A Word in Season: Apostolic Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15)

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Christians ought to be traditionalists in the best sense of the word.

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It's important to make that qualification because there are many occasions in the scriptures when tradition, wrongly understood, wrongly maintained, is warned against.

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Our Lord Jesus, for example, talks about the Pharisees who made the commandment of God of no effect because of the traditions of men.

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They're habits that had no real basis in God's word handed down through the generations that were then used to sweep the word of God aside.

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The Apostle Paul talks about being delivered from aimless or pointless conduct that had been received by tradition.

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No one knew why they did it or how they did it. They just did it. It reminds me of the story of a family who always used to cut the wings and the legs of a chicken before they put it in a pot to cook it in the oven.

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And one day the daughter asked her mother, why do we cut off the legs and the wings of the chicken? And the mum said,

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I don't know, I'll ask my mother because she taught me to do it. And she asked her mother and maybe the great -grandmother was still alive.

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Turned out that three or four generations back the family only had one pot and it wasn't big enough to hold a chicken with the wings and the legs still on it.

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So they got into the tradition, the habit of cutting off the wings and legs so it could push into a pot to be cooked in the oven.

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And so it was that down through the years, they'd just been cutting off the wings and the legs.

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That kind of thoughtless repetition, even if it's relatively harmless, that's not the kind of tradition that Christians are to maintain.

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What we're talking about is what the Apostle Paul refers to in 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 15, where he says, therefore brothers stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught whether by word or our epistle.

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Christians are traditionalists in the sense that they remain firmly committed to the word of God as it comes to us through the apostles and prophets.

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We believe what God has said. We believe that those men who gave us the entire

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Bible, full, complete and sufficient, that those men were God's instruments to communicate

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God's truth to us. And now our task is to stand fast and to hold the traditions, to stand our ground, not to let the appetites of the world, the spirit of the age, the fads that sweep through professing churches from time to time, turn our minds away from the things which

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God has spoken. We're not just to jump on every passing bandwagon and hope that it will carry us on to some greater form of glory.

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We are to hold fast. We are to believe what the Bible says. We are to cling to the things that have come to us by the words and the writings of the apostles.

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We're to hold the traditions. We're to maintain our commitment to the truth of God.

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Now at times, that's going to make us perhaps appear extremely old -fashioned in the eyes of some.

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In others, it's going to make us look like radicals of the worst kind who are sweeping aside age -old traditions of men.

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Christians are not just inherently old -fashioned and neither are they deliberately cultivating novelties.

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Whether or not the age carries us in one direction or another, whether or not the world travels in this way or that, the believers are rooted to the word of God.

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And in that sense, we ought to be holy traditionalists. And one of the things that we do then, as we come under the word of God week by week, is to hear the apostolic traditions taught to us again.

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Men will study the word of God. They will search the scriptures. They will examine the words and the phrases, the sentences, the context, and the individual elements.

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And they will, by careful study and dependence on the Spirit of Christ, seek to bring forth from the scriptures the truths that we need to know so that we can stand fast and hold on in an age when, as ever, we're so easily blown about by these prevailing winds of doctrine.

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So, let's undertake to hear, to heed, and to hold fast to the things which