QUESTION #24 Why do you also break the commandment of God by your tradition?

  QUESTIONS JESUS ASKED BIBLE STUDY

      Read Matthew 15:1-20 KJV: 

 

  Why do you also transgress (break) the commandment of God by your tradition? (Matthew 15:3)

   Are you also yet without understanding? (Matthew 15:16)

 

THE PHARISEES WASH THEIR HANDS

Reference: Matthew 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-23

 

Jesus asks these questions of the Pharisees when they accuse the disciples of breaking the traditions of the elders because they did not wash their hands before eating bread. (Read Matthew 15:1-20)

 

The Pharisees washed their hands – not as a matter of hygiene – but to be ritually pure. Although the original reason for washing the hands didn’t apply, the ritual was continued on grounds that the idea of holiness demands a special, ritualistic washing of the hands, which was traditionally passed down by the elders of the Jews.

 

Jesus uses the Pharisee’s condemnation to reveal the depths of their hypocrisy. In defending His disciples, he points to another tradition that the Pharisees taught that nullified the Word of God for the sake of giving them money. One of the Ten Commandments says, “To honor your father and mother” but they encouraged sons and daughters to despise their parents by giving the religious authorities the money that should have went to help their needy parents. Jesus exposed how they completely set aside one of the ten most sacred commands in order to enrich themselves, and nullify the Word of God for the sake of their tradition.

 

Jesus called them hypocrites and said that Esaias (Isaiah 29:13) had prophesied of them (verses 7-8). Got wants us to see that worship can be thought of in two different ways. When God says, “In vain do they worship Me,” or “with their lips they honor me,” He implies that worship can be thought of as a series of acts or words that are performed in obedience to biblical commands or ceremonial tradition. Worship can be performed in bowing, lifting the hands, kneeling, singing, praying, reciting Scripture, etc. All this can also be done when the heart is far from God. 

 

Jesus also took the Pharisees’ phony outrage as an occasion to prove the largest spiritual point possible to the crowd standing about. He said that it wasn’t what went into the mouth that defiled a man but what came out of the mouth. 

 

Later Peter asked Jesus to tell him what he meant by the parable he told the crowd. Jesus asked Peter, “Are you also yet without understanding? Do you not understand that what enters in at the mouth and enters the belly is eliminated and then cast from the body?” He goes on to teach it’s not what a man puts into his mouth that defiles him, but what proceeds out of his mouth. What is in the heart will be revealed by what comes from one’s mouth. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies, these are things that defile a man (Matthew 15:19).

 

The disciples told Jesus that the Pharisees were offended at His sayings. That the Pharisees were offended at Jesus’ teaching suggests that they understood that He was referring to their hypocritical speech, which honored God even as their hearts refused to worship Him. Jesus said, “Every plant, which my heavenly Father has not planted, shall be rooted up.” Leave them alone he said, “they are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

 

Jesus used the imagery of blind leaders leading the blind to show the hypocrisy in self-righteous religion. The Pharisees thought that they obeyed the law. They pursued holiness through human effort. They thought their efforts would make them righteous. One is not made righteous through their own efforts, only through Christ can we be made righteous.

 

Dictionaries define righteousness as “behavior that is morally justifiable or right.” Such behavior is characterized by accepted standards of morality, justice, virtue, or uprightness. The bad news is that true and perfect righteousness is not possible for man to achieve on his own. The good news is that true righteousness is possible for mankind, but only through the cleansing of sin by Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. We have no ability to achieve righteousness in and of ourselves. But Christians possess the righteousness of Christ, because “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). 

 

This is an amazing truth! On the cross, Jesus exchanged our sin for his perfect righteousness so that we (those that have become the sons of God) can one day stand before God and He will see not our sin, but the holy righteousness of the Lord Jesus. This means that we are made righteous in the sight of God; that is, that we are accepted as righteous, and treated as righteous by God, on account of what the Lord Jesus has done.

 

And neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we MUST be saved! (Acts 4:12)

 

We have received this precious gift of righteousness from the God of all mercy and grace. To Him be the glory!

 

How must we be saved? See “Plan of Salvation” pamphlet enclosed in pocket of study.

 

Notes: