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What's that? Alright. Let's go to the Lord. Before you thank the Lord for today, thank the Lord for your goodness, your mercy, your grace, which is renewed to us every morning. We ask, Father, that you would enlighten us now with your word of instruction, with teaching that is pure from your Word, that we would not fall into the errors which are so prone to the world and to wrong, which is to mix your pure Word with things other than.
That which you have created. We pray, Father, that you.
Grant us protection from unbiblical practices. We ask that you help us, Father, in our endeavor to worship you purely as you have desired. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So, one of the things that we're going to talk about today is we're going to look at some of the struggle, the tension that exists between Scripture and church tradition.
Let me ask you, because, you know, oftentimes when we look at Catholicism, we figure out that and say, look at all those unbiblical practices. But how many unbiblical practices do we have? Let's examine ourselves before we point the finger at Rome.
What are some things that you, maybe in your past church experience, maybe even in your present church experience, that you have felt maybe, I'm not sure there's a direct line between what we practice or what we've done in the Bible.
I want you to think critically here for a second. Let's not look just at Rome. Let's look at ourselves for a moment.
The prayer that they do, you know, they raise their hands and they go and they go through the prayer about asking Jesus into your heart and say, congratulations, today you're in the family of God. Yeah.
And it's a false security because they think, I've done it, I've got it now. You know, you've been.
Converted, they're saying. So you're talking about the sinner's prayer. Yes. So there are many in Evangelicalism today that hold to this kind of false security when the preacher says, come on, Jesus in your heart, all you've got to do is raise your hand.
And I used to do, I was a son of Baptists for a long time, so in our first church we did altar calls often. And I was always kind of uncomfortable with it because I felt the same tension. I was always trying to frame the altar call really like, okay, who wants to come and die today, right?
The call's not for you to come and simply raise your hand and give it to Jesus, but this is a call to die as a self. So who's actually interested in that? So I kind of pretext it a little bit more strongly.
But you're right, you know, there's no rarer descriptors where Paul says right now, anyone here who wants to give their heart to Jesus, raise your hand. You don't see that necessarily. Scripture's a great example.
Anyone else have something that they're experiencing? Yeah. I'm sure it's a great workspace. You know, there's some preachers that, you know, unless you speak in tongues, you're not saved. That's right.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, do all speak in tongues? It's a rhetorical question. Obviously not. Do all prophesy? Obviously not. So clearly not all the early Christians spoke in tongues.
We are sitting in not a sanctuary, but an auditorium. And I don't know if it's petty, but I always, you know, they say, don't run in church, or don't run in the sanctuary. And I go, no, it's.
An auditorium. Have fun. Yeah. I guess we were really pivotal that we'd be meeting in someone's living room right now, because all the early churches met in homes predominantly. Although they also met in the public square and in the synagogues, Scripture says.
So there were three meeting places, synagogue, when they were allowed in, public square, and then people's homes. One cuppers. What's that? One cuppers. One cuppers. Okay. Explain that for people who don't know.
In communion, Christ handed around one cup. And so, that's what they do in their services. I don't know. Catholic? No. It's like in the Roman Catholic church as well, right? They have one cup.
Well, the Roman Catholics do that, but many churches do that.
They take that text very seriously. We all drink of the same cup. Okay, so the financial prosperity gospel. There is a biblical principle there, right? The Bible does say, he sows fairly, he reaps fairly.
He sows, you know, there is a principle there, but I think that all the prosperity creatures, they go before. So, anyone else? Anything from your experience? Yeah.
I'm not in any way an expert, but I'm starting to see specifically in Reformed circles, theonomy, and you know. What's theonomy? Explain that for people who don't know. My understanding is that the government should be like having the Christian faith be like the government rule of faith.
That our influence should.
Be that all of our laws should really be biblically based. You know, essentially. Essentially, it's full of theocracy, right? Yeah. Theonomy is a kind of male theocracy where all of the government is subject to a biblical principle, which on the outside doesn't sound so bad.
But, yeah, you're right. I would contend that a full theonomist worldview does not conform to Scripture, so I would agree with that. And it is because we're popular in Christian circles. Primarily, you know, guys like Jeff Durbin and things like that.
Post-millennialism, huge, huge eschatology thing. Yeah, I love eschatology. You guys know that already. And I get passionate about eschatology. I have a certain time when I think about eschatology because it's the hope that you have.
It's to see Jesus in the view of Jesus. I get, you know, I always get choked up when I think about seeing Jesus. Anyone else have anything in their experience that maybe their traditions, teachings, practices that have not always conformed with your understanding of the Bible?
I'll give you one for myself. Our avoidance of using the divine name to me is very unbiblical. And what I mean by that, most churches, as a matter of fact, if you go to our hymnal, I love our hymnal. The reason I love our hymnal is I almost, you know, lots of songs use the name Jehovah in our hymnal.
If you go to a modern, I think the modern review OPC hymnal book, like with the song Guide Me Without a Great Jehovah, they changed the name from Guide Me Without a Great Jehovah to Guide Me Without a Great Redeemer.
