Well happy Sabbath so glad that uh we’re able to worship together little bit different this week
as we have Dr vine with us he um is of course giving us messages through our
Sabbath school time on through to the afternoon and so this morning you can see it’s the
tradition above all tradition so I know this is a little bit of a a different
um kind of format for us getting up a little bit earlier for those not used to
being for Sabbath school but glad that we’re able to worship together this morning let’s bow our heads as we get
ready this morning and heavenly father we thank you that we have this opportunity to worship together to be
blessed by your word we pray that you would be with Dr vine as he presents to
us words of life for father we recognize the times in which we are living and we
recognize the messages that will set our hearts in the right place to have us
ready to enter into the kingdom of heaven to be disciples for you to bring others with us we thank you for this and
ask this in Jesus’s name amen dr is yours
thank you uh good morning everybody good morning
it’s a privilege to be with you here in um Ohio and
um I was uh I had a wonderful night last night with Pastor Michael and his uh
wife and he was explaining about why this is called Tills Plane and uh people were asking me like where is this
meeting going to be i said it’s in Till’s Plane and I’d never heard of Till’s plane myself um so it’s always an
act of faith when you say I’m I’m going to be somewhere and I have no idea where it is uh but anyway it’s a privilege to
come and share with you today um as I want to say thank you to Pastor Michael for your gracious welcome here and uh
for your hosting last night for myself and uh I just look forward to sharing these Sabbath hours together with
everybody who is here today and uh for those of you who are joining online and we give you a warm welcome as well and
we pray that you’re also blessed by our fellowship together so today um we’re going to go on on a journey we have uh
four sessions together uh the final one is a Q&A this afternoon and um the first
uh the first talk I’m during Sabbath school is now I’m going to talk about the tradition above all other traditions
uh because sometimes we think the tradition is good and sometimes we think that tradition is bad and actually
there’s a whole spectrum of different kinds of traditions we’re going to look at those then we’re going to look at the most important tradition of all uh in
the scriptures uh in our worship service today we have a sermon entitled the great reset and um that directly applies
to where we are today in salvation history and then this afternoon I’m going to talk about our greatest
spiritual needs um and that’s from the book of Revelation so that’s our journey today um well I’m not doing any
religious liberty kind of sermons today but um maybe you’ll see those in a few weeks time in another church somewhere
else so um I bring greetings from my wife i have but one wife uh she’s back
in Bering Springs and uh so is our our daughter and uh uh my son he works with
me in as needed to the pole he does website management and that kind of stuff um social media and recording of
talks and I’m truly grateful for the genzers and millennials out there because they bring a whole set of gifts
and skills and abilities that people my age just do not have so I look at a website let’s say a payment function and
my eyes just glaze over like give me Greek or Hebrew but don’t give me a website and my boy looks at a website
and within 30 seconds he’s figured out the problem and I was driving with him a couple of weeks ago in Portland Oregon
uh to a church and somebody called and he said “Oh there’s a link broken on the website.” And so my son just took out
his phone turned it into a hotspot went onto his laptop and he typed in some code and the website was fixed just like
that i thought I have no idea how you do anything like that so I’m truly grateful for the younger generation and the gifts
and abilities they bring us so uh today uh for Sabbath school I’m going to talk about the tradition above all other
traditions and uh as we begin I invite you to bow your heads invite the presence of the Holy Spirit uh so
heavenly father we thank you today for the beauty of the Sabbath lord we thank you for the crisp air outside the green
grass the blue skies the beautiful flowers and uh for the gentle uh rustle
of the breeze around us and Lord after six and a bit thousand years of sin we still see the beauty of the original
creation all around us and Lord we thank you that you are a God of beauty and uh you reveal yourself to us and now Lord
as we share these moments together Lord I humbly ask that you will speak through me and for me I ask Lord that what I
share uh will will lift Jesus high uh that each one of us will be drawn closer
to Jesus um in deeper faith more faithful obedience and brighter witness
for him uh I thank you father for hearing this prayer in the name of Jesus I ask amen okay so uh do do any of you
have um memories from your childhood when growing up things that you might say were precious traditions when you
were a kid do any of you have memories like that um yes yeah i see a few hands
going up okay so um uh does anybody know uh what great American tradition this
represents black Friday okay black Friday okay so there you have there’s Black Friday and um a great American
tradition i actually love Thanksgiving i think Thanksgiving just the attitude of slowing down and being grateful to God
for all the blessings we enjoy i think that’s one of the most wonderful days of the entire year and so I love
Thanksgiving and Black Friday to me is a day just to kind of potter around the house and catch up on chores and get my
honeydew list done before Sunday comes along okay uh which great American
tradition does this represent sorry fourth of July yep there
you have 4th of July and um speaking as someone who was born in England I have
very mixed feelings about the 4th of July um but I think there’s over about 60 or 70 countries around the world that
celebrate independence from Britain so if there’s one common factor in all these celebrations it is the British u
but uh Fourth of July I actually really enjoy now the 4th of July because um I
appreciate the protections of the American Constitution and I think the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution are some of the most incredible human governance documents you find anywhere
on planet Earth i was speaking with a pastor the other day and he lives in another country he’s an American citizen
and he wants to start an online preaching ministry and I and uh he lives in a part of Europe where they have very
strict uh anti-hate speech laws i said to him I said ‘Well look I know you like living where you’re living i said ‘But
um the country right now with the most protections for preachers is the United States of America no questions asked
because the sermons if I were to preach the sermons I do in Ireland or Britain or Canada I could be arrested for
preaching hate speech laws uh but what we preach in America is protected by the First Amendment i said so if you’re
going to be a preacher and you’re going to go on the internet you need to be based in America and so I’m grateful that America represents freedom and
freedom of conscience and freedom of speech okay does anybody know what great American tradition this this
represents any any clues um
uh this is uh April 15 tax day all right so there you are there’s tax day April
15 and um you know many men will maybe forget their wedding anniversary but you
