Matthew 14 verse 34. After they had crossed over, they being the 12 disciples and Jesus, they came to land at Gisenaret. And when the men of that place recognized him, they sent around to all that region and brought to him all who were sick, and implored him that he might only touch the fringe of his garment, and as many who touched it were made well. Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, why do your disciples break down the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.

He answered them, and why do you break the commandments of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say if anyone tells his father or mother what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father and mother. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void or nullified the word of God. You hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching us doctrines the commandments of men. This is the word of God. Whenever I read this encounter, it reminds me of one of the most remarkable missionary events in church history. Madeira is a Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco. Today, it's a tourist destination.

But in the 1800s, it was the site of a massive revival that, as I mentioned, many church historians consider one of the most remarkable missionary events in church history, and since this is Pentecost Sunday, I want to draw our attention to it. Madeira had a Madaran population that spoke their own language, but in the 1400s it was, colonized by Portugal. Many Portuguese people settled there, and so there were two populations on the island, the Maderans who spoke Maderan and the Portuguese who spoke Portuguese, but they were all under the authority of the Catholic church. It wasn't ruled by the government of Portugal, but by the Archbishop of Portugal, to use a more modern term, and the Catholic Church in that time period had banned the Bible from the islands, banned Bible study, banned adult baptism, banned religious meetings that weren't part of the Catholic Church, and made Catholic mass compulsory. There was a little British outpost on the islands that they used for base is too strong of a word, outpost is probably the right word that they used for getting food and supplies to soldiers and the British Navy as they sailed by, and the British and the Portuguese operated peaceably enough, but the rules against Bibles and baptisms were mostly aimed at the British.

But by the eighteen hundreds, you had four hundred years of Catholic rule in Madeira, and the rules had become fastidious. The result is that basically every Madeiran considered himself a Catholic. And yet, the Bible was not in their language. They were only seen at church for weddings and funerals, not unlike the Portuguese, and there was no gospel presence on the island at all, but that changed in the mid-1800s. '2 men, one named Robert Reid Cayley and the other William Hughaston.

Cayley was a doctor, Houston was a pastor. They left England and came to Madera as missionaries. They learned the Madera language. They started schools all over the island and they raised up teachers. They started hospitals or medical clinics all over the island as well.

They brought education, they brought healthcare, and they brought the Bible. They began translating the Bible into the Madaran language. Within three years, there were health centers everywhere, schools everywhere, and a thriving Madeiran church. It's amazing that in just such time there was such a profound gospel impact. Well, when word of this reached the archbishop in Portugal, he demanded that the priest or the bishop of Madera shut down all the hospitals and expel the missionaries.

The priest refused because he himself had been treated at the hospitals. When he would not shut the whole thing down, he was recalled, removed from his post and a new bishop was placed in Madera, who closed many of the health centers, all of the schools, and had the missionaries arrested. Houston, the pastor, was able to flee. He took his wife and Caylee's wife with him and they joined a British ship and got out of there, but Caylee himself was arrested. Put on trial.

He was eventually released, but he didn't leave. When he was released, they thought he would flee the island. No, he stayed on the island, just went into the mountains, hid on the island with the Madaran people, and the church kept growing, and that's the way it stayed for three years until Kaley made a mistake that almost cost him his life. He brought from British ships the Portuguese Bible onto the island. He started churches in Portuguese.

When the Catholic church heard about that, they shut down the few hospitals that remained. Burned the schools down, started going home to home, both the Mederans, the Portuguese, searching for Haley and for any sign of scriptures, which again, they would put on fire and they would arrest the families that had the Bibles in their homes. They put them on trial. And the trial was pretty simple. They would ask them to take the Catholic mass, and if they refused, they were sentenced to death.

The way you got out of this was to just simply take the mass. Well, the evangelicals wouldn't take the mass. Some of them, I'm sure, capitulated. Most of them held strong and were put in jails, again condemned to die. When the British heard what was happening, they sent gunboats to the islands and the British government wouldn't let the British soldiers invade Madera because they didn't want to start a war with Portugal over some doctor, but the British gunboats just staggered themselves around the island and launched cannons over the islands at regular intervals for days to kind of warn the Portuguese that if you kill these people, there will be consequences.