They took the name out. And this has been a practice over the last hundred years in particular in Anglo-Saxon churches and circles of removing the divine name Jehovah Yahweh and replacing it with other titles such as Redeemer, Lord, etc.
Now that has a long, rich tradition in our English heritage, starting with the Geneva and King James Bible. But the Geneva and King James Bible does have the Tetragrammaton translated as Jehovah by the Fathership signs, if I'm not mistaken.
But I think that's an unbiblical practice. And I think when translators do not translate the name properly, either as proper names, such as Jehovah or Yahweh, I think they're doing a disservice and defaulting the tradition of man.
That's my personal prediction. Lord is not a name. God has revealed His name to us in Scripture, Exodus 3. Moses asks, what's His name? He says, Jehovah, Yahweh, I am that I am. That's His name. And so when we do a disservice when we translate it as a title, similarly we wouldn't like it.
There's a practice in the Middle East for Muslim sensitivities where they do not translate the name Jesus as Jesus in some Arabic Bibles, but instead they translate it as teacher, rabbi. Do you think that's right?
Should we take the name Jesus out of the Scriptures and give them a title such as rabbi in order to corporate with the sensibilities of the people in the Middle East? They do the same thing. There's some Native American translations that do the same thing with the name of Jesus.
A major translation that was just done in one Native American language done actually by people that I know in Canada. They translated God is translated as the Great Spirit and Jesus is translated as the Great Teacher.
So whenever the name Jesus appears, it's not Jesus, it's the Great Teacher. Is that right? I don't think so. Neither should it be right that we do the same thing with the divine name Yahweh, Jehovah. There's a debate as to which would be the best term to use, but as long as you use one of them I'd be pretty happy.
A new modern translation of LSV, Leviticus 395, I think is a great translation that keeps the divine name Yahweh in the original text. So I'm very supportive, obviously, you guys know that translation in particular.
So I think that's an example of a biblical tradition that we have adopted in the secular circles. So the topic, the question I posed to you guys this morning was, what are some traditions, what are some things in our own experience as Christians in the Reform camp, maybe in other experiences, that have not always been reported to the Bible?
We're going to examine this struggle, this tension between Scripture and tradition. And I would suppose, and I would submit to you all, that we all have traditions. We all have things that are either extra-biblical or maybe even non-biblical in our faith or practice in the way that we do things.
Now, one of the reasons I'm really proud to be your pastor here is because I think this is a church where we really try to focus, we really try to do all that we can to do our best to do everything by the Scriptures.
Now, are we perfect in that endeavor? Most likely not. I'm sure there's some things that we're going to either, through time and study, we're going to see that we could do better. Or when we get to the sign of eternity, he's going to go, yeah, I love your effort, but you got this totally wrong.
And so we have to be humble and allow Scripture to dictate truth, dictate practice, and that's one of the reasons why we hold to what's called a regulative principle of worship. Anyone know what a regulative principle of worship means?
Yeah, I was going to mention that as one of the things. We, our worship is not informed by our methodology, but theology. So we look at Scripture and that drives how we worship. So one example I was going to give is, you know, the use of hymns as opposed to what even in Catholic churches as well as some evangelical churches using the popular use of more modern worship music.
So really sticking to and it's not just in the hymns, but also in how we conduct our worship services. You know, it's not a rock concert, you know. We're holding very dignified.
Yeah. Specifically, it's like we only do in corporate worship, we only do what the Scripture.
Explicitly prescribes. That's right. That's the prescriptive methodology of worship, right, where God has spoken, He has said, this is what you are to do, and we do exactly that. You know, Paul says this, and this is the overlooked Scripture, I think it's in 1 Corinthians 3.
He says, do not go beyond the things that are written. And oftentimes, evangelicals, we love going beyond the things that are written. You know, I was an evangelical pastor for many years as well. Non-denominational, and you know, there's a lot of liberties.
It's almost like there's two methodologies that is prevalent in American politics in terms of how to interpret the Constitution. For the first 200 years of our country, most of our presidents, regardless whether they're Federalist, Republican, Democrat, all held to kind of a standard view of the Constitution as viewing it quite literally, and then also not doing, understanding the government doesn't have the authority to do anything other than what is prescribed in the Constitution.
That's kind of a regular worship sense, right? Now, in the 1900s, a certain Theodore Roosevelt, yeah, yeah, and he started to say, well, how about we don't do anything that is not explicitly condemned by the Constitution, right?
So the Constitution doesn't talk about something. If it doesn't particularly give us a yay or yes or no, then we can do it, right? And then that's when you start to see big government approaching government life and life in this industry.
And so there's two different views of viewing the Constitution, two different views of looking at the Bible. We either do exactly what's in the Bible and don't go beyond what things are written, or we take great liberty and start adding more and more things, and I think that's the danger, and I think that's what regular worship protects us, and it protects us really from unbiblical practice, unbiblical traditions.
John? Principle. A principle is a little bit less, you know, there's a principle at play here that in itself does grant some liberty, obviously. You know, that's a given. So for instance, we're talking about certain elements of worship, right?