can’t forget tax day that’s the one anniversary you cannot forget right now um in Britain we have here in America we
have Memorial Day and in Britain we have Remembrance Sunday as it’s called and it’s the Sunday closest to the um to
Armistice Day as some would call it uh when World War I ended they signed the armistice and the guns fell silent on
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 and so every year uh
the government the royal family the representatives of the armed forces and the general population they gather uh
this memorial here um to pay tributes to the uh almost 20 million people who died
in World War I on on all sides it was a incredible conflict uh so that’s the tradition that we have in England and to
honor that in people in England wear little red poppies on their jackets for the month of November because the
poppies covered the fields of Flanders in northern France where so many young peop young men died here’s another
tradition from England has any of you seen this any of you been to see this this is this happens on the the
sovereign’s birthday which is mid June every year and this is known as trooping the color and these are some of the
soldiers from the household division and what they what happens is that in in days gone by there was so much smoke on
the battlefield the soldiers would got they got lost and they had to recognize the flag of their regiment and so every
year they would troop the colors they still do this today and they march the flag beside all the soldiers of their
regiment so that in battle they recognize their regimental b um uh flag
and that’s where they’re going to rally and so they rally the troops and they have the trooping of the color nowadays
it’s a big tourist attraction but that’s an old tradition also growing up in England um every year on Christmas Day
um at uh 3:00 uh the Queen or now the king they give a 50-minute address to
the nation and that’s pretty much the only time they speak to the nation and it’s on all the TV channels and this is
Queen Elizabeth giving one of her addresses and uh I would encourage you to just type in you know Queen’s speech
Christmas like 2016 or 2017 and Queen Elizabeth basic she was a devout Christian lady she would always give a
homaly on a Christian theme such as forgiveness or reconciliation and it was
basically she gave a sermon to the nation every year and that was that’s called the queen’s uh the Christmas
speech of the king or the queen that’s a tradition that we have in England moving on to the Adventist world here’s a
tradition hay stacks all right haystacks and um I don’t know how much you like
haystacks um I I I endure haystacks um but uh anyway that’s an Adventist
tradition that goes all around the Adventist world no matter what part of the world you’re in you’re going to find hay stacks um and so uh here’s another
Adventist tradition do you know what this picture is referring to
yeah that’s right Pastor Michael that is the parade of nations held at the conclusion of the general conference
session every five years um they have a parade of nations and all the nation countries line up in alphabetical order
and they have a representative with their flag and the name of their country and this signifies the countries where
the Adventist message has reached and so let’s say there’s just over 200 nations
in the world as far as the UN are concerned and we’re in maybe 150 160 of
those countries officially we have an unofficial presence in other countries but if you look at the um uh 18,000
language groups in the world Today we’re in probably fewer than 300 of those 18,000 so even though we may have a
presence in let’s say India India has um thousands of language groups where we
have no presence and and so the gospel is go to every nation tribe language and
people so that the the parade of nations celebrates the nations where we’ve reached with the Adventist message but
in terms of language groups uh we’ve still got a long long way to go when we were growing up as kids this was our
family tradition we’d go camping every year on the south coast of England my dad was a pastor we had four kids that’s
us with our cousins there my dad on the right my mom on the left we always drove the Volkswagen Beetle with four kids and
all of our tents stuffed in there i mean it was it was a tight fit in those cars all right and that’s why um that’s why
mom fed us on brown bread and peanut butter to keep us deliberately small so we could fit into the car for those long
journeys and so um that was a family tradition as we were growing up and one
of the most treasured family traditions of all was this here we go visiting as
more boys with my dad he was a pastor we go visiting with him he do Bible studies
we’d sit in the car as they doing family counseling and stuff like that and when the evening was done um we’d get in the
car and on the way home dad would say “Boys now mom has a lovely green salad waiting for you at home would you like
that or would you rather go and get some fish and chips and uh being boys um we we opted for the sanctified option which
was the battered cod and chips uh they’re called French fries and we bathe them with salt and vinegar and uh my dad
always seemed to have a tin of Nestle’s sweet and condensed milk in the car and he punched two holes in with a
screwdriver we pass it around my dad and my twin brother and myself and we would have one slurp at a time each so you
kind of suck as much as you could then you pass it on to the next guy there okay so
these are examples of relative relatively innocent traditions so not
all tradition is bad uh some some traditions are helpful because particularly as you’re growing up as a
child you kind of live your life from those high points to high points you go from birthdays to Christmas to
Thanksgiving Fourth of July and those traditions actually create like um like
um a skeleton within which you live your life and so not all traditions are bad and as Protestants when we say when we
say we our faith is based on the word of God alone not on tradition we’re not talking about these kind of traditions
so not all traditions are bad um every Sunday we go sailing with my dad we start in little boats with red sails
called mirrors they’re 11 ft long tiny little boats then we graduated onto Enterprises with blue sails they’ve got
13footers and then we moved on to wayfarers and they’ve sailed across the Atlantic in those and those are almost
16 ft long they’re seagoing yachts they’re very nice yachts so we would go sailing with my father as as young kids
um on a regular basis and we had so many adventures about doing that that my mom would she’d spend her Sundays praying
that her boys made it home alive because we had all kinds of adventures out on the English Channel or in the North Sea
all right so we’ve looked at some innocent traditions there um but let’s um let’s look at a more spiritual uh uh
take a more spiritual turn now um we’re going to look at the Jewish debates over the traditions of men we’re going to
look at some of the futile traditions of men we’re going to look at um what is a positive tradition and then we’re going
to look at what is the best tradition of all that we find in the scriptures so that’s our journey today okay and you
know George Orwell um wrote in the book Animal Farm um when the pigs take over when the animals take over the farm have
you all guys all read Animal Farm yes and the pig the animals take over the farm they get rid of the humans and they
