I am not recommending the book House Church, edited by Steve Atkerson with eight other contributors. The book is a little over 300 pages with small font, single-spaced and information I did not agree with, making this an unpleasant slog. I did find one excerpt from Beresford Job that I thought was compelling and it’s highlighted below.
It is amazing to realize, though nevertheless a fact, that Jesus’ conflict with Israel’s religious leaders was not over the Mosaic Law. Jesus kept the Old Covenant to the letter. Apart from one attempt to trip Him up using the occasion of a woman caught in adultery, those who sought to do battle against Him did so for other reasons. What made them so angry with Jesus wasn’t that He went against anything in the Old Testament Scriptures, but rather that He challenged and went against something called the tradition of the elders.
We read in Mark’s Gospel, “Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”” (Mk 7:1-5). So what, precisely, is going on here? The answer is that whereas in theory Israel considered the Old Testament scriptures to be its final authority in matters of both faith and practice, the reality was somewhat different. The Jews actually paid far more heed to a system of teaching and practice known as “the tradition of the elders” or “the Oral Law.”
Pharisaic Judaism taught that when Moses was on Mount Sinai he was given not one, but two laws by God. The written law, or Mosaic Law, was recorded in the pages of the Old Testament. However, a second, secret law was said to have been passed on purely orally down through the generations. This secret law allegedly only came to public light in the years preceding the time of Jesus. When the inevitable conflict between these two laws and what they taught came about, Israel had to eventually decide which one was their actual final authority. After all, you may claim to have two things equally as your final authority (in this case the Old Testament and the Oral Law), but you can really only have one, and it is that which you obey if contradictions between the two emerge. Incredibly, Israel went with the Oral Law, and relegated the Mosaic Law, and thereby the Old Testament scriptures, to second place. Indeed, the Pharisees taught that it was more punishable to set against the tradition of the elders than the Old Testament scriptures.
What we must understand is that, at the time of Jesus, the nation of Israel lived under the authority of a system of teachings and practices which, in vitally important ways, went against other teachings and practices laid down in the Old Testament. They did this whilst claiming to have been led to do so by God Himself, under the pretext that this Oral Law had supposedly been given to Moses by Him. A system of completely man-made and merely humanly originated teachings and practices had therefore usurped and replaced the revealed truth of the written Word of God, yet under the claim that, even though they contradicted the Old Testament Scriptures, such traditions and teachings had nevertheless come from the Lord God of Israel Himself.
However, if we ask what the Lord God of Israel thought about this (supposedly) inspired Oral Law, then all we have to do is to look at Jesus’ responses to it: “He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written. “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” (Mk 7:6-8).
Hypocrisy! That was the Lord’s clear and unwavering verdict on such traditions as were causing His people to go against the inspired traditions as revealed in the Word of God. To hold to merely humanly originated practice, whatever it may be, as opposed to biblical practice is, according to the Lord Jesus Christ, to “abandon the commandment of God.”
I think you’ll agree that this is pretty heavy duty stuff, and I can imagine the kind of responses even now being elicited from my readers: “Amen brother! That’s terrible what Israel did!” “Imagine that! Israel going against the Mosaic Law in favor of their own man made teachings and practices and traditions. No wonder God judged them!” “What? Abandoning the commandment of God by holding to merely human tradition? Unthinkable!” But I have to tell you that, for virtually two millennia, we Christians have been doing exactly the same thing.
It is incredible beyond words to realize that when it comes to our experience of church life, by which I mean the traditions, or established practice, which the vast majority of Christians unquestioningly follow, virtually all of it is based on a system of practices which, just like Israel’s tradition of the elders, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Word of God. Far from being what we see revealed in the pages of the New Testament, it rather originated from, and was implemented by, men who came on the scene after the Apostles of Jesus were dead and therefore after the writing of the New Testament was completed.
Many church traditions are not just different from what we see in Scripture, in the sense of being merely variations. They are actually the complete opposite of what we see in the New Testament. Far from being mere developments whereby biblical practices are applied in slightly different ways, they are rather practices which are actually at complete variance with what the New Testament teaches. They are practices that cause those adhering to them to go directly against what we see revealed in the Word of God, the very thing Jesus so unwaveringly and blatantly condemned.
Israel disobeyed the Old Testament at various points because of their beloved, yet totally wrong and unbiblical, tradition of the elders. The Christian Church has done exactly the same thing, only with the tradition of the Early Church Fathers. In England we call that a double-whammy, and it’s time we started to put it right. What are we going to go with? The traditions of man? Or the traditions of the Divine? I leave you, dear reader, to decide for yourself!
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