So the Scripture gives us elements of worship, prayer, reading of Scripture, music, making a covenant in your hearts to the Lord, the preaching of the Word, and community. So when does it tell us at what point in the service these things should be?
It's interesting because in the first century we have an early Christian document called the Dake, and the Dake is like a, it's like the first Christian catechism of sorts. Very short, it's only about 2 ,000 words long, it's not very long.
But the Dake gives this kind of instruction and kind of fills in some of the gaps of what early Christians assumed. Some of the things that is actually really interesting is that the Dake affirms Trinitarian baptism, the Father, Son, and Spirit, in fully version, and they also affirm that baptism is an entrance into church membership.
So kind of the practices that we have today here, particularly in this church. And so they kind of fill in some of the gap on some of the things, but that in itself is not, you know, it's not the Bible, you know, we don't hold on to that as the Apollo work of God.
So there is flexibility in the principles, but we follow the principles as kind of a rule thing. Any thoughts or questions? When was that written? The Dake, some people put that towards maybe around 70 to 180.
Some people put it in the second century, but that section, the predominant view is that it was a first century document. And that it was likely written around the time of the New Testament. So early church fathers debated whether or not this should be canonical.
Ultimately, they rejected it as canonical. And I would agree with that assessment. When you read the Dake, you can certainly tell early Christians are doing their best at compiling data, and having kind of a rule of faith.
You know, like us, admiring and holding fast to, for instance, the 1689. But we would never say, okay, this should be included in the canon of Scripture. Right? We examine the 1689 document, and we say this is a good examination of the faith, this is a good assessment of the faith, but by no means is it on par with Scripture.
Right? So I think the Dake served as early Christian Catholicism, early Christian confession for the first century and second century Christians.
Without your questions.
Well, let's get into the actual reading of this week, which is chapter 6. And it's called A Thousand Traditions. And we have some things to set out to you.
In the reading. And, um,.
Rome was saying that their traditions, the way that they claimed that they were, um, you know, received from the apostles through the very word of Christ, and then transferred down head by hand to earth, they made it sound like, you know, of course, always governed by the Holy Spirit, like you would be coming against the apostles and the Holy Spirit.
That's right.
Yeah, it's very slick how they and, you know, essentially they're, you know, I think it was 1 and 2 in Trent that they quote, that the chapter quotes from. And it shows, you know, it's like hand in hand.
It's like they go hand in hand. It's the apostles and now it's the Pope. It's all this beautiful succession. And that's one of the appeals to Rome is, um, is that Rome says, you know, you don't have to worry about all the hard to interpret the Bible because we've already done it for you.
And that is an appeal. Let me tell you, the Jehovah's Witnesses do the same thing. The Jehovah's Witnesses say that the Bible is not a book for individuals, but rather it's an organization of it. And it can only be understood within Jehovah's organization.
And so they give you the Watchtower magazine and they say, this is your interpreter. This magazine will interpret the Bible for you. So you don't even have to read the Bible. You just read the Watchtower and you'll know what the Bible teaches.
There's an appeal to that because it's easier to read a 30 page magazine than it is to read, you know, 2 ,500 pages of the Bible.
Yeah, it wasn't clear were the traditions ever written down?
Well, here's the struggle, right? There's the old tradition that they talk about that they appeal to, which, of course, to some degree is written, verbalized and scripted because they had to keep it. So that's a great question to ask a Catholic.
It's a okay, when we're talking about oral traditions, like, what are we talking about exactly? Which oral traditions? The ones that are being canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, which are no longer oral, they're not written.
They're literally written and catechized in their catechisms. So that's a good question for Roman Catholics.
The same thing about where are these written? Are they in a certain amount of I mean, I know the Roman Catholic Church isn't a confessional, right? But I mean, how do you bring it in? Do they let us see everything?
No. You've got to go to the Vatican Library, which is top secret. You'll find the Da Vinci Code and stuff there. But, no. The thing about Roman Catholicism and the interesting thing about it is Roman Catholicism has a lot of history.
You know, nearly, you know, over 1 ,500 years of history. And so they've kind of monopolized a lot of Christian documents, a lot of Christian tradition. And what they consider to be authoritative is what has been prescribed in their councils or in their catechism, right?
I think I've showed you the catechism. I have it, the Catholic catechism. It's huge. And so those are the things that they consider as authoritative traditions. And that, obviously, that much they practice within their mass services.
Those are the things that they consider to be oral traditions. If anyone would give me an example of an oral tradition in Roman Catholicism, what would be considered kind of an oral tradition? Don't they do the sacrifice when the, it's actually the body.
The Eucharist.
Yes, it's actually the body of the Christ. It becomes that as you partake.
Yeah, and that certainly, they have an interpretation of the Eucharist, of the communion. And that is based upon primarily tradition. Now, not just oral tradition, but written tradition. So the Catholic Church would make a small distinction between written apostolic tradition and oral tradition.
They would make a small distinction between the two. Their understanding of the communion would be more so a what's an apostolic handing over understanding of the Eucharist. That comports to oral tradition, but really there's a whole other line of tradition that supports that understanding of the Eucharist.
