3 For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders.
4 And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.
5 Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?
6 He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
7 Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
8 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.
9 And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.
We must realize here that no Old Testament texts call for anyone to wash hands before eating (but see what priests do in Exodus 30:18-21; 40:31). This may be an example of what was called “building a fence around the law.” The idea was that laws would be given that would prevent people from getting near to breaking a law just as a fence insures that no one gets near trespassing on private property.
These “traditions of men” that our Lord Christ keeps referring to here has to do with Jewish source of authority — “the Oral Law” — which would eventually become “The Talmud.” The Talmud is a collection of Rabbinic writings from the first few centuries after Christ, however those Oral Law writings are based upon the kind of Oral traditions mentioned here and reach back long before the time of Christ. In the time of Christ, the Pharisees had already developed a system of Biblical interpretation of the Old Testament that allowed them to violate the letter and spirit of Biblical commandments while fulfilling them in a barely superficial way.
Here Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for adhering to legalistic man-made tradition while neglecting the law of God.
If we examine the Talmud, it becomes obvious that the Jews ignored Christ’s rebuke and continued down the path of wickedness. The Jews have progressed so far down this path that they no longer worship God, but instead worship their own techniques of hairsplitting argumentation. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the following episode from the Talmud (Baba Mezi’a 59b). In this passage, the Rabbi Eliezer is debating with his fellow rabbis about the cleanness of an oven. The other rabbis refuse to accept Eliezer’s argument, even after God himself speaks from heaven on Eliezer’s behalf:
The conviction was that since the Oral Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; they need pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai.
After this debate Rabbi. Nathan met (OT Prophet) Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour (when it was said “pay no attention to a Heavenly voice”)?
Elijah responded, He (God) laughed [with joy], he (God) replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’
This mindset is codified in the Babylonian Talmud,
“Since God already gave the (Oral) Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of rabbis. —
BT Bava Metzia 59b
Rushdoony made it is life’s work to warn about this phenomena,
The self-righteous man makes his own will his law; he replaces the law of God with man-made traditions of his own devising.
~ R. J. Rushdoony
As it pertains to the value of the Oral Traditions, one OT Scholar could say,
The oral traditions of the ignorant rabbis …(give) not the sense of the Mosaic writings. Many of the laws of the Pentateuch would make a strange figure indeed, if we were to interpret them as the Pharisees did, whose exposition, according to Christ’s declaration, in many cases served to inculcate doctrines and precepts directly the reverse of what Moses had taught and commanded… even with regard to Jewish antiquities, prior to the Babylon captivity, the Talmud is … an impure source of information … a book … which appeals only to oral tradition can tell us nothing worthy of credit …”
Johann David Michaelis
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages
University of Gottingen
Commentaries on the Laws of Moses
*.) Talmudic Traditions of Men in our Current Laws
God’s law says, as quoted by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel,
Matthew 19:4And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE,5and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH ‘?
This is God’s law. It is the only law we know. It is the law that must be the soil out of which any other law must grow.
This is God’s law, but this is not man’s law. No, instead we are having talmudic type law foisted upon us. We are being forced to governed by the very traditions of men that the Lord Christ so severely denounces in this passage.
The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
Now there exists a fundamental right to marry?
And by what standard are we defining “stigma and injury”? Where does our “basic charter” prohibit the stigma and injury that comes with violating God’s eternal law.
The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era. Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied. Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
1.) “Rights come not from ancient sources alone” — Clearly a swipe at the Christian Scriptures. So, rights do not come from God alone? Well, what other God is there to give rights if not man?
2.) “Better informed understanding” — those poor poor fools of the past who were not bright enough to have the better informed understanding of this brilliant current generation.
3.) We’re not disparaging you or your beliefs as wrong in the least. We are just saying that you did not have the “better informed understanding” that we have. No disparagement at all here.
4.) So, Christian beliefs as enacted law should not be but the religious beliefs of sodomites should be enacted law?
5.) Is it ever proper to stigmatize or disparage any sexual self identity Mad Anthony? Should we stigmatize Bestiality? Should we disparage Pedophilia? Should we consider Necrophilia taboo? Remember Justice Kennedy you have created a right of self identity in this decision.
And we must mention here the connection between Talmudic thinking and the Supreme Courts decision on Abortion (Roe vs. Wade).
Whereas God recognizes life even before it is in the womb,
Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
Our law, based on Talmud takes a different direction.
According to Michael Hoffman in his “Judaism’s Strange Gods”
“Since the 1973 SCOTUS decision, Roe v. Wade, the standard American abortion procedure is considerably Talmudic in nature, since the Talmud specifically states that if the unborn baby is adduced to be ‘rodef’ (one who threatens), the rabbis authorize that it can be chopped up at any time: ‘They chop up the child in her womb.’ (Mishnah Ohalot 7:6)
Rabbi Meir Abulafia decreed, “So long as the fetus is inside the womb, it is not a nefesh, and the Torah has not pity on it.” Judaic legal scholar Rabbi Isaac Schorr stated, “The sense of the Talmud is that a fetus is not a person.” The Talmud contains the expression, “ubar yerech imo” — the fetus is as the thigh of its mother. (That is to say that the Fetus is deemed to be part of the pregnant woman’s body.)
