SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/5/2022 10:15 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “The Confrontation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
15:1-2
Message of the verses: “1 Then some
Pharisees and scribes *came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, 2 "Why do
Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their
hands when they eat bread.’”
I want to continue looking at the sermon by John
MacArthur as he explains more about the different ways that the Jewish leaders
began and continued to make tradition more important than the Bible.
“Now,
let me approach that general concept in a more specific way. When Israel and
Judah was taken into captivity, particularly when Judah went into captivity, to
Babylon, 586 B.C. They were carried away into captivity. It was a shock to the
land of Israel. It was a shock to the Jewish people. It was as if God had
abandoned them.
“I
mean here they were, the promised people of God, living in the promised land of
God, and now, all of sudden, their hauled off into captivity. They were jolted.
The God-fearing Jews among them realized that what had happened had happened
because they had departed from Jehovah God, and that they were getting what
Isaiah said they would get and what Jeremiah said they would get. They were
getting the judgment of God because they departed from God.
“And
so, they decided that the only hope of reconciliation was to turn to God, to go
back to God. As a result of that, a movement started to put those fences back
up, to reacquaint the people with the law, to reacquaint the people with all of
the traditions of the elders, to get them back to the right kind of behavior.
“A
man, by the name of Ezra, fathered a whole group of people known as scribes.
And the job of the scribe was to collect, to collate, to propagate, and to
interpret all of these slats in this traditional fence. And it just kept
building up, and every rabbi commented on it, and every student commented on
it, and more stuff, and more stuff, and more stuff. It just kept piling and
piling and piling. And they lost – and it’s a very key point – they lost the distinction between the law of God and the
tradition of men. It got rubbed out. And it was all a big mishmash. But
the commentary effectively obscured the basic law of God.
“Now,
over the years, this thing became unwieldy and difficult to handle. So, in 200
A.D., Rabbi Yehudah pulled the whole pile together and committed it to writing,
which must have been an absolutely monumental job, and it’s called the Mishnah
– have you heard that? – from the Hebrew verb to repeat. It’s the Mishnah.
“Then
not only did they have the Mishnah, but beyond that, they needed commentaries
on the Mishnah, because the Mishnah, which was trying to explain the law of
God, needed to be explained. So, they had what was called the Gemara, and the
Gemara is a series of commentaries on the Mishnah. So, you have the Mishnah,
this massive accumulated tradition, and you have the Gemara which is the
commentary on the tradition. And it’s filled with all kinds of things.
“Well,
some rabbinical schools got together and decided to put all this stuff
together. So, in Jerusalem, they put the Gemara and the Mishnah together, and
it became known as the Talmud. In Babylonia, they did the same thing, only they
made four times the size. They collected four times more material, and the Babylonian
Talmud is now the one that is the one that is the best or the most accepted one
among the Jews. And by the way, if you were to buy a set, it’s at least 20
volumes in Hebrew. Massive amount of material. Massive.
“Now,
this wasn’t enough either. They added to this what’s called the Midrash, and
the Midrash is commentaries on the various books of the Bible. And so, you have
the Mishnah, and you have the Gemara, and you have the Midrash, and just
volumes and volumes of stuff to wade through. All of this supposedly to fulfill
the Mosaic injunction to the scribes to put a fence around the law. In effect,
all it did was just totally obscure the law of God. It’s absolutely chaotic.
“The
sum of it is this. The Talmud says – here’s the key, and here’s where these
guys were. Even though they were 200 years before the Mishnah was brought
together with the Gemara, or before the Mishnah was even codified and written
down, even though they’re before that, they still have all the stuff. They’re
still trying to deal with all this material. And they had come to be so
committed to it, listen to what the Talmud says, “The words of the scribes are more lovely than the words
of the law.” The Talmud says, “It is a greater time to transgress the words of the school of Rabbi Hillel
than the words of Scripture.” The Talmud says, “My son, attend to the words of the scribes more
than the words of the law.”
“So,
you see, they were committed to a lot of traditional stuff, not the Word of
God. They had ceremony and tradition as over against truth and righteousness.
“Now,
the – this huge mass of material in the Talmud is divided into sections. There
are six main sections. And under those, there are tracts and treatises, and
under those, there are paragraphs and chapters and all of that so you can look
up stuff. One of those sections is on cleansings or washings. And under one of
those headings is a whole little deal on hand rinsing. And that becomes the
issue here.
“Let’s
look back at verse 2. “Why do Thy disciples transgress the tradition of the
elders?” That’s a general statement, but now they give an illustration, “For
they wash” – or they literally rinse – “not their hands when they eat bread.”
“Now,
he’s not talking about cleanliness. He’s not saying, “These guys haven’t washed
their hands before they eat, and anybody knows you want to be clean before you
put food in your mouth.” That is not the issue. They’re not accusing them of
being uncouth; they’re accusing them of violating religious tradition. They
believed, because this is what it taught in all of this material, that you had
to go through ceremonial washings of your hands for two reasons. Reason number
one was that if you had touched a Gentile that day, you’d been defiled, and
there was a prescribed ceremony to detoxify your Gentile touch. See?”
Lord
willing we will pick up with the second point in our next SD.
7/5/2022 10:34 AM
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