Would their oral tradition include things like.
Stories of the saints? Yes. Like how the saints became, you know, important.
That's a perfect example. Have you seen the news lately? This week there was a, somewhere in Ohio there was a nun who was buried, and they were to, you know, fumigate her body, and when they checked she had not decomposed at all.
Barely had decomposed. It's now her body's on display for having a pilgrimage and touching the dead body of this lady who died just a couple years ago, poor thing. And this saw is part of oral tradition.
There's no meaning coming from Rome saying, now go visit this person's grave. These are all things that comport with oral traditions. There are veneration of saints, veneration of different people, of angels.
These are all things that comport with oral tradition. Very, very strange stuff. Relics and things like that, would you pass on as an oral tradition? Yeah, relics. A lot of things have to do with relics.
A lot of things have to do with indulgences. A lot of things have to do with, you know, like, for instance, the shroud of Turin. Have you guys ever heard of the shroud of Turin? There's a shroud that supposedly was wrapped in Jesus' body.
It's a very interesting thing. We don't know how, you know, this thing works, but you know, it supposedly shows the body of Christ, but we don't really see, it's all derived by oral traditions. We don't really see anything of it in tradition until around.
Like the 13th, 1400s. What about the doctrine of purgatory?
Does that come from a written, what they misconstrued from scripture, or.
Is that something else? They take part of the two verses of scripture, one in the Luke's Gospel, one in the Apocrypha, and they extrapolate that to this huge doctrine, dogma of purgatory. And a lot of their understanding does come from oral tradition as well, right?
So they have to fill in the blanks. So oral tradition works great in the Roman Catholic Church as a great filler. Because you have these kind of vague things in scripture maybe that they point to, but then how they support their dogma is through the oral tradition.
They say, well, look at all those who come before us and all the things that they've written on this, and therefore we can extrapolate, we can have this dogma in place because it's supported not just by one or two scriptures' text, but also because of the weight of church tradition and church awareness.
With.
The idea of sins, menial sins, moral sins,.
That would come from a mid-adventure as well. Absolutely.
And you actually, you begin to see kind of the beginnings of that in the docket, the document I mentioned earlier from the first century, where you have kind of a listing of sins. I think the docket makes like a three-fold distinction of sins.
I think the first distinction is like you know, basically like they talk about the ways of life, the ways of death, and these are the things that you have to avoid, and these are the things that you have to do.
And then they talk, so the sins that you're to avoid that lead to death. And then there's other gross sins that are forbidden that, okay, they're not gonna these are sins that lead to death, these are sins that, you know, won't kill you necessarily, but they're bad.
And then you have what they call other forbidden sins, so kind of a three-fold degree of sins in the docket, which is where Roman Catholic Church, I think, eventually develops some of their views on different kinds of.
Sins. Do you have any thoughts or questions so far? So we know in the Roman Catholic perspective.
They obviously do not hold to what's called sola scriptura, but instead they believe and teach something that's a little bit different. They believe in sacred theology, so I'm reading from, I think this is from Second Vatican.
It says, Sacred theology rests on the written word of God, together with sacred tradition, as its primary and perpetual foundation. That's the last sentence there in page 33 of the quote from the Second Council of Vatican.
Sacred theology rests on the written word of God, together with sacred tradition. So again, this hand-in-hand of sacred tradition, being the interpreter of the sacred word. Why is it appealing? Why is it appealing to have this view that sacred theology stems from not only the word, but the sacred.
Tradition that interprets it? So if they haven't, you know, really read it for themselves, I just don't...
Well, here's Urban Intimidated by the book of Revelation. Alright? You know, we think of certain books of the Bible, Ezekiel, Revelation, Jeremiah, and we, it's like, we're going through, you know, Prodigals and home groups, and we're going through those names and genealogies.
It's intimidating, isn't it? This is someone in the men's group or someone sent a picture of a meme of a guy sweating and saying, you know, my worst nightmare is reading through the genealogy. And so, you know, certainly something more intimidated by the Bible, I'm sure.
John?
Well, it's intimidating, but one of the traditions having that as an option for.
Interpreting would be that you can make it mean pretty much anything you want, in the sense that you would be reading, you would be, the Scriptures would be interpreting what you believe.
You would be reading into the Scriptures what you believe and interpreting it through the Scriptures.
You know, and I would suggest that maybe a lot of evangelicals do the same thing. You know, we don't have Rome. We have our favorite TV preacher. You know, we have our favorite writer on eschatology. You know, or on Rhodes, or Tim LaHaye, or whatever the person may be.
We all have these little books that we run to to help us interpret the Bible. You know, my previous church, I had spent four years in depth studying eschatology, and in particular, Revelation. And so, after compiling all the data, I wanted to teach it to the church.
And so, we were very afraid of Septuagint. My interpretation did not compare with a dispensational view of Revelation. And so, I was allowed to teach it, but I wasn't really allowed to advertise it. And so, we had a small group in the church who would meet every Tuesday, I think it was.