* .) The “Christ Has Delivered Us From The Law Position” (We are ruled by Grace not law)
Old line Dispensationalism
“The law (which) grace writes in our hearts must answer to the law written in God’s Word.”
John Owen
*.) The “Christ Has Delivered From the General Equity Argument”
R2K
Mosaic Covenant as Covenantus Interruptus
Ruled by Nat’l Law.
Claim that at this point in time when Christ is speaking in defense of God’s law He was living between the ages of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The New Covenant had not been enforced yet by His death and so these kinds of Law remained in force. (Tithing of Mint, Dill, and Cummin for example)
However with the death of Christ, so this argument goes, we have a “new and better covenant,” that does not include the OT judicial case law, which was only for OT Israel.
*) The Continued Non Judicial Attempt To Press Upon Us The Traditions of Men As Law
We live in a culture, that having denied God’s law, opt for the traditions of men. Today the “Traditions of Men” is typically rephrased as “Political Correctness.” We are given an implicit speech code and we implicitly told that if we violate this speech code law that we are guilty of sin by man’s standard.
And so we have a list of sins that are man created and which we are to be constrained by.
It is against the law of Political correctness to say “illegal alien,” or “anchor-baby,” or “sodomite.” It is against the law of Political correctness to be opposed to homosexuality or transgenderism. Political Correctness has made laws against matters they seldom define. For example there is the modern sin of “racism,” not mentioned in God’s Word and very seldom if ever defined. As such it is impossible to not be accused of breaking this law whenever an enemy of God finds it convenient to accuse someone of “racism.”
The traditions of men live on as law whenever one is accused of not sufficiently loving Jesus because one might be convinced that Scripture defends the idea of “nations,” and so would disallow universal open borders. The traditions of men live on as law whenever anyone condemns someone for saying that women are different then men and that God made them different.
It gets worse than that though. Today, given our Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism, if we insist upon the necessity of a known Lord Christ in order to be saved we are accused of breaking the Traditions of men that demand tolerance and acceptance. If one suggests that one simply cannot inherit the Kingdom of God while still pursuing the deliberate lifestyle of sin one is accused of being insensitive, being bigoted, being intolerant. Even more, given our current climate, if one makes a righteous judgment, consistent with God’s word, but that just judgment hurts someone’s feelings then that person who made the just judgment is uncaring, unloving, and unfeeling.
This is madness. Having traded in the law of God for the traditions of men we have at the same time traded in God’s legislative sovereign authority in exchange of man’s legislative sovereign authority. Having traded in the law of God for the politically correct traditions of men we have exchanged God’s definition of sin for man’s definitions of sin, we have tried to cast off our guilt as God designates guilt and have embraced a false guilt foisted upon us by charlatans, mountebanks, and perverts, and in doing so we are destroying ourselves as we seek to pull down God.
The Westminster confession defines sin as any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God. This is reflective of God’s Word which teaches, “Sin is the transgression of the Law” (I Jn. 3:4). Let the “Traditions of men,” as law therfore be damned. Let Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism as God’s law be cast into the deepest nether regions of hell. Let the false guilt of false sin stemming from a false law from false Messiahs go bugger itself. Christians are free men and Christ and must not be weighed down with the yoke of a law from hell.
____________
*.) The real problem
15 There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man. 20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: 23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
What Jesus subjects to fiercest criticism in this passage is the human being. Joel Marcus notes the concentration of the word anthrōpos(“human being” or “person”) eleven times in the span of Mark 7:7–23 and says:
“The basic problem Christians should be concerned about, Mark seems to be saying through this striking pileup [of the word anthrōpos], is not how or what one should eat but the internal corruption of the anthrōpos. It is this malignancy that chokes the life out of tradition, turns it into an enemy of God, contorts it into a way of excusing injustice, and blinds those afflicted by it to their own culpability for the evils that trouble the world.”
The teaching here is the necessity to guard one’s heart.
Interesting here that this list of our Lord Christ of what Each of these particular vices is, in some way, a sin of lust. Adultery, theft, avarice, envy, pride — each of these springs from a desire to take, to grasp, to own, to devour.
The corruption of the human heart is rooted in desire to suck the life out of that which is not ours to have. It turns out that our lusts do affect our hearts. If our desire for the satisfactions and the quenching of our lusts is not identified and repented of we become increasingly Demonic.
(Proof for doctrine of total depravity.)
Brief discussion of Heart — (not speaking of non rational self)
Warning against self righteousness.
Odd that in a passage that so clearly warns against hypocrisy finds us in danger of falling into hypocrisy and self righteousness. It is easy to envision ourselves of not being guilty of the Pharisee’s error. We can fall into think that we respect God’s law unlike everyone else. We can fall into thinking that “Ha … we get it right.”
But are we humble enough to search ourselves to see examine where we create our own traditions of men in our own lives. Do we hold people to God’s standard while allowing ourselves to be excused. Do we not see that we break the law every day in word, thought or deed? Can we come before this passage and not shiver and shake in fear that we are the one’s that our Lord Christ is speaking of?
*.) The Cross as only remedy for forgiveness for our creating “The Traditions of Men.”