have these kind of Marxist slogans so um one of the one of the slogans at the beginning of the revolution is all
animals are equal but then when the pigs want to take preeminence among the animals the slogan changes so now it
says all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others and that was the pigs wanted to control the
farm in the way the farmer did and so you might say that all traditions are equal but there is one tradition more
equal than all other traditions and we’re going to come to that best tradition of all later on in our Sabbath
school time here okay so let’s look at the Jewish debates about the traditions of men and um I want to start out by
just using this chart here and uh you’ve got the three um faiths that people
believe uh came from Abraham or from his family you have Judaism you have
Christianity and you have Islam and for Christianity I’m using the majority
group there that is the ca the the Catholic faith um and so you got three
faiths Judaism Catholicism and Islam uh which are the um uh Catholicism and
Islam are the two largest independent religious groups in our world today and then on on the left hand side the rows
I’ve I’ve given you three rows there and what you realize is that each of these faiths has a very very similar approach
to the text that they used and so in Judaism um in Judaism they they they
rever the Old Testament and they don’t call it the Old Testament they call it the Tanaka uh Tanaka is t short for
Torah na is short for neim that means the prophets and ketuim is means the
writings so they call the old testament we call it the tanaka or the tanak and so that is the sacred text of Judaism
today and then uh underneath that you see that there is uh an oral tradition
within Judaism and that’s we call that the oral Torah those are the traditions of the Jews and uh be at the time of
when Jesus was born there were two sets of traditions of the Jews uh for the Jews of the dispersion there was the
Babylonian Gamarra that’s what it’s now known as and for the Jews of Palestine there was what we now call the Mishna
and about 200 AD um the Jews started to collect these and the summary of the
Jewish faith is at the bottom there so when you add the the the Tanaka the Old Testament to the Babylonian Gamara and
the Mishna that’s the oral traditions of the Jews you end up with the final product and that is known as the Talmud
and if you go to a library today and say I’d like to take out a copy of the Talmud you need a station wagon because
there are multiple volumes in the Talmud it’s not just a single book and then if you look at Catholicism Catholicism has
the same kind of structure so Catholicism has uh their sacred texts as the Old Testament and the New Testament
now I’ve put up there on the screen the Apocrypha because officially um in Catholicism the Apocrypha is not a
source of doctrine but actually it is in fourth Mcabes you have the concept of praying to the saints the dead saints
and that’s where they get that idea from from the fourth book of Mcabes in the Apocrypha uh then you have the oral
traditions or oral traditions of the Catholic Church so we have a number of sources of those you have papal bulls
you have papal encyclicals and you have the decrees of the councils of the church such as the council of Trent that
started the counterreformation uh Vatican 2 is also um a source of of
authoritative tradition in the church today and when you add the the Bible to
the traditions of the church the councils of the church and the papable bulls and the encyclicals when you merge
those together you get something known as canon law and that’s the law of the church and then when you have Islam you
have the underlying sacred text as they view it is the Quran uh the oral traditions we call today say the hadith
the hadith are the sayings of the prophet of Islam and the the hadith um
uh they are collected in books and uh some books are called al-Sahi which
means they are reliable they’re like gold standard there’s about five books of those um al-Bukari is the most famous
of those um but there are tens of thousands of hadiths of sayings attributed to to Muhammad and they they
have people study this for their entire life they look at who passed on the tradition in each generation and was
that person considered reliable and based on the reliability of the tradants tradants are people who pass on
tradition depending on how reliable the chain of tradences that means you determine how reliable that hadith is of
Muhammad and so when you add the Hadith and the Quran together that is the that the Quran is the text the hadith or the
oral traditions you end up with something that combines everything which is known as the Sharia law so the Sharia
law and canon law and the Talmud are kind of parallel concepts within Islam
Catholicism and Judaism are you following me on this so far and in Adventism we’re not that much different
okay we have the underlying text is the Bible the oral community traditions are
the writings of the spirit of prophecy and when you combine those together you get the church manual okay so we’re not
that far different okay when the structure you have a sacred text you have some oral traditions which are
believed to be inspired and then you merge those together into a document like how’s this going to work and that’s
known as a church manual the Talmud the Sharia law or canon law so in all of
these faiths the point I’m making here is that in Judaism in Catholicism and and in Islam um the oral traditions are
really important that you cannot have you cannot have modern a Sunni Islam um wi
without the the hadith of of the prophet of Islam Muhammad uh so uh the the the crown prince of Saudi Arabia three or
four years ago did an interview and in that interview he said basically said we know that most of the hadith are not
true and the interviewer almost had a heart attack i mean literally it was he was terrified of what he was hearing and
crown the crown prince um he said most of the hadith are not true we need to
remove anything that was not directly connected with the Quran and we should just have the Quran and if you take away
the hadith you you eliminate the Sharia law and 85% of Muslims live under Sunni
Islam which is Sunna is the way of way of Muhammad as expressed in his hadiths so you take away the hadiths you don’t
know what the way of Muhammad is sunni Islam just evaporates in front of you and this has caused a uh like a an
internal crisis within Islam in the last three to four years and that’s a side issue and the crown prince did that
because he wants to diminish the power of the clerics in Saudi Arabia as he embarks on a big modernization program
there but anyway so what we have here is that we see that traditions the oral traditions of the Jews are essential if
you’re going to get to the Talmud and the traditions of the Catholic Church are important if you’re going to get to canon law and the Hadith are essentially
if you’re going to get to the Sunni the Sharia and the spirit of prophecy is essentially if you’re going to get to the church manual so in all of these
four faiths we’re just mentioning here oral traditions are really important
they’re a big deal and so um when we say you know solos scriptorera
um even as Adventists we need to be very careful about what we say with that uh because um a lot of what we do a lot of
the practice of our faith is not so much driven by what the Bible says as what the spirit of prophecy says let’s be
honest about it and so um that’s not bad it’s just just a reality and so um uh