We would study, you know, the material that came up with it. I would actually tell you that the book of Revelation is probably the easiest book in the Bible. For those of you who have ever been intimidated by reading the book of Revelation, I think it's actually the easiest book in the Bible.
And I can say that because if you know the rest of the Bible, the book of Revelation is a cakewalk. Revelation will not make sense to you if you don't know the Bible. If you don't understand the narrative, the meta-narrative, starting in Genesis going all the way through, there's these huge, you know, overarching ideas and themes, and they're just very straight to Revelation.
And they make a lot of sense. You know, you have this scary seven-headed dragon, where did he come from? He's the serpent from the garden, right? And it's this narrative, this little cunning snake has now become this huge monster.
I mean, the imagery is so rich there. There's so many things there that, you know, if you just know the Bible, the revelation is very easy to understand. And it comes down to a difference of obvious human interpretation, that we believe as Protestants that there is a science to interpretation.
And that's called hermeneutics. It's called exegesis. Whereas the Roman Catholics say, the hermeneutics and exegesis have been done for us. We have no need to do it ourselves. Rome has done it for us.
Rome is the interpreter. Rome is the is essentially the infallible interpreter. Now, you have some groups who have this idea that the Bible is inspired. So the Roman Catholics will agree, God's word is inspired.
So, amen. We agree. So does the Seventy Adventists. So do the Jehovah's Witnesses. So do the Mormons. But all those groups have in common that I just mentioned, Catholics, Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, is that they all affirm the Bible.
But they also add something, a caveat on top and say, well, we have a, not only do we believe the Bible, we have a perfect interpreter for the Bible. For Jehovah's Witnesses, it's the watchtower. For Mormons, it's the Mormon prophet.
For Seventy Adventists, it's Ellen G. White, who is the founder and prophetess of the church. For Roman Catholicism, it's the Pope and his many councils. They all have an interpreter who say, we're the perfect interpreter for the word of God.
So in order for you to understand God's word, you have to be on our side. You have to accept our authority. So when it comes down to ultimately, it's whose authority do you accept? As Protestants, we accept the Bible as the authority.
As the sole authority for faith and practice. And so nothing supersedes the Bible. Not our creeds, not our catechisms, not our confessions. All those things are subject to Scripture, servants of Scripture, but in no way are they on par or over Scripture.
And that is the basis for social authority. Social authority does not say that we cannot have extra-biblical sources, right? Obviously we look at history, we look at all the things of the church fathers,.
We look at the creeds. We are a creedal faith.
We do hold on to confession. We are a confessional faith. But those things are servant to the Scriptures. Not that they are the infallible rule or infallible interpreter of Scripture. So you can come to this church and you can say, well I'm not sure I believe this part of the 689 confession.
As long as it's not something major like the resurrection, the deity of Christ, the trinity, things like that, things that aren't damnable heresies, then we're fine, right? We're not going to kick you out of the church because you don't believe the Pope is the Antichrist.
We're not going to kick you out of the church. I might do that, but no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to kick people out because you don't agree with every single sentence in our confession, obviously.
So, most people who adhere to our confession, for instance, don't hold on to everything. In fact, if you look at our website, there's two or three things that we say. We hold loosely to these things and not completely.
Any thoughts or questions so far? And so we want to make sure that we understand exactly our perspective on this. That we're not saying you can't have tradition. I think that's extreme. But what we're saying is that tradition should be subservient to Scripture, right?
So our traditions should ultimately be derived from Scripture and have its foundation in Scripture because we all have traditions. Let's define this for a moment. What is a tradition anyway? What does it mean?
What does the word tradition mean? I'll give you a definition if you can. It's something that's believed and really the word tradition has the connotation of transmission. Of transmitting something over time.
And so generally a tradition is something that is customary that is transmitted over time. So for instance, some of us have traditions in our families surrounding holidays. Christmas, for instance. I love our family's traditions around Christmas.
As long as I didn't grow up celebrating Christmas and now that I get to do that with my kids, it's very special. But our Sunday, or our Christmas is pretty well defined now. What we do is we have, first and foremost, we wake up, we go you know, kids on Christmas Day, we go to the street to present.
We don't do that. We don't do presents until like much later in the day actually. The reason why is because we start the day off with worship and we go into the narrative of the Christmas story. We go through it as a family and then we'll sing Christmas songs and then we'll have breakfast and then we'll do all these nice things and then we'll open presents.
We'll actually sing Happy Birthday to Jesus and then we'll say, you know, Jesus is so good on his birthday, we get to have presents. That's how good Jesus is, right? So we're kind of instilling that in our children.
That's a tradition, right? And I love that tradition and I think it's obviously, we try to derive that from the scriptures and, you know, we start the day with family worship. We're not venerating the presents.
That's not the center of what we do and it came to a point where even this past year when we did it, you know, sometimes the kids get very itchy and they just want to open the presents. I think we opened the presents at like two in the afternoon or, you know, actually this year because it's past because it fell on Sunday, we did our Christmas song on Saturday.
