He Set the Commandment and the Tradition Side by Side and Named Which Was Which

He was nineteen the first time he asked, and he did not ask it to be difficult.

He asked because he genuinely wanted to know. There was a rule in the house, a real one, one that had shaped a hundred evenings, and he had gone looking for it in Scripture the way he had been taught to go looking for everything, and he could not find it.

So he asked his uncle. Not in front of anybody. In the driveway, after, with the engine already running.

And the answer he got was six words long. This is how we do it.

He has thought about those six words more than about almost anything else anybody in that family ever said to him. Not because they were cruel. They were not cruel. They were said kindly, by a man who loves him and who has never once let him down when it mattered.

They were said the way you say a thing that has never needed a reason, because nobody in living memory has asked for one.

And here is the part he could not get past. He believed the rule was probably good. He still does. What unsettled him was that when he lined it up beside something God had actually said, out loud, in the text, the rule was the one that had never been questioned, and the commandment was the one everybody was comfortable arguing about.

That is the thing that will not leave him alone. Not the rule. The rank.

He was asked about a tradition and He answered about rank

The scene in Mark 7 opens with a complaint. Some of the men from Jerusalem have come up and noticed that the disciples are not keeping a particular washing practice, and they want to know why.

It is worth saying plainly what that practice was, because we get it wrong. It was not superstition and it was not hygiene theater. It was a serious, well intended, centuries old attempt to take the holiness of the temple and carry it into an ordinary kitchen, so that a man eating bread at his own table would handle it the way a priest handled bread in the holy place. Somebody thought that up out of love for God.

And Jesus does not answer by ruling on the washing at all. Quoting the King James Version:

For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. (Mark 7:8)

Read what He actually did there. He put two things on the table, named each one, and refused to let them be the same size. The commandment of God. The tradition of men. Both real. Both present in that house. Only one of them binding.

You are allowed to know which is which, and the knowing was never withheld from you. Mark 7 has Him doing the separating out loud, in public, for people who had lost the ability to see the seam, and the Holy Spirit is given, John 16:13 says, precisely to guide into truth rather than to leave a person guessing.

The next sentence is the one that costs something

He does not stop at naming the two. He says what happens when the smaller one is allowed to grow.

Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition... Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered. (Mark 7:9,13)

Of none effect. Not deleted. Not argued against. Not denied by anybody. Still on the page, still read out, still believed, and functionally switched off in that house by something that had been laid on top of it.

That is a very specific kind of damage and it is worth being precise about it, because it is not the damage a young person usually imagines. Nobody in Mark 7 has stopped believing the fifth commandment. They would have died for it. What has happened is that a second thing has been placed beside it, and the second thing is the one that decides how Tuesday goes.

You have not lost the commandment, and nothing in your house has the standing to switch it off. It is written in Mark 7:13 that a tradition can make the word of none effect, which means the word itself is still there underneath, and the Spirit of God is named in 2 Corinthians 3:6 as the one who makes the letter alive rather than dead.

Isaiah said it seven hundred years earlier and Jesus quoted him

This is not a new complaint and it is not a modern one, and that matters more than it looks.

Jesus does not invent the charge. He reaches back and quotes a prophet, which means the thing He is describing was already old, already common, and already understood well enough to be written down.

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. (Matthew 15:8-9, quoting Isaiah 29:13)

Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Not inventing them. Teaching them. Passing them on with a straight face, in good conscience, as though they came down the mountain.

I want to be careful here, and I am going to say why. The people Isaiah is describing are not frauds. Their mouths are drawing near. They are showing up. If you are looking for a verse that lets you write off the people who raised you, this is not it, and I have never once found one.

You were not handed a lie by people who did not love you, and both of those things stay true at the same time. Isaiah 29 says the honor was real and the heart had drifted, which is a diagnosis and not an accusation, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a clever reader, who is able to divide that finely.

The Bereans checked, and Scripture calls them the noble ones

Here is the sentence I wish somebody had shown me at nineteen in that driveway.

Paul preaches in Berea. The people there hear him, an apostle, a man with more authority than anybody in your family or mine has ever had, and then they go home and check him against the text.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. (Acts 17:11)

More noble. That is Luke's word for people who fact checked an apostle. Not more difficult. Not less submitted. More noble.

And notice the order in the verse, because it is the whole thing. They received the word with all readiness of mind, and then they searched. The receiving came first. They were not looking for a way out. They were looking because they had decided to take it seriously, and taking a thing seriously is what makes you want to know exactly what it says.

You have permission to check, and Scripture praises the people who used it. Acts 17:11 is not a loophole somebody found, it is written into the record as a compliment, and the Spirit is described in 1 John 2:27 as an anointing that teaches, which is a thing you were given rather than something you have to be granted by a room.

The rules that look wise are the ones to watch

Paul writes something to the Colossians that took me years to hear properly, because it says the opposite of what I expected.

He is talking about a set of practices, and he does not say they are silly. He says they look good.

Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. (Colossians 2:23)

A shew of wisdom. They look like wisdom. They look like humility. They look like a person taking God more seriously than the next person, which is exactly why they are so hard to question, because questioning them looks from the outside like wanting less of God.

That is the trap, and it is worth naming out loud so it stops working invisibly. A rule that looks like extra devotion cannot be examined without the examiner looking less devoted. So nobody examines it, and it stays, and it grows, and after forty years nobody can remember which shelf it came off.

You are not asking for less of God when you ask which rule is His. Colossians 2 warns about practices that carry a show of wisdom and no power against the actual problem, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things of God, 1 Corinthians 2:10, who makes a person able to want the real thing rather than the appearance of it.