what I want to focus on today is the bits in red on the screen and that’s the oral Torah um because that’s what
relates to the time in which Jesus lived back then okay so the the Jewish word
for tradition or that so the Greek word for tradition is paradosis um it’s
Strongs number 3862 it means a tradition uh that which has been passed on or an ordinance from
the past and uh in the time of Christ um the Jews believed and even to this day
actually with the oral Torah and the Talmud the Jews believe that when God gave Moses the written Torah on Mount Si
it wasn’t just the ten commandments but it was the Torah itself they believe that God gave that to Moses that God
also gave to Moses the authoritative interpretation of how you apply the Old
Testament or the book the pentetuk the books of Moses and that became known as the oral Torah
all the traditions of the Jews and the Jews believed that with every generation there was going to be a conservative the
conservative side of interpretation and a liberal stream of interpretation like we have today in our church in 21st
century in America and so you have Moses who had the original authoritative oral
interpretation and that interpretation comes down through the centuries and eventually that’s manifest in the time
of Christ and so um in the time of Christ in the first century AD Um there was the conservative stream and
they were championed by a very famous rabbi called Shamayi and there was a very liberal stream and they were
championed by a name a rabbi called Hillel and interestingly most of modern-day um um reformed Judaism
follows the Beth Hillel the house of Hel they follow his interpretive stream of the Torah so this isn’t something that’s
lost in the dimmiss of history reformed Jewish congregations today will follow the house of Hell rather than the house
of Shamayim and so much of what we find in the Gospels the debates between Jews
Jesus and the religious liberties of the Jews religious liberties have to do with these rabbitic debates that were going
on at the time and they’re asking Jesus to comment on what does he think about
these rabbitic debates and a classic example of that is found in this passage here Matthew 19 and:e3 where it says
some Pharisees came to him that is to Jesus and to test him they asked is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for
any cause now they weren’t just asking a random question to Jesus this was a
matter of intense debate among the rabbis and the there were various
positions on this um but the the house of Shamai they were the um conservatives
they taught that divorce was only permissible in case of your spouse committing
adultery that was the conservative side of the equation the liberals the house of hell said that a man can divorce his
wife for basically any reason whatsoever and he just writes her a stiff divorce and off she goes and she can’t question
that uh you know if she burns the proverbial toast she is toast
i mean proverbally speaking you understand so the the the underlying text that they
were debating was this text here Deuteronomy 24:1 i’m just giving you an example of
these debates among the Jews here in their traditions it says “Suppose a man enters into marriage in with a woman but
she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her and so he writes a certificate of divorce puts
it in her hand and sends her out of his house she then leaves his house and so this the rabbis debated
what did Moses mean by the bit in red something objectionable about her you
know she chatters too much she snores too much she walks too fast to the
market she wastes too money too much money at the market we’re always arguing with one another um you know people had
their own understandings of whatever that phrase something objectionable meant when Moses wrote this in
Deuteronomy 24 and verse one and so um the rabbis would debate this and the
oral tradition on the conservative side said something objectionable only means adultery and the house of Hel the
liberals they said no something objectionable means literally anything and so in the time of Christ um the the
liberal divorce was more co more popular than the conservative understanding of
divorce and as a result men were divorcing their ri wives for pretty much any reason that you displease me today
you know addios you know goodbye you’re no longer my my wife and this was leading to problems in marriage in first
century Judaism and so we find an example of this in Matthew 1 and verse
19 where Joseph he discovers that Mary is pregnant and um he doesn’t know he
doesn’t know that this is from the Holy Spirit yet and so before the Holy Spirit
appear appears to him um Matthew 1:19 says her husband Joseph being a
righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace planned to dismiss her quietly now what this text
here is Moses Joseph um Mary comes along to him and says “Joseph,” she says “I’m
pregnant.” And he says “How can this be we’re not yet married we’re just betrothed we’re just kind of like a semi halfway house to being
married.” And um he knows that they haven’t been married everybody knows
they’re not married yet it’s going to be clear to everybody that Mary has committed adultery or she’s been fornicating with somebody and Mo Joseph
has a choice to make he can either call off the marriage from a conservative perspective which is he’s saying to the
community I had nothing to do with this child mary’s been sleeping around she’s an immoral woman um and so I’m I’m
pulling out of this marriage before it actually happens and she’s going to have to raise that child as as an
illegitimate child born out of wedlock and she’s going to be viewed as a shameful woman for the rest of her life
that would be the effect of the conservative understanding of of divorce on the other hand Mo Joseph being a
righteous man he looks at Mary and he and maybe he still loves her who knows
but let’s presume he does he doesn’t want her exposed to public disgrace everybody will know that she’s pregnant
they’re going to see the baby growing there and everybody’s going to be gossiping in the market and around the well but Joseph is going to have a
liberal understanding of divorce and say “I’m just going to quietly put you aside i’m not going to make a big song and dance about this people are going to say
what they’re going to say but I’m not going to nail your name to the to the town um to the to the pillars in town
and say this girl committed adultery or committed fornication i’m just going to put you quietly away and officially
nobody knows why we separated and he’s doing this because he wants to be merciful to Mary and so Joseph is
following the the house of Hillel here rather than the house of Shamayi so when we think of conservative good liberal
bad that’s not always the case you see in the New Testament some stories Jesus comes down on the on the more
conservative side of things and sometimes he doesn’t and so Jesus has his own way of thinking through these
problems but the point is we’re dealing here with the traditions of the Jews and the house of hell and the house of
Shamay uh the conservatives and the liberals they were kind of arguing about
um the the the interpretation of the uh the Torah the law of Moses so for
instance um well on the question of whether it was permissible to tell a lie or not and whether you could say a bride
was ugly or not hell argued that every bride is beautiful if only for the wedding day but Shamay argued that you
cannot tell an ugly bride that she is beautiful that would be a lie and so they had these discussions back and
forth and in this case here in Matthew 19 Jesus upheld the conservative view of