Eventually, they were able to smuggle O'Keely off the island. They dressed him like a woman, wrapped him in a rug, said that she had a rare infectious disease that had convulsions, and that she needed to get to the British medical ship because of the infectious nature of the disease, the Portuguese soldiers let himher off the island onto the boat, then he escaped. Once the Portuguese realized he was gone, they rounded up all of the Madeiran converts to Christ and exiled them to Trinidad. And, by the way, this is where the gospel presence in Trinidad came from. The first believers in Trinidad were these Madeiran exiles.

IBC has sent several mission trips to Trinidad. It has a thriving Christian population in its day owing to this history. The Portuguese converts as well as some of the disciples, the missionaries, they were rounded up and exiled from the islands and the Portuguese sent them to Brazil, where revival broke out in Brazil. It's ironic that at the time, Brazil was probably numerically the largest Catholic nation in the world, and the Portuguese government planted missionaries there unknowingly. When I read the text in front of us, that story comes to mind.

We're at a transition in the book of Matthew where Jesus is going from His ministry in Galilee, He's gonna end up out of the country. Think of Matthew like a chess game, the first third of a chess game is where the players are establishing themselves, the last third of a chess game is the end game, where you're down to just a, you know, a few players, a few pieces middle part where you start exchanging pieces, the middle third of the game, that's where we are in Matthew's gospel. The players have established their positions, you understand who Jesus is and what He teaches, You understand the Pharisees are against him. You understand the battle lines are gonna be the Sabbath law and the the oral tradition. That's where the lines are drawn.

Now the middle part of the game, that's where we are now. They start trading pieces. John the Baptist is dead. The 12 have been sent out and they're back. The Pharisees and the Herodians are conspiring against each other, the Herodians are a party of allegiance to Rome and the Pharisees are allegiance to Israel, they're partnering together to put Jesus to death.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, trading pieces that's setting you up for the endgame. We're almost there. Jesus, from this point, is gonna go to Jerusalem One last time and then is gonna leave Israel. He's gonna go up to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria, and he's not going to come back to Israel until he's ready to die. That's where we are in Matthew's gospel.

This is the tipping point, and there's no turning back. We see in the text that we read here this morning two different groups of people that both are supposedly worshiping God, but both are actually hating him, and with both groups of people, it's Jesus himself who describes their conduct as hatred towards him. From that we can deduce two approaches to worship that are vain. Vain is a word that's used in the text, it's used in verse nine. In vain do they worship me.

It's similar to the concept in verse six. They make void the word of God, they nullify the word of God, and they worship in vain. In other words, their hearts are sincere. They are sincerely being religious, but they are impotent when it comes to worship. They are unable to actually worship God for two different reasons.

We're not talking about Romans that are doing their own thing or Gentiles that are doing their own thing. We're talking about two groups of people that would consider themselves worshipers of the true God, but their worship is meaningless. The first approach to worship that way is to treat Jesus like a spectacle. When Jesus and the 12 had crossed over, verse 34 of chapter 14 says, they came to land at Gennesaret. That's on the kind of southwest quadrant of the Sea Of Galilee.

You remember when John died, Jesus started working his way around the Sea Of Galilee. The 12 joined him. He took a boat and cut across the Sea Of Galilee, moving from, let's say, the 10:00 over to the 02:00 position. The crowds grew following Him, and remember they were going into the wind, the boat was into the wind, and the crowds were able to outrun the boat, so it was kind of a comical scene as the boat is moving around to find an isolated land. The crowd just kept growing.

Jesus docks, heals people. As the night grew on, He then feeds everybody. Remember, this is the feeding of the 5,000. And then when it gets dark, Jesus sends everybody home. And so they're all at, let's say, the 02:00 part of the Sea Of Galilee, and he sends them home.

There's no Jewish communities out there, so they've got to work their way back around, many of them on land. Jesus puts the 12 in a boat and sends them across. He goes up on a hill by himself, prays. In the middle of the night, He goes back down, walks on the water, joins the boat, and it lands down at Gennesaret, like I said, down at like the seven or 08:00 area. What you learn from John's gospel is that the crowd that was dismissed, they're working their way around, they know Jesus is coming across by a boat and they're wanting to meet Jesus again.