So it wasn't until much later in the afternoon that we actually ended up opening the presents. So it's okay to have traditions. That's what I'm saying. But this should be derived from scripture, right?
And all of our traditions, especially those surrounding our worship, surrounding our families and how we conduct ourselves during the holidays or during other special occasions should be derived from scripture.
So traditions in themselves are not that. Let's not have an allergic reaction to this word tradition. But also the warning of Christ which is make no void of the word of God by the traditions of men. What do you think Jesus is trying to accomplish here when he confronts the Pharisees with such a powerful statement?
Make no void of the word of God by the traditions of men. Think about what the Pharisees were doing, right? The Pharisees were taking the scriptures and they were saying like the Catholics we affirm it's the word of God.
But the Pharisee class became the interpreters, the keepers of the religious system of Judaism and the keepers of the Old Testament law. And so what ends up happening is they begin to build systems, add more laws, add more dogma on top of God's inspired word which Jesus came and says you made no void of the word of God.
You missed the entire point. By adding all these things, primarily things concerning the Sabbath for instance is a big deal. You know, you could the Sabbath law which is, which commandment is the Sabbath?
Which is the only one that actually starts off with this phrase, remember the Sabbath today and keep it holy. It's the only one that we're called to remember to have remembrance of. And so God's fourth commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, to remember the Sabbath today and keep it holy.
Had a pretty clear cut statement. Now over time, over centuries over the Pharisee of Colossus taking it over, had become so complex that there were a lot of do's and do not's on the Sabbath. Right? So if you had you know even today you go to a Hasidic Jewish community in New York.
So I grew up pretty close to New York in upstate New York but in Manhattan Brooklyn area there's a lot of Hasidic Jews and they won't even like switch you know, put the switch up or light on the Sabbath because which is the Sabbath?
You know, there are so many things that they cannot do because of all the regulations that they put on top of it because they're trying to be careful not to break the Sabbath. Similarly one of the reasons why the Divine Name Jehovah Yahweh was taken out of the Bible translations was because out of the superstitious Jewish tradition which said we can't even utter the name Yahweh or Jehovah out of fear for contaminating it and making it unholy because we're commanded to keep God's name holy.
You know not to blaspheme God's name. But they took that very simple prescription from God's word and they added so many things to it that they lost the meaning of it. So much so that they don't even have a name for their God anymore.
They don't even name God's name. The Jewish community, you know what they say instead of Yahweh or Jehovah? They'll never say it. Anytime you see it in the scriptures you know what they say? They say, you know, Adonai which is the Lord or which is where we get our English tradition for doing the same thing.
Or they actually made up a whole term for it called Hashem. You know what Hashem means? Hashem just means the name. Okay? So when they read it in the scriptures in the synagogues, they'll likely say, when they see Yahweh or Jehovah, they'd say Hashem.
The name. They don't say what the name is they just say the name. Again, traditions that make no more than the word of God. And so we want to be careful of that and we want to make sure that as Christians we're not falling into the same traps as Pharisees or Roman Catholicism by making no more than the word of God by the traditions of men.
Any other thoughts or questions so far? Some things that were of interest as well in this in this discussion on the thousand traditions is the idea of sufficiency. Can it be said that the Roman Catholic in all honesty have a view of a sufficiency of scripture?
Are the scriptures sufficient in the Roman Catholic view? How can we defend that?
How can we defend that? That view. It has to be interpreted by their traditions. It has to be. It's not complete without the tradition.
How does that differ from Protestants though? How does that differ from us? We have a scripture. So we say we have a scripture. Here's what Catholics will slap back at us. The Catholics will say well you have the same problem that we do.
Because look at all the different interpretations that you have in scripture. And everyone essentially becomes a pope of their own. See we have one pope. We have one interpretation. But for the Christian, for the Protestant everyone's their own pope.
And so it's kind of like that scripture that says everyone did that which was right in his own eyes. Everyone interprets that which they want in their own eyes. Essentially we're a Catholic republic. They say well you've got the same problem.
We have one pope, one dogma, one interpretation, and you have thousands. How would we rebut that? How would we answer to that? They do. That's one of Martin Luther's thesis is one of the things he pointed out was how the myriad of different popes and councils have often been contradictory.
They've contradicted themselves often throughout church history. And so yeah there's a myriad of contradictions we've had from dogma from pope to pope. We just look at the style of popes. We had Pope Benedict who recently died.
And he was considered kind of a bulwark of conservatism. Now we've got Pope Francis who says atheists and gays go to heaven. I mean that's not official church dogma either, but the pope is saying yeah atheists will go to heaven, yeah gays will go to heaven.
And that's not official church dogma. So you have all these contradictions happening even now before our eyes.
It's the official Catholic position that scripture is not sufficient.
You can't understand scripture by itself. We would assert yes we can, and we would also agree that humans are fallible and different people are going to get it wrong sometimes. But they would actually officially say no, God's word is not clear enough for you to write yourself.
And here's the.
Protestant perspective is we believe in the sufficiency of scripture, that scripture in itself is sufficient for every good work, for every teaching, for every, you know, 2 Timothy chapter 3 obviously comes to mind.