marriage um even though the fact that the liberal view of marriage was the most common in his time and Matthew
chapter 5 the sermon on the mount is an exposition of the Torah of the law of
law of Moses uh and so what’s interesting about sorry the
law of the sermon on the mount is if you read the Talmud today uh there are
multiple volumes in the Talmud there’s there’s trackcts on on cleanliness and how to keep the Sabbath on a marriage
and so forth You go to any of those tracts and there is a question you know is it permissible to light a candle
during the Sabbath hours and then you get an extended discussion rabbi Ben Ysef says no because it’s work he’s a
very arch conservative rabbi Ben Yehuda says yes because we all need light to
live by rabbi Ben Ysef says um yes but only if you only work walk three feet in
order to get to the candle and another rabbi says “Yes you can light a candle but only if you’re lighting it from
another candle that’s already lit you’re not allowed to strike a flint lock.” And another rabbi says “Yes you can light a
candle if it is necessary to heal somebody or do them good but not if it’s just for your own personal pleasure and
enjoyment.” And if you look through the the Talmud um what would happen by the time of Christ is if somebody asked a
rabbi is it permissible to switch my lights on in the morning you would get a stream of rabbi so and so says this
rabbi so and so says that rabbi so and so says this rabbi so and so says this and once the rabbi has demonstrated they
know all the major positions out there then they try and come to their own conclusion and so uh when Jesus speaks
um in in the sermon on the mount Jesus doesn’t do that he says ‘You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not commit
adultery.’ Okay he’s referring to the seventh commandment here but then Jesus says “But I say unto you.” And the point
about this is that Jesus nowhere quotes the rabbis of the past he doesn’t go he doesn’t get into
the disputes about the oral Torah he doesn’t say “Well this is what the traditions of the Jews say and therefore this is what I say.” Jesus speaks as the
giver of the law and he says “Well you’ve heard it said “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I’m now telling you as the giver of the law this is what
I meant by it and so Jesus doesn’t delve into the traditions of the Jews and so
this these were some of the the debates that were going on at the time of Christ so let’s look at some of the futile
traditions of men that we find in the New Testament and a good example is found in in Mark chapter 7 and verse 8
and uh Jesus explicitly condemned the Jews of his time because they were
setting aside the commandments of God in favor of the the traditions of men that
is the oral traditions of the Jews and in this case here what was happening was that um the um uh the fifth commandment
says honor thy father and thy mother yes and uh in those days there was almost no
social security and it was the responsibility of children to provide for their parents in old age and what
was happening was um under the traditions of the Jews if you devoted something to the service of the temple
it was known as corban and then you were not you were you could only use that for your personal needs but you couldn’t use
it for the needs of anybody else so if you didn’t once look after your parents in old age you would say everything I
have is corban it is devoted to the service of the temple which is like putting it in in a revocable trust these
days and only you only you were allowed to benefit from those assets and the
temple didn’t benefit only you could benefit from those assets and then you weren’t then you could say to your parents I’d love to help you but
everything is now devoted to the temple so I no longer am able to help you and in that way um the Jews would set aside
the commandments of God for the traditions of men and so these were some of the futile traditions and Jesus
explicitly condemned the Jews for this practice in fact he goes on to say it here he said this is Mark
7:9-13 then he said to them you have a fine way of rejecting the commandments of God in order to keep your tradition
for Moses said honor your father and your mother and whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die but you
say that if anyone tells father or mother whatever support you might have had from me is korban that is an
offering to God then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother thus making void the word of God
through your tradition that you have handed on and you do many things like this that word for tradition there is
paradosis we mentioned that earlier it’s a word that appears regularly throughout the New Testament that which is being
handed on so Jesus says that when there are the commandments of God and there are the traditions of men the traditions
of the Jews he says that when there is a clash between the two of them you elevate the traditions of men over the
commandments of God and you do many many things you do this in many areas of life and Jesus condemns the Jews because they
elevate the traditions of the Jews over the commandments of God so these are traditions that are not
good traditions in the eyes of Christ so there are innocent traditions like July the 4th and Thanksgiving okay and there
are some traditions and we we don’t have any problem with those kind of thing traditions um going out visiting with
your father and eating a bag of fish and chips and salt and vinegar and sweet and condensed cream that’s a great tradition
from my childhood okay i treasure those memories they were sweet in more ways than one uh then there are traditions
such as this where um a religious community may have a tradition that they practice but it actually overrides the
commandments of God and we need to ask ourselves in our own lives do we have any traditions in
our in my life in my family in my home um that overrides the commandments of
God as an example you might say um in our tradition I always take um this
isn’t my personal one but this is a hypothetical example you might have a tradition that says um I always take my
wife out for a meal on her birthday um so that she doesn’t have to cook on that day fair enough and what happens when
her birthday falls on a Sabbath what are you going to do well I’ll take my wife out i want to honor her birthday and in
so doing you break the fourth commandment okay that’s a good example of the simple example of how we may face
this dilemma today within our own lives and so um Jesus condemned the traditions when
they make void the commandments of God now at the time that Jesus was
saying this there was a young man called Saul and Saul was of the tribe of
Benjamin and he was proud of his Jewish heritage he was proud of the fact he was of the tribe of Benjamin he was named
after King Saul the most prominent of all the Benjaminites in Israelite history and he was also a Roman citizen
and he was a student in Jerusalem of a man called Galiel we come across him in Acts 22 in verse three and he is one of
the most famous scholars of first century Judaism now Galiel was the
grandson of Hillel that liberal rabbi we’ve been speaking about and Galiel was
generally on the liberal side of interpretation and he was one of the most if not the most famous teacher at
the time of Christ at the time of the apostle Paul in Jerusalem and Paul was one of his students but as so often
happens even though Galial was on the liberal side his student Paul as a young