Only they're grabbing more and more sick people to be healed, and you learn about that here in Matthew 14 verse 35. The men recognized him and sent around all the region and brought to him who were sick. John six says they were also in boats. So once they saw that the 12 went off without Jesus and then they saw that Jesus wasn't there and there were no other boats that had been missing, they all take the boats that are there and go hunting for Jesus. So you've got Jesus being hunted on water and hunted on land.

They all collide here in Gennesaret. The crowd is huge. This is back to where we were in Matthew 13, where Jesus told these people in this area that if the signs done to them had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented, but these people do not repent. And Jesus is back doing more miracles. The sick people are still there, verse 36, they're begging Jesus to just touch the fringe of his garment, and everyone who touched it was made well.

Jesus is healing them. These people are seeking for Jesus and being healed by them, but their hearts are far from Him. We know their hearts are far from them. They want the signs and miracles, but they don't want Him as their Lord. They honor Jesus, but they did not humble themselves.

And that's a way to pursue vain worship, to be drawn by Jesus, attracted to Jesus, to know that Jesus is powerful, that he can answer prayers, that he can meet your needs, and to be attracted to that without humbling yourself before him. These healings mark how close people were to Jesus with their hands, but how far away they were with their hearts. They believed He could do miracles, but they did not surrender their lives to Him, and so their worship was vain. I was reading last week in my own devotional time, Acts chapter 14, And I noticed something that struck me in a new way there. Paul and Barnabas are in the temple to Zeus there, or outside the temple to Zeus preaching, and Paul sees a man who's lame in both of his feet, it says, and he locks eyes with him.

The ESV says he stares intently at him. And then Paul heals him and everybody sees it. Something I hadn't really noticed before is the crowd sees it and they go and they get the priest of Zeus and the priest of Hermes and they decide that Paul is Zeus and Barnabas is Hermes and start worshiping them. They saw the miracle, Paul started preaching and the preaching doesn't stop their false worship. They saw the miracle, they believed the miracle, and they responded to the miracle by worshiping Zeus.

You know, miracles are powerful, but they are impotent to change a heart. They cannot change the heart. They have no power to change a heart. You can see miracles and not be saved, and that's what you're seeing here in Matthew 14. These people are overwhelmed with miracles, but they don't humble themselves.

They view Jesus as a vending machine for manna, not the Lord of the universe. And if you think I'm being too harsh on them from this, just this passage, understand this is the same scene in John six where Jesus is healing all of them and then at some point just tells them, listen, you're only here because I fed you yesterday. You want more food. And then He says, I'm not giving you more food today. And they all leave, remember?

They all leave. And Jesus looks at Peter and says, are you going to go also? And Peter says, where else would you go? You alone have the words of eternal life. Everybody left.

Jesus looks back on this in John 15 and says it this way, if I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they wouldn't have sinned. But now they have both seen and hated me and my father as well. Do you catch what Jesus is saying? If they didn't see miracles, this whole thing wouldn't be credited against them as sin. But because they did see all these miracles and they respond by hating me, hating is Jesus' word, they hated me and my father as well.

He's not saying this about the Pharisees, he's saying this about the crowds of people who saw his healings. They've done this to fulfill the word that is written in their law, they hated me without a cause. They don't even realize it, but they're fulfilling scripture. And Jesus continually revealed himself to them. He's raining compassion down on them.

There's nobody he refused to heal, yet they did not respond in faith, which leads to the second way to oppose Jesus, is to treat him like an obstacle. The first way is treat him like a spectacle, like a vending machine for your needs being met, but the second way is to treat him like an obstacle. The second group is who we meet in chapter 15. Verse one, the Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem. Alright, so that's not walking half of a day around the Sea Of Galilee.

This is traveling three days. They're nowhere near Jerusalem here. And the Pharisees did this earlier in Matthew's gospel, they came out to meet John the Baptist, that would take a day and a half, but everybody was going out to meet John the Baptist. Here you've got the religious leaders of Israel traveling around the whole nation going for three days probably at least to get up to Galilee to confront Jesus. Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders, they ask in verse two.

