning, I’m using this one as an example, but there’s a lot for you to consider here. Whatever the commandment of God. So Israel, although they didn’t realize it very well, Israel had a predicament. In the old Life of Riley shows, William Bendix used to say, what a revolting development this is. Well, you look at Israel, I’m sure Jesus looked at Israel, and in his own way, he said, what a revolting development is this nation, especially the disrespect for parents.
You know, politicians will try anything to be successful anything but God’s way, anything but what the commandment says, or they run away from the Bible like it was poison. Disobedience leads to confusion and disappointment. That was a predicament that Israel had, confusion and disappointment. You have chaos in the home, chaos in the world, and ultimately death.
Disobedience leads to abandonment. That goes right with the idea of leaving. You leave the commandment. You abandon the commandment. You search elsewhere. For what? For order? For success? But you’re not going to find it anywhere except in the Bible, God’s Word, and following the Lord Jesus.
Disobedience leads to clever workarounds. And Jesus talks about this whole business of Corban here and how they worked around the fifth commandment, at least some people did. If you’re clever, you can be persuasive. There’s an interesting way of putting things here. He says you make a fine business of this situation of obeying parents or not. In other words, again, you really have come up with some neat ideas.
I’ve found it true in my life, and you probably have in your lives as well, that when you want to do something that God doesn’t want you to do, you can be very clever. In Arabic, where we used to live in Egypt. The good words that people would speak to people, compliments that would speak to them was, you’re very clever, they would say, you’re clever. And of course they meant it good. They just meant you’re a smart fellow. But I’ll tell you when it comes to getting around God’s commandments, we’re very clever. We can work things out so that it’s nice sounding.
That word korban, that sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like the color of your shoes. That’s cordovan, I think, but korban. And they think of a very good explanation of it here in the parenthesis is that is given to God. It really is from a Hebrew word that means to draw near, to draw near. And so if you declare Korban, it means I’m coming to God with an offering. I’m coming to give Him something to show how much I’m committed to Him.
Jesus says don’t say Korban. He doesn’t say that the word itself is bad. He just says don’t have that attitude. Don’t make the Word of God void. That is to remove it from life. Whatever you void out, it’s not part of life anymore. You’ve got a check, and you have to void it. That check means nothing anymore. You voided it. There are clever workarounds, but more often than not, they end up voiding the word of God. Not avoiding, but just voiding, making it nothing.
Well, that brings us then to our final point here today, and it has to do with God’s solution. We’re so tempted and so pressured to skirt the commandments of God. Not to be quite perfectly obedient, but enough we think that God should be satisfied. You know, most of us, it comes late in life, it did for me, but most of us have learned to use a computer We know how to get the computer to do what we want, but you know what you can’t do without? It’s the password. But the right password just opens the whole thing up for you. You can do what you need to do. Well, prompt obedience, and I just emphasize prompt here, prompt obedience will open the way for you. and to provide a wonderful situation for you. Trust and obey, we say. There’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey. Disobedience is a sure guarantee that our fellowship with God is broken. If you can’t obey what God says, there’s a breakdown in your relationship to Him.
You see, one of the things that Jesus did when He washed away our sins and He provided new life for us in resurrection from the dead, one of the things He did was to firm up that fellowship with God. But when we disobey, even as Christians, when we disobey, then that fellowship gets broken.
Now, the term quick fix we often think of negatively. The quick fix is not as good as taking the time to fix something. But I want to say here that it really works. Prompt obedience is the quick fix. If you disobey God, you’re not fully conforming yourself to what He sets forth in His Word, then fix it quick. How so? By obeying Him. By doing what He says. Prompt obedience is a quick fix for broken fellowship, and it usually follows repentance. If you’ve done an act of disobedience to God, then repent of that. Lord, I’m sorry, that sinful thing that I’ve done. Please forgive me. And then Lord, with your help, now I’m going to obey what you’ve said. The quick fix.
Obedience to tradition, We’ve certainly dealt with that word a lot lately, but obedience to tradition becomes a shackle. You know what a shackle is? It’s a handcuff, a leg cuff. You’re chained by it. Obedience to tradition becomes a shackle. And generally speaking, it’s hard to break free of it. Oh, the tradition. You know, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, the whole thing starts off, tradition. It seems so great, so wonderful. We must keep tradition. Obedience to tradition becomes a shackle. and may well put us in bad company, because there are a lot of other people that are shackled there with us. Misery loves company, we say. But prompt obedience to God’s commands is both liberating and uplifting. Liberating because now you’re free to do what God says and you don’t have that burden of guilt anymore. And uplifting because it just brings you right up to the face of God, right into His presence. If you’re going to continue to be disobedient, God’s going to push you away and say, not yet, not time right now. But when you’re obedient to Him, it’s uplifting. It just lifts you right up to Him.
Do I keep all these things as I should? No, of course not. I am a very sinful person. But the truth is the truth. Prompt obedience to God. Right now, Lord, I’m going to quit this and do that that You said. That’s liberating and uplifting.
Let’s pray together. I come before you today as part of a great company of people, not just the Israelites, but many, many people who try to skirt around your commandments. Your commandments won’t save us. They won’t take us to heaven in and of themselves, but they sure have to do with fellowship. They sure have to do with enjoying a happy and productive life and how we need, Lord, to repent of our sins, quickly obey You, and find the relief that You supply. Forgive us, Lord, when we fail to do that. And help us, Lord, to be a people who are known as an obedient people, even if it doesn’t make us popular, even if it doesn’t gain the world’s approval, even if it doesn’t fit tradition very well. Help us, Lord, to be an obedient people for whom Christ died and who want to serve Him, who want to show their love for Him, who want to draw close to God. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.