GOD’S MORAL STANDARDS AND TRADITIONS
Mark 7
“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”
Let’s be clear: Not every traditional practice or rule is bad in itself. There is nothing wrong about getting people to wash their hands before eating. Neither is it wrong to encourage modest dressing.
But when these human rules become the focus of the community and God’s moral standards are not taught nor emphasised, then it becomes a problem because human rules tend to focus on the external and God sees the internal.
Even worse is that when we teach moral codes, behaviour and priorities we tend to inject our own ideas rather than expound God’s concerns. We tend to be unbalanced in our concerns because our capacity and understanding are limited and sometimes we become extreme.
There are also situations where we reason ourselves out of God’s moral standards, pitting one aspect against another, such as the notion of “corban” that Jesus spoke of.
And so religion then becomes very restrictive, very judgemental and very impersonal and transactional even though God reveals himself to be on the side of freedom, mercy, forgiveness, compassion and love.
How we need to let the Word teach and shape our minds so that we may enjoy the life that God gave his Son and his Holy Spirit for us to have.
“Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”