Neglecting and Transgressing

In Matthew 15:3 Jesus asks, "And why do you yourselves transgress the commandments of God for the sake of your tradition?" In Mark 7:8 Jesus says, "Neglecting the commandments of God you hold to the traditions of men." In one we have "transgressing"(parabaino=going too far) and the other we have "neglecting" (aphiemi=to send away, even forgive). Tradition is pitted against commandments. Commandments are from God and traditions are from men. Traditions are not wrong per se. But, when they compete with the commands of God and cancel them out, taking precedent over these commands they are dangerous. This is a hard teaching. The application of this is very tricky. The Jewish leaders had constructed a very elaborate system and the average person could no longer tell the difference between a command and a tradition. The leaders often were not about trying to find ways to be more faithful to the commands of God by considering the spirit of the command, but to find ways to avoid having to obey the command. Commandments can be costly. They found ways to give God a cheap substitute for the real thing. They knew God wanted a pure heart. Perhaps he would settle for clean hands.

John uses parabaino in 2 John 9, "Anyone who goes too far, and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God; the one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son." Boy, has this passage been abused! Almost anything we disagree with gets tagged as "going too far." But, look at the context. Some were saying Jesus did not come in the flesh. They may have had some good motives for this. We don't want to think of Jesus having to live in the same sin-prone fleshly body as we do. But, this teaching not only went too far, it also cancelled out a very important and essential truth, i.e. that Jesus had to come in the flesh, die in the flesh, and be raised in the flesh in order to be our eternal redemption. Here a tradition cancelled out an essential teaching of God. We must not play games with such texts to justify our condemnation of a "tradition" that is harmless and does not invalidate a command of God.

Much more serious are traditions that we see today constructed to justify sin. The command of God is not to commit fornication, i.e. sex outside of marriage. The tradition that is common today is that it is alright to have sex outside of marriage if 1) you love the person; 2) you intend to be married one day. When we do this we go too far. We neglect and transgress the command of God for the sake of our human tradition. TV church is another one of those "traditions" that is becoming common. It cancels out Real church. Or, promising my kids I will take them to Disney World on Sunday cancelling out meeting with the saints. I fear we are creating a whole new set of traditions to avoid what God actually tells us to do. Think about it.