man was not on the liberal side when it came to the interpretation of Jewish traditions he was he wasn’t just on the
conservative side he was on the zealous side for the for the for the traditions he was willing to kill for those
traditions he wasn’t just you know live and let live he wasn’t of in the line of Hel or
Galiel even though he studied with Galiel he was actually he was actually an arch conservative and he was willing
to kill for those um traditions of the Jews so even though Paul advanced beyond
many others in Judaism his own age this is what he says here he says when this is uh his autobiographical discussion of
his life in Galatians 1 and the first half of Galatians 2 Paul says this “You have heard no doubt of my earlier life
in Judaism i was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to
destroy it i advanced in Judaism beyond many young pe among my own people of the
same age why because I was far more zealous for the traditions of my
ancestors.” And that word tradition is paradosis that’s what Jesus just been condemning in Mark 7 that you elevate
the traditions of men over the commandments of God and when when he uses the word zealous there was a
political party in Palestine at that time they were known as the Zealots and the Zealots they were so opposed to
Roman rule that they would carry these car carved daggers with them they’d come up behind collaborators tax collectors
like Matthew Levi and they kind of slip it between the ribs and kill them in the streets there was a lot of that going on
back then and so when Paul says he was zealous for the traditions of my ancestors it means I was willing to kill
for those traditions so when Jesus is out there preaching that the the
traditions of the the traditions of the Jews are being placed above the commandments of God and Jesus condemns
the Jews for that there’s a young student in Jerusalem at that time called Paul who’s willing to kill for those
traditions so Jesus and Paul are on opposite ends of the spectrum on this question jesus condemns the traditions
of the Jews because they override the commandments of God paul is willing to kill for those traditions of the Jews if
you disagree with me so Saul and Jesus were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the question of the
traditions of the ancestors or as we today call them the traditions of the Jews but once Jesus interrupted Paul on
the road to Damascus and Saul or Paul becomes an apostle he was then able to critique the
religious ideas that he’d grown up with and he was able to critique in the light of the gospel um and the revelations he
received from Jesus he was able to critique his all his education at the feet of Galiel in Jerusalem and so this
is how Paul looks back on it he says “See to it that no one takes you captive
through philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition.” That’s the word paradosis there the word for
the traditions of the Jews according to the elemental spirits of the universe and not according to Christ and so when
Paul was writing this the church of Colos um uh that’s in the eastern Mediterranean there um there were many
many um philosophies the word philosophy um sopos means wisdom sophia means
wisdom it’s a feminine version um filo fileo means love it’s like you love your brother philadelphia means brotherly
love and so philosophy literally means the love of wisdom or human wisdom and so Paul says to the church of Colos
where they had Greek philosophy and they had they had things like like their different philosophical schools there
was cynicism we have cynicism today they had stoicism we have stoicism today they
had epicurionism let us eat and drink and be married for tomorrow we die that’s maybe the dominant philosophy in America these
days let’s eat and drink and get as much pleasure as possible meet your um uh do
everything on your bucket list then you can die okay and so um Paul is talking not just he’s talking about Jewish and
Greek philosophies here he says see that no one takes you captive through philosophy those are the philosophies of
of the Greek world which have shaped America and the Britain and the west in a profound way today uh we think based
on Greek philosophy today when we say that’s not logical it’s because we’re using Greek philosophy in our in we
don’t even think of it our brains are wired that way in the west so when we say something like classical logic all A
is A okay follow me on this all A is A all non A is B
therefore C equals B because C is not A therefore it
must be B yeah so all A is A all non A is B therefore C equals B classical
logic and so we think in these terms and when somebody speaks a politician says something or your spouse says something
or children say something to you you say that doesn’t make sense that’s not logical is because we are literally
thinking with a Greek philosophical mindset in the west and that’s had a huge impact on our Christian faith as
well and so Paul says here see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit according to
human tradition and according to the elemental spirits of the universe now you’re referring to a number of things
here in Greek philosophy and also the the Jews had a complex angelology they worshiping they believed they were they
were hierarchies of angels they were intercessors between them and God and then he says “And not according to
Christ.” And so Paul looks back on his early life and he realizes that he was
taken captive through empty deceit the traditions of the Jews as many of the people of Philos are being taken captive
by the empty philosophy of their time and as people even today in America our
children are taken captive by the philosophy of despair that permeates Western society
we have a philosophy of despair in our country right now nothing ultimately matters you came from the slime you
return to the slime there is no revealed morality do what you want to get a few moments of fleeting pleasure in this
dying world because one day it’s all going to implode anyway and so our our young people today inhabit a philosophy
of despair that’s been prevalent in the West since the 1960s and if you don’t believe me take a look at some of the
pop music and some of the lyrics that are being sung out there there’s a very famous song by Queen and the British
rock band when the lead singer discovered he had AIDS in the early 1980s he wrote a song called The Show
Must Go On very famous rock anthem it sung by tens of thousands of people in rock concerts and you you look at the
lyrics of that song here like “Does anybody know what we are living for does anybody want to keep on living?” and
words like that you know that’s just just just despair because the modern philosophy um does not lead you to God
it just leads you to nothingness so um Paul looks back on his life following the traditions of the Jews and he’s
referring to it as empty deceit and Peter also critiqued the traditions of
the Jews in 1 Peter 1:18 the same word appears there paradosis he says “For as
much as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver or gold from your vain
conversation received by tradition from your fathers.” And so Peter is referring
here to the fact that um that the the traditions of the fathers were basically
a vain conversation they weren’t going to get them weren’t going to lead them towards salvation it wasn’t there was a
conversation there was a lot of dialogue there was debate about the traditions of the Jews but ultimately this wasn’t
going to lead you anywhere and another version translates that verse this way it says “You know that you were ransomed