But we also believe in the clarity of scripture. Part of the sufficiency of scripture is understanding the clarity of scripture. That scripture is in itself, in its plain reading, sufficiently clear. That's important because, you know, we can trust that we can hand this book off to a child and he'll come, by and large, to the same conclusions that we have.
Right? The scriptures are sufficient and they're sufficiently clear. That's why all the Protestants, we do have lots of different views of Protestantism. Among the major things, we're pretty much on board with the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, all these major Christian dogmas and teachings which are the citadel of the Christian Church.
We all agree on that. Right? So on the essentials, we're all pretty much on board. Unless you're part of the cult, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, or maybe an urge from the Christian Orthodoxy on the major essentials.
But I would say that this actually shows the veracity of scripture as being clear, concise, and clear enough to lead us into the truth. If you were to put a man on the high level of the Bible, I promise you, at the end of that experience, he would not be a Jehovah's Witness.
I promise you he would not be a Mormon. He probably wouldn't be Catholic either. He'd be a Christian. And so, that shows the clarity of scripture, not just the sufficiency. In order for scripture to be sufficient, it also has to be sufficiently clear.
And so we believe in the clarity of scripture as well, along with sufficiency. Does that make sense? That's the perfect thing to talk to a Mormon Catholic about is, obviously, their dogma of scripture isn't sufficient.
But for the Christian, we can say with confidence that it is not only is it sufficient, but sufficiently clear. So that's important. That's very important. John?
I think it's very interesting that the Catholic.
Should be able to either be able to respond to us. One of the things that came up in this chapter as well is the development of dogma, the development of.
Doctrine. And.
The Roman Catholics, similar to us, to most Protestants, would agree that you need a level of tradition because scripture, the canon of scripture, is closed. So unlike, for instance, the Mormon Church.
The Mormon Church believes that the canon of scripture is not closed. Do you know when was the last time Mormon was added to the scriptures? Was it 1973? In 1973, the prophet of the Mormon Church decreed that blacks were no longer outcasts and that blacks could now be included in the priesthood.
And that was the last major revelation. It was included in what's called Doctrine and Covenants. The Mormons have four major scriptures. It's the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants.
And Doctrine and Covenants is mostly the writings of Joseph Smith and other prophets after him. And the last scripture that was added was 1973 when they included blacks into the Mormon priesthood. And so they're still adding things to scripture over time.
So their canon is not closed. But the Mormon Catholics and the Protestants would both firmly agree that the canon is closed. What we would disagree on is the development of Doctrine out of that closed canon.
And so the development of Doctrine in the Roman Catholic dogma obviously includes the councils, the reeds, and the Pope having the final authority over what is canonical, what is official church teaching.
But if you didn't know, it's not just like these guys kind of just get into a room where the Pope can just say things and it's true. So for instance, I showed you how Pope Francis said, atheists and gays can make the heaven.
You know why that's not official church doctrine? Even though the Pope said it. Why is it not official church doctrine?
It has to be speaking ex-cathedra or something from the seat. It's got to be like switch on the magic switch.
Now that's true, but it's more complicated than that, a little more nuanced than that as well. In order for the Pope to speak in that condition, he needs to convene with the Council of Cardinals to come, the College of Cardinals to come, and they would debate these things, and then only afterwards when this matter is settled can he now take his authority and say, this is official church doctrine.
So he can't just sit there and say, okay, this is official church doctrine. There's a process in place in Roman Catholic teaching for a teaching to become officially Catholic doctrine. And so, it's not simply the Pope just agreeing because Popes over centuries have all said some wild things and not been part of the official canon of Catholic doctrine.
So, there's a process in place, and that's essentially how the Orthodox, for the Protestants, it's a little bit different. Let's look at our own history, let's look at our own confession, we have the 1689 Confession.
Anyone know a little bit how that was compiled? How was the 1689 Confession compiled? It is often referred to as the second London Baptist Confession, which means it was the first one, the first one being I think in 1646.
Right, so you have the 1646 and the 1689. How are these confessions compiled? Isn't the second London.
A combination of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the civil way, and then they wanted to refine it to their Baptist.
That's right. So, the Westminster Confession is kind of like the gold standard of confessions in terms of consonancy. It is kind of like the first major English Confession with Protestant distinctions and you know, it's just an invaluable document.
It really is just a marvelous piece of work. Obviously, the reason why we all go to a Westminster Confession and we all go to a second London Baptist Confession is because of their Baptist distinctions.
And so what happened is over the first and second London Baptist Confessions you had you know, essentially dozens if not almost hundreds, I'm not sure if it was almost hundreds or not, but it was over 40 churches that compiled, that were Baptistic, Calvinistic, which says, okay, we need to have a kind of standard of what we believe.
And so you have 40 different churches represented and they're all trying to sort out okay, what are our beliefs on Baptism? What's our beliefs on Jesus? And so forth. And they took a systematic approach to doctrine.
And they say, let's take every major Christian doctrine and let's come to a place of commonality, of common ground. And so over many years, debates back and forth, they said, okay, these are the essential truths that we believe on these essential matters.
