Tradition. It’s a dirty word to some, to some it’s life. Church’s(denominations) have survived on them. “We have always done it this way”, “This is the way that our grandparents have believed”, If we go against them it will be wrong, just wrong! This is the usual remarks that you hear from most older generations in the congregations, it is this mentality that has maybe, just maybe gotten us to the point of where we are at now, at the same place where we always have been.
Why do we seem to think that what we are doing is changing things? If our traditions are to be what we think they are to be why haven’t they set the world on fire? Traditions have come and gone for centuries, and yet everyone has demanded that theirs are the ones that are the right ones.
God didn’t condone traditions. He spoke against them, telling us that we have set our lives to them to make us righteous in God’s eyes. It was the pharisee’s and Sadducee’s were using their traditions to control the law was to continue the traditions of the past. Man has made their bed of continuing their same ole,same ole,things that keep them in the fold. God’s design is to be different.
God designed for His creation to be interwoven with him in his being that made them one. It is this bond that overwrites the mundane things of our daily lives that include ‘our’ traditions of believing that they will get us somewhere in life. What we need to do is to re look at the beginning of God’s world in which He makes a companion in man to be his image. Genesis 1-2 is the blueprint of God’s world with Him, and his image in the center of it. (Do you ‘see’ it!, This picture is the the reality of what the example of the temple was in man’s world, just as an example of what God’s government is to look like.)
Our failure to ‘see’ this picture in Genesis can cause us to totally see another ‘picture’ that we go on a tangent. Mankind has taken it’s pieces and started a different game. Man has seen that it can create ‘ways’ or traditions to stay in the graces of God. Man chooses to forge his own path to God. Man sees his way to God as a structured path of a over and over again ‘work’ to gain that righteousness. God has other ideas, after all it is His plan.
God is in the right. He is the Creator,designer, and the righteous One. God’s love for us and desire to bring us back to him in the renewal of his creation of Man and God together in his creation of community of fellowship.
But why do continue use tradition as a crutch for man to ‘see’ and understand God. Why do we assume ‘our’ tradition is the right one? Did Jesus preach tradition? If I remember right from reading the scriptures Jesus taught against them with the religious leaders. Jesus’s life and ministry was going against the grain of traditions of long standing ways of the ways of man and his traditions.
This has to be seriously considered to be re looked at in the way we perceive our way of life. God has had the way back to him in his plan, our job is to ‘see’ it as our salvation from Him.
Stop, rethink, or more importunately re read the bible from beginning to end to see the storyline of God’s salvation for Us!
The Eternal Purpose 