from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors.” It’s the same word um pataradutu which means having being
passed on by your fathers that’s what the word literally means and so um Peter
and Paul both look back on the traditions of the Jews and they say these are basically vain empty deceit
they don’t help you with salvation jesus has condemned the traditions of the Jews because they set the traditions of men
over the commandments of God and Jesus has no time for any tradition that overrides the commandments of God and so
Peter and Paul later in their lives having been raised in the synagogue with the traditions of the Jews both of them
later in life come to the point where they say “This was empty conceit this was a vain conversation this wasn’t
going anywhere.” And so there the the that which held Jewish society together
which was the discussions about the oral traditions um they’re basically saying that doesn’t mean anything so these are
the futile traditions of men so then we come to the positive traditions we find
in the scripture and uh we have I see the time is moving on here and I need to need to move on with this so we have
some positive traditions in scripture and the first of these we find is this passage here so not all tradition is bad
so so far we’ve seen that some traditions like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving are essentially neutral um
then we have some traditions that are futile that take you away from God but there are also some traditions that are
actually positive and this is one of those positive traditions it says “Now we command you beloved in the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the paradosis or the
tradition that they received from us.” And so uh in this passage here Paul is
speaking favorably about a tradition that the church of Thessalonica has received from the apostles in their
preaching and what is that favor that what is that positive tradition well it’s not maybe what you think it is this
is what it that positive tradition is it says for even when we were with you and that word for gar also means because so
this is an explanatory sentence here what was that positive tradition he says “Even when we were with you we gave you
this command anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” So that was the positive tradition that they’ve been
passed on this was a teaching of the apostles that if you don’t work you don’t
eat and that was uh the rest of the text essentially it gives some more explanation for that but this was a
positive tradition and so um some traditions are innocent some traditions take you away from God some traditions
override the commandments of God and are com and are com uh condemned by Jesus and some traditions are positive we find
in the New Testament this is one such tradition so we cannot go away from uh today thinking that all tradition is bad
no some traditions are good when something has been passed on from the apostles um uh from the apostolic
authority that is an explanation of how we are to put into practice the commandments of Jesus and his commands
um then we should follow that those are positive traditions but there always needs to be a thus sayaith the Lord behind what we do you know we can’t just
be I do this because my parents did it and they do it because their parents did it there needs to be a thus sayaith the lord behind how we practice our faith
and so this is another positive tradition that we find in the uh New Testament uh so this is the Paul
speaking to the church of Thessalonica once again and he says for this purpose
he called you through our proclamation of the good news the gospel so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus
Christ so then brothers and sisters stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that were taught by us either
by word of mouth or by our letter and in this passage here Paul parallels the
gospel with the tradition or the traditions and so in in this passage here we see that the gospel when it is
something that is passed on from generation to generation the gospel is literally a tradition in the sense that
the word tradition means that which has been passed on and so there there’s the apostolic teaching those are traditions
that we pass on from generation to generation and a really good or very important tradition that is passed on is
the truth of the everlasting gospel and so not all tradition is bad and so uh
Paul goes on to say elsewhere 1 Corinthians 15:es 3-5 he says for I
handed on to you of first importance and that word handed onto you is the verbal
form of paradosis it’s a it’s a paradoker means I have handed onto you or or I have traditioned onto you so
this is what Paul handed onto the church of Corenth he says I handed on to you of
first importance what I in turn had received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that
he was buried that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to see
first or Peter and then to the 12 and so we have traditions that are neutral like
fourth of July we have traditions that go against the commandments of God and Jesus condemns those those are the oral
traditions of the Jews uh we may have oral traditions in Adventism today that go against the commandments of God we
have to think about those things then you have some traditions that the apostles have passed on but are good
like they that do not work should not eat but then Paul talks about the tradition of first importance that which
I have passed on to you is the story that Christ died uh for our sins that he
was buried and he was raised again in accordance with the scriptures and that’s the tradition of first importance
that po that Paul wants us to receive not just in the church of Corinth but in the church today and you notice what he
bases the the authority of the gospel on he says twice he says in that passage
there he says in accordance with the scriptures for Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures then
he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures so Paul is basing the authority of the gospel
not on the traditions of the Jews but on the word of God itself therefore he has
a thus sayaith the Lord for this tradition that he’s passing on this tradition that which he is passing on is
that Christ died for our sins that he was buried and that he rose again um in accordance with the scriptures and so
this is the the tradition of first importance that Paul has passed on christ crucified Christ risen Christ
exalted and in 1 Corinthians 15 Christ returning again and so I want us to
think about today um what tradition do we pass on in our
lives and the tradition of supreme importance according to Paul is
Christ buried Christ died Christ buried Christ raised and Christ exalted but
there is one other tradition that trumps them all pardon the phrase today there’s
one tradition that is above all other traditions in the New Testament and it’s found in this verse here this is not an
apostolic tradition from the apostles uh it’s actually what Jesus did himself the
best tradition of all is here and you say “Pastor what are you showing me upon the
screen?” Well this is an interlinear and I would encourage you for your next
birthday or for Christmas get yourself a good interlinear and the interlinear has you see in the
red you have the literal word for word translation and in the black just above
the red you have the you have the Greek word there and then just underneath it
in the blue you have the pausing of the word is an adjective is a preposition is it a verb first person singular