And that's how we come to Christian doctrine. Is we look at the scriptures. These guys were pouring over the scriptures. They weren't debating about ecumenical councils or things that had to do with the politics of the church, how to get more indulgences, how to get more money into the coffers of the church, how we can build the next great cathedral.
They were concerned with doctrinal purity. And that's a great foundation. And that's what distinguishes a confession such as the Second Luke of Acts confession and the ecumenical councils of the Roman Catholic Church, where there's so many other considerations, such as church history, which was not things that were not considered in our confession.
Those things are all secondary to what scripture plainly said and taught. When we develop Christian doctrine teaching, it really comes from the Bible being the main source, whereas in Roman Catholic doctrine, the Bible is not necessarily the main source.
It can be often secondary to things such as tradition. So, does that make sense? Any other thoughts or questions? Your previous question, you know, they came and.
Pointed out that you don't have one person like the Pope telling. That reminded me of the verse, 2 Peter 1, laying down this verse that no scripture is of any type of interpretation.
That's right. That's right. But these men were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the dictator of truth. And Jesus says that the Spirit will lead you to all truth. Which is why I believe in the sufficiency of the clarity of scripture, because how does he lead us to truth?
Jesus says to the high priest in prayer, Father, your word is truth. So how does he lead us to truth? It's through the word, right? So the word has to be sufficiently clear in order for the Spirit to lead us into the truth of the scriptures.
And so, yeah. Any other thoughts or questions? Yes.
How do we understand, how do we explain this?
Do we know that the Bible is sufficiently clear to understand? Is that something valid? It is a contention,.
Right? There's a contention there. And I would say, you know, there is a science to interpretation, right? It's hermeneutics. It's exegesis. And so, part of the science of interpretation is understanding that all the time the plain reading is to correct the understanding, right?
So that when Jesus is saying, if your right hand calls to you to stumble, cut it off. Do you actually cut it off? Do we understand? What's the plain reading of this? Put yourself in the, just like you were taught in elementary, put yourself in the audience.
What would they have understood? What they would have understood is clearly being metaphorical. And they wouldn't have come to the conclusion that some evangelicals have today, for instance, to say well the reason Jesus says to cut off your hand is because you might take the mark of the beast.
If you take the mark of the beast, the only way out of it is by cutting your hand. So Jesus is actually being literal here. That's not what he's talking about. If the plain, understand the plain reading is usually the correct reading.
And so I would say people have to directly study the science of interpretation, remember we did exegesis in order to come to an understanding. And if you do that, and if Christians did that, man, we would be so better off.
But the problem is that for us it's all the same trap as Catholics. We all want the little pope to tell us what to believe. Whether it's the pastor, whether it's the tympanis of the world, whether it's the wrong roads of the world.
We want someone to tell us what the Bible teaches. Instead of just knowing the basic principles of interpretation and reading it. And how long the Spirit leads us to walk through it. I think that would be, you know, that's my interest.
I think we would be so better off if we just knew the basics of hermeneutics and exegesis.
I was going to say so. I hear hermeneutics very much, the science, what is it? Because everybody has their own.
Hermeneutics. That's right. Not everyone has the same hermeneutics. There is a foundation of what hermeneutics is. So just like in science, the word science, there is a basic understanding of what science is and what takes place for it to be science.
It needs to be observable, it needs to be measurable. These are all things that have to deal with true science. The same is true for hermeneutics. There's a basic underlying principles that dictate hermeneutics.
If you do something other than those basic principles, you're doing something other than hermeneutics. So again, some of the basic principles of hermeneutics. One is that Scripture interprets Scripture.
Two, that plain reading is usually the correct reading. Three, you have to take the historical and narrative context into account when reading Scripture. So when Jesus says, again I've used this a couple of weeks ago, I think.
When Jesus says, this generation will by no means pass away. If you were in the mount on the Olivet Discourse hearing Jesus say that, you wouldn't be thinking to yourself, those guys in 2023 are really smart.
That would not come to your mind. You'd be saying, oh, we're in trouble. This generation. So again, you just have to put yourself in the shoe of the audience. Again, those basic principles of hermeneutics come into play.
And exegesis, which is important as well, which is another facet of hermeneutics, which is basically, we exegete, which means we take out of Scripture. We don't put into Scripture. So we draw out. We exegete.
We don't isegete. Isegete meaning putting in versus drawing out. Jesus says in John, well it says in Jesus that he is the exegeter, he is the one who has exclaimed the Father. John 15, right? He's who has exegeted the Father.
So, very important principle there. Pray for us and then we'll get ready for service. Father, we do thank you, Lord, that you've given us time to consider these matters. Lord, we know that you have given us your word, which is sure, which is sufficient and clear, which leads us into all truth.
Father, we pray, Lord, that your will be done in our lives, that we would use this information effectively to help and serve others. And Lord, that we would not become appalling in our own estimation, our own spirits, but Lord, rather that we would be humble in how we use this truth to reach the laws, in Jesus' name.
Amen.