Plumb Line

When people don't know the Word of God well, they fill the pages with foolishness that sounds biblical. Perhaps you've heard some of these before: God helps those who help themselves. God wants me to be healthy and prosperous.

The Pharisees were citing oral law here. "Don't eat food with hands that haven't been ceremonially cleaned."

Tradition taught that filthy hands were an open door for evil spirits to enter the body. The gravity of this sin was comparable to soliciting a prostitute and punishable by excommunication or even death. This and other oral laws formed a set of regulations and traditions not found in the laws of Moses, or Torah. The Pharisees valued their traditions even more than the Torah.

Many years later the oral law was printed in a book known as the Talmud. There we find this belief: “The words of the scribes are lovely beyond the words of the law: for the words of the law are weighty and light, but the words of the scribes are all weighty.”

Jesus counters the Pharisees’ accusation by pointing out that while they have been keeping their own regulations, they have failed to pay attention to God’s Word, which says that cursing your parents is punishable by death (Leviticus 20:9). He then goes after the Pharisees’ root problem: they don’t elevate the Word of God above all other wisdom.

We have the same core problem today. We put science, philosophy, or self-help advice on the same level as God’s Word, taking an enlightened, both/and approach to our faith. But such syncretism inevitably leads to a conflict between man’s wisdom and God’s truth. What happens then?

Have you set God’s Word as your ultimate plumb line? Do you know the Word so well that you can distinguish human words from God’s Word?

Respond in Prayer

Living Word, I am but a breath, but your Word stands forever. Help me to so immerse myself in your Word that I won’t be attracted to human wisdom that fades with time. Then the Word will be living and active in my life. Through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.

Roy Eyre