That's the question they've been working on for three days. This should remind you of Matthew 12, they encountered Jesus on the Sabbath in Matthew 12 and ambushed Him earlier, that was a different encounter, earlier and saying, why do your disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath? Do you remember that encounter Jesus was healing people on the Sabbath? He healed the man with the withered hands without lifting a finger. That drove the Pharisees crazy.

They wanted to accuse Him of working on the Sabbath, but He just killed them mentally. They couldn't even accuse Him of working. So instead they accuse Jesus of letting His disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath and say, that's not lawful to do. Jesus rebukes them and says, in fact, He's the Lord of the Sabbath, He can do whatever He wants to on it, which is itself an interesting way of answering it. He doesn't engage with, is it actually okay to pluck grain on the Sabbath or not?

What does the Fourth Commandment actually say? He doesn't play that game. He just says, the Sabbath points to the Son of God. I am the Son of God. My disciples can eat what they want to on it.

And do you remember they left that encounter deciding to put him to death? That's where they partnered with the Herodians to figure out a way to destroy him. Well, now they're back, and this time they have a similar accusation, only this time they note that it's the tradition of the elders. They think this is strengthening their argument. Understand that the Pharisees have a complex system of laws and regulations.

They viewed two streams of authority. The word of God as written, the law, the Torah is a stream of authority that is interpreted by their own tradition and religious leaders. That's the oral authority or the tradition. It's often called the oral authority by many Jewish people, even though it is written down, but it's declared orally, it's to contrast it from the written word of God. So they have the written authority, the word of God, the law of the Torah, and the spoken authority, which is their own teaching of scribes and rabbis, that have been passed down for thousands of years to them.

And you can understand how this works. The written word of God defines clean and unclean food. The oral tradition explains to you how you navigate that distinction. So for example, you can't eat fruit that fell on the ground for lots of reasons. First of all, you don't know was it harvested on the Sabbath, for example.

You don't know. You don't know who harvested it, you don't know when it fell, so don't eat it. Secondly, though, a Gentile pork is unclean. Gentiles eat pork. If food lands on the ground, it could have landed on a place that a Gentile had touched or made unclean.

You know, a Gentile had a ham sandwich last night, walks on the ground, an orange lands on the ground there. You don't know what happened and who was on the ground, so the fruit could be unclean, so you can't eat it. That's the oral tradition. I'm trying to think of an analogy to explain that and you might find this silly but it's helpful for me to think of it through. I think of the analogy of TSA security screening.

Okay, it divides the airport from unclean to clean. Alright? And regardless of how effective the security itself is, you recognize a very clear line. You move from the unclean, you get through it, to the clean, now there's no security. And I'm sure you've had the experience before or been in an airport or heard of this happening, what happens if somebody, you know, makes it through security without being screened?

Well they clear the whole terminal out. People who are on airplanes, they take them off airplanes, they clear out everything and make everybody go through screening again, because the theory is you don't know where that person went. I was at LAX once when that happened, somebody went through security in Terminal 3, which leads these stairs that go up, and they even, they got the guy at the top of the stairs. But they did that, they cleared out the whole terminal, screened everybody, because you had an unclean person where it's supposed to be clean. Rant over, back to the text.

That's the oral tradition. All of these rules and regulations to keep the unclean from tainting the clean. Part of that was the washing of the hands, and so they had a very explicit way that you're supposed to wash hands. It wasn't saying your disciples are eating with unclean hands like they they went to the bathroom and didn't wash their hands. Not that kind of thing.

They're not they're not fourth graders here. We're not talking about that. We're talking about this whole elaborate system of how you're supposed to ceremonially clean yourself depending on what you've touched and who you've interacted with in all of this, and they're not following it. Jesus and his disciples are not following that system. They never have.

They're too busy out there showing compassion to people and healing people. So, they don't play those games. So, the Pharisees ambush Jesus and ask him about that, and I want you to marvel at Jesus's response. He does not answer according to the question. He does not engage with what does the written law versus the oral law actually say.

He doesn't go down the road of does the oral law say you pour them with your right and wash them with your left? He doesn't do that. He doesn't say, you know, the oral law is actually wrong at this point because the written law about clean and unclean foods can be better interpreted this way and he doesn't get into an argument about their actual objection. Again, another example of this might be somebody who says, I don't want to believe the gospel because how could all the animals fit on the ark? So there's part of you that would be tempted to actually answer the question.