decodactive and so forth so you can parse it if you’re interested in pausing and above it you have some more data you
have the the strongs concordance numbers now an interlinear helps you get to the heart of the matter
and so when you’re looking at a verse uh let’s say your favorite verse in the Bible look at it in an
interlinear it will tell you an awful lot more depth about that word having an interlinear if you don’t read New
Testament Greek it’s like watching a movie in black and white that’s in English then you see the same movie in
glorious technol that’s when you start to understand the Greek that goes with it it’s the same story but now there’s a
whole lot more nuance and shade of meaning so I’d encourage you to get yourself an interior they’re not that expensive you can look you can they’re
online freely available um I use an interlinear with every sermon preparation they’re very helpful and I
want you to notice the last line it says um and the second line down that that
which then now I live in the flesh or the life I now live in the flesh uh through faith i live that I live that
life um from the son of God who the English version says who loved me and handed himself over for me and there in
the Greek it’s the the one having loved me and having given himself up for me
and that word having given himself up paradontos is a past participle of the
verb paradosis that’s the noun this is the verb and so this is the tradition
above all other traditions it’s the same word paradosis that which has been handed over and what this verse tells us
is this is that Jesus loves me and because Jesus loves me he handed himself
over for me he handed himself over for me and for you that is the most important thing
that was ever handed over jesus was handed over by the soldiers to Caiaphas
and Annus in John 18 Jesus was handed over it’s the same verb from the chief from
the chief priest to Pilate and Pilate knew that it was out of envy that they had handed him over and then Pilate
handed Jesus over to Herod and Herod sent him back to Jesus and Herod and to
Pilate Herod handed Jesus back to Pilate and Pilate handed Jesus over to be
scourged and then when he comes back and he’s mocked Jesus and says “Et homo behold the man.” Then Pilate hands Jesus
over to be crucified and in all the way through John 18 and 19 you get the idea that these things are just happening to
Jesus but this passage here it tells me that Jesus wasn’t an innocent victim in this
it wasn’t just an innocent victim he handed himself over it was an active
choice on his part because he loved me therefore he handed himself over for me
he He He wasn’t just caught up in events beyond his control he chose to be handed over in order that I might not be handed
over he chose to be handed over that he might die the death that I deserve in
order that that I might have his everlasting life this is the most important tradition of all we find in
the scriptures and and in there’s there’s one other passage where this phrase appears and I was as I was I
discovered this the other day and I was looking at this I thought man I’ I recognize that passage and
um uh Ephesians chapter 5 25 says husbands love your wives just as Christ
loved the church and gave himself up for her and so Christ loves the church and
therefore he handed himself over for the church and Christ loves me says Galatians 2:20 and therefore he handed
himself over for me and that is the most important handing over or tradition that we find anywhere in the scriptures so I
want to ask today in conclusion what are we handing over in our lives are we handing on nice traditions
to our children like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July those are nice traditions they don’t seem to hurt anybody they
provide a nice structure for this annual cycle of of holidays and so forth um
those traditions don’t harm anybody there are some traditions like the traditions of the Jews that we may hand
over that actually may take people away from God it’s our wedding anniversary today honey let’s go for a meal well
actually it’s the Sabbath so what are you going to do as a simple trite example but we could list some more if
we were to think about it are we going to allow the traditions of men to override the commandments of God and the
answer really is no then you have some traditions that are positive in the New
Testament uh that’s that those are the apostolic teachings and those are the those are the teachings that the
apostles have passed on and then you have the the teaching that Jesus died he
was buried he rose again and he’s coming again that’s one of the most important traditions or teachings have been passed
on in 1 Corinthians 15 but the tradition above all other traditions is this that
Jesus loves me and Jesus handed himself over for me and that is the tradition that we
should all be passing on so I want to encourage you today to
pass on that tradition above all other traditions if people know you for one thing uh may
they know that you that uh Jesus loves you and he handed himself over for you
and if you’re going to pass anything on to your children or your grandchildren or to your community or to your workplace let it be known that Jesus
died he rose and he’s coming again that’s a worthwhile tradition to pass on
and also let them see that as Jesus passed handed himself over for us so we
hand ourselves over in service to a dying world let people see Jesus in us so as
Adventists we say “Oh we don’t like tradition we just follow solos scriptorera.” We understand where that comes from the clash between the the
traditions of the medieval Catholic Church and and the scripture but not all tradition is bad and there is one
tradition that is worth passing on to everybody else i once asked a pastor he
spent 40 years studying the doctrine of the atonement like what happened at Calvary because there’s multiple theories and if you ask a different
theologian you get a different answer and I said at the end of 40 years of study what is your conclusion of the
matter he says Conrad it comes down to this he says Jesus loves me this I know
for the Bible tells me so it’s the heart of the matter and once I appreciate and
know and receive the love of Christ into my life then I can pass on as a beautiful tradition to other people
around me the good news that Jesus loves me he handed himself over for me he handed himself over for you he died he
rose and he’s coming again not just for me but he’s coming again for you may people see that tradition in our lives
from this day forward let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer heavenly Father uh we thank you that Jesus loves
us and handed himself over for us we thank you Father that Jesus didn’t just
talk the talk but he walked the walk we thank you Father that he didn’t leave us as a planet in rebellion a speck in this
universe and go and focus on the unfallen worlds but our father I thank you that you sent your son into the
world not to condemn the world but that through him the world might be saved so Lord in our lives from this day forward
we humbly ask that people will know through our lives through our ministry through our words through the way we
live through the way our families interact with one another that we serve a savior who loved us who died was
buried was rose again is coming again and he did all this out of love for each
one of us lord may people see and experience the love of Jesus in our homes in our hearts in our marriages
from this day forward in Jesus holy name we pray amen