To be like, okay, there's a difference between species and kinds and family, and they're on the ark according to their kinds, and this is how big the average kind is, this is how many kinds there are in the world, this is how they get here's a shipping container, here's how, have you been to the ark encounter? You could do that whole answer. But Jesus does not answer that way. Jesus goes at the heart of their question, their presupposition. He answers, why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?

Why do you reject what God says for your own tradition? That leads you to this point. They were treating Jesus like an obstacle because they were honoring traditions that were opposed to him. They were so fastidious in their traditions, they were willing to reject the savior because he did not keep their own oral traditions. So Jesus goes after him.

You're rejecting God, not me. And he gives an example. There could be a thousand examples, he chooses one. Jesus does in verse four. God said, honor your father and your mother.

That's the fifth commandment. That's the exact middle of the 10 Commandments. He's not picking an obscure law, he's not saying you also have, you know, you once ate something that was unclean too. He doesn't go after them that way. He picks the heart of the law, the middle of the 10 Commandments.

Honor your father and your mother. You ignore that, he says. Exodus 20 is the fifth commandment. Exodus 21 says any child who curses, or it's translated here, reviles in verse four, his father and mother must surely die. In Exodus 21, a child who curses his parents should be put to death, and let me just get ahead of this one real quick.

This is a verse that is often misappropriated by parents. I may have misappropriated a time or two myself. You rolled your eyes at me. You know, in the Old Testament, you would be dead right now. That's not what it is.

It's an oath that you make. The Hebrew word here back in Exodus 21 is if a child makes an oath to condemn his parents, like it's severing your tithe from your family. It's a child who says, I'm no longer going to be part of my family. I'm washing my hands and my family. As far as I'm concerned, they're as good as dead.

I'm going away from them. Which happens, you know, it's not unheard of. With somewhat a frequency, even in our own culture, where kids are like, I am done with my family, I'm out. In the Old Testament, that is a capital offense. When you take an oath in the name of God that you are over your family, you're done with them, you could be put to death.

That's how serious of a charge it is. So that's the law. Honor your parents, and if you cut ties with them, if you don't care for them anymore, then you could be executed. That's not an obscure command, it's the heart of the law, and Jesus keeps going. But you say, speaking to Israelites, if anyone tells his father or mother what you would have gained from me is given to God, he does not need to honor his father and mother.

So this is a system the Jews had, it's called Korban. In fact, in Mark's description of this in Mark seven, it uses the word Korban. It's not here in Matthew, but it's what this system is called. So the law commands you to care for your parents. In their old age, they're too old to work, they need help, you're supposed to care for them.

What the Jews would do, many of them, your parents ask for help and you would say, oh, I had stuff to help you, but I have given it to God instead of you, so I have nothing left to help you with. And it's just a silly analogy, but I have the prop with me. Here's this book that we talked about earlier. So parents in their old age say I need help, I need that book from you, and you have it and it was even maybe reserved for them, but you look at it and you're like, and you say the word Corbin over it. You say Corbin, and then you can tell your parents, oh, what I had for you is now meant for God, you can't have it, I'm so sorry.

It's given to God instead. And the ripple in this is that when you make something Corban, it stays in your house. You don't even have to give it to the to the priests. So sorry mom, dad, Corbin. I would love to give it to you, but I can't Corbin and all.

And then all you have to do to to undo it is to say Corbin again. So now the next day you wanna read this book yourself? Corbin. Your parents ask for it? Corbin.

Like that's what they were doing. I'm making it sound a little silly, but that is what they were doing. And Jesus calls them out on it. They travel three days to say, You guys aren't washing your hands the right way. And Jesus gets back at them, You have a whole system to keep people from honoring the Fifth Commandment.

Don't pretend like you care about clean and unclean food through handwashing. Prophet after prophet has gone to Israel, Prophet after prophet has been killed in Israel, and it's this attitude they reject the prophets for the sake of their own tradition. For the sake of your tradition, verse six, you have made void the word of God. You've nullified the word of God. You act like it's so important, but you may as well rip out the fifth commandment from your Bibles.

You hypocrites. Verse seven. Hypocrite is a Greek word just brought into English, not even translated, and we use it as an English word today. Literally, it's an actor, And in the Greek stage plays, somebody would put on the mask to play a part. It's not the real person, it's the mask.

Just brought right into English. You hypocrites, you put on the mask. You cannot be that hard hearted and spiritually dead sincerely. You can't travel three days to get me to stop healing people because my disciples haven't washed their hands. I mean, are you kidding?

How hard hearted would you have to be to close hospitals that are healing people because they are not participating in your religious traditions? The lepers can die for all I care. Better people die from lack of healthcare than they nullify my traditions. How can you really think that? How spiritually dead do you have to be?

Sometimes we believe that religious people are by nature good people. I'll even hear the objection. What happens to somebody who doesn't, you know, doesn't believe in Jesus, but they're so religious, you know? They don't believe the gospel, but they are so religious. I'm telling you some of the most evil people in world history have been the most religious.

You're seeing that in this passage here. They're telling Jesus stop healing people because your disciples aren't following our oral traditions, and they think they're on the right side of this. It's hard to even understand. You hypocrites. By the way, you see the same tension today.

In the Roman Catholic church, you see the same tension. You know, evangelicals say we have the Bible and the Bible's our authority, the Roman Catholic comes along, you know, an educated Roman Catholic comes along, It says salvation comes through sacraments, that God has made a way of sacraments, and it's, you know, God graciously giving us these sacraments. Sacraments are just a way to receive grace. These are works that you do, you receive God's grace, you energize it with your faith, that produces the life of works. Those faith fueled works are meritorious and you receive them through sacrament.

Combine that with the doctrine of purgatory, perpetual virginity of Mary, and you have a whole religious system, and the Christian comes along and says, you know what, that's not in the Bible. Those sacraments are not in the Bible. The virginity of Mary perpetually is not in the Bible. The purgatory is not in the Bible. The whole system is not in the Bible.

And the response that you will most likely get, I'm not talking, you know, a hundred years ago, I'm talking today, the response you'll most likely get from people is that, well, the Bible is your authority, the Catholic church also has the Bible as authority, but in addition to the Bible it has church tradition as authority and the teaching of the church, the magisterium of the church. It's a three legged stool. Scripture, tradition, and church authority. And yes, you have the Bible as your authority, but you need the church tradition to shape how you understand the Bible, And when tradition and the Bible seemed in conflict, you have the Church to arbitrate the two and tell you what it really means. This is, do you appreciate this is the same logic the Pharisees were using with the Torah?

Yes, we have the Torah, but how do you know what the Torah means unless you have our teaching? You know, and an evangelical I'm sure you might respond with, but the Bible is my authority, and you will get the response of, yes, but the church gave you the Bible. How do you have the Bible? You have the Bible because the church said these are the books of the Bible. The church gave the Bible to you.

So therefore the church is the authority. You can't appeal to the Bible because the church is over the Bible, it gave you the Bible. And I know people get so confused about how to respond to that. And you could respond differently. You could respond with, you know, well that's not actually how we got the Bible.

There's an internal characteristic called canonicity. The Bible self authenticates. You have some answer like that. That's not how Jesus does it though. Jesus doesn't answer the outside of the question.

He goes right at the heart. Somebody tells you, you know, the church is the one that gave you the Bible, so you need to respect the church's authority. Here's the question you ask. Where did the church get its authority from? And the answer you will probably hear is that Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter.

Matthew 16, Matthew 18, Jesus made Peter the head of the church and he has the authority of the church. Now here's where you need to think for a second. If that is true, where does the Roman Catholic church learn about that from? Who taught them that Peter had the keys to the church? The word of God, right?

That's where that's from. So when you hear that the church has authority over the Bible because the church gave you the Bible, you need to understand for a second that their so called authority itself comes from the Bible, and if that's true, the Bible is still the authority. The Bible is always the authority. Do you notice that's what Jesus does here in Matthew 15? He says, you hypocrites, and then look what he does.

He doesn't go after their tradition of men. He doesn't say you're actually not understanding what the world tradition is. He goes right to the text. He quotes the Bible back at them. Isaiah prophesied to you when he said, and he's quoting Isaiah twenty nine, this evil honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Yes, their lips are all about we worship God in cleanliness and uncleanness. Their heart is not even in the same world as worship. In vain do they worship me. They try so hard to worship but their wheels are just spinning. They're stuck in the mud of their own traditions because they teach as doctrines the commandments of men.

They are making up things that they say, and sweet, call it the church, call it rabbinic tradition, call it two thousand years of unbroken Pharisaical doctrine passed down through their whole entity, it's still the traditions of men. And so what happens? The Pharisees have two thousand years of tradition and they say they want the Messiah, they meet the Messiah, and the Messiah undercuts their tradition by not following it, and they say He must be killed. You have two thousand years of tradition telling you about a sacramental system that gives you grace through this and that, and then you run into the pure gospel of faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone. It does not depend on works, unless people would boast.

It comes as a free gift of God, salvation does. He saves freely by his grace, not through sacrament, but through faith. And you run into that and you say, I can't believe that, because that undercuts thousands of years, generation after generation after generation, I've been taught the importance of the tradition of the church. It's the same thing here with the Pharisees. And people, when they hold on to thousands of years and generation after generation of tradition, they hit the gospel and they can't let the tradition out of their hands.

They're holding onto it so tight. They think it has to be through sacrament. It has to be through the church. Even if you find somebody that says I believe the gospel, but I just need to keep participating in in the mass. I need to keep participating in the in the teachings of the church and the doctrines of the Catholic church because I believe the gospel, but I has to come through that.

What you're seeing is these people here, their arms are so tightly clutched to the oral tradition, they can't get it out of their hands, and you should feel sorry for them. I mean, Jesus says it's in vain, notice that language, in vain they're trying to worship. They're trying. And it's just so hard for them. They developed a way around the word of God.

Understand, when you encounter the word of God, you have two choices. You take the, again, the fifth commandment. You encounter the fifth commandment, honor your father and your mother, and that's repeated in the New Testament, by the way. First Timothy five, whoever doesn't care for his family is worse than an unbeliever. You know, we're not gonna throw rocks at you until you die if you abandon your family, but we will put you out of the church.

You know, you encounter the fifth commandment or any of the commandments, let's take the fifth one. Honor your father and your mother. The right way to respond to that commandment is to be aware of your sin and be like I've fallen so far short of God's holiness, this exposes my sin, I'm so sorry, And you cry out to God for mercy and receive salvation. The wrong way is to say, well, if this means that, there's no way I can do that. So I'm gonna fence this with other things, other teachings to water it down.

And if I keep those other teachings, then I'm okay. And lo and behold, you have a manmade system. And when that manmade system encounters the Lord, you reject Him. Jesus says this, I showed you so many good works from the Father, for which of these are you stoning Me? That's another question that gets right to the heart.

They say, hey, we're rejecting you because you reject our teaching. And Jesus says, I rejected your teaching by healing thousands of people. Which one of the healed people are you charging me with? Jesus transcends all this, of course. He just falls back on the fact that He is the Lord.

How merciful it is of Him to heal people. He never turned anybody away. How hardhearted you have to be to say close the hospitals unless you receive the mass. Close the miracles of the Sea Of Galilee unless you start washing your hands the way Rabbi so and so said to wash your hands. But, you know, despite how difficult it is, the Lord still saves people.

That's what's so remarkable about this, that people can still get to the point of their life, they're still holding on to their traditions, and then there's a moment where the Lord opens their eyes and they see the truth. It's a moment of clarity. It's not a moment that answers two thousand years of church history. It's not a moment that solves every riddle in the Bible, but it's a moment where the person realizes, you know what? Jesus Christ is the way to salvation.

I should trust Him instead of tradition. Well, Jesus is not done with this group of people. He's gonna double down, but we'll look at that next week. Lord, we're grateful for your word, how it is compelling. We think of so many people we know that are in such thick clutches of tradition, thousands of years of tradition on their shoulders.

It's a weight impossible to bear. Praise God, You did not call us to bear it. Instead, You call anyone who's weak and weary to come to You and You'll give them life. I pray this morning there would be people here in our congregation who would come to you and receive eternal life. I ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen. And now for a parting word from pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today today or if you wanna learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to tms.edu. Now if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.