What stuck out to me today is Jesus’ admonition about the Pharisees that they “teach as law the commands of men.” We all need to careful about this from two angles. We need to watch that we don’t fall victim to other people who are teaching “as law the commands of men.” We always need to check what other people are teaching us with God’s Word. Remember, just because someone has been to seminary or been a pastor for a while doesn’t mean their interpretation of scripture is infallible. The fact is that the greatest teacher of scripture isn’t another person anyway — it’s the Holy Spirit. That means you, sitting down with a Bible in hand and with the Spirit in you, are just as able to understand scripture as the most experienced teacher.
A few years back there was an interesting study done on church planting in international contexts. The places surveyed were places where the pastors had little formal training (like seminary, college, or even a high school diploma), but they were pastors who were committed to obeying and teaching others to obey what the Word of God says. Those doing the study expected that they’d find that the churches these pastors started had more doctrinal problems than churches in the West that had predominantly seminary-trained pastors. They discovered just the opposite. The most doctrinally pure churches were the ones whose pastors were simply committed to doing what the plain reading of the Bible says. I don’t say this to down a seminary eduction. I have a seminary degree. I say this to let you know one thing. You don’t have to know Greek, Hebrew or all of ins and outs of an advanced biblical degree. Often the Bible means what the plain reading of scripture says. The best teacher you have is not a seminary-trained pastor, but the Holy Spirit moving and working inside of you.
The other point I believe we need to ask ourselves is, are we teaching other people the commands of men as lawz? It’s an easy habit to fall into. Sometimes you’ll read a book, a book even based on the Bible, and that book will have some helpful applications to help you live out the scripture it includes in the book. That’s great. Eat that up. Ask God whether those are applications you need to build into your life. What you can’t do though is take those applications and tell someone else they have to obey them. They have to obey God’s Word — not your word. For example, say you’re reading God’s admonition in the 10 Commandments to honor the Sabbath. And you’re thinking about that command and you listen to some preacher and he says that to honor the Sabbath You’ve got to spend the day in your house with your family. You pray about it and God tells you to do it. So you make a commitment to do that. You spend all of the Sabbath with your family in your house. That’s great. The problem comes in when you start teaching other people to do this and making them think they have to do that to obey scripture. No, they don’t. Bible doesn’t get that specific about the Sabbath. We’re told to honor it. We can share our suggestions beyond that about how to help people do that — but we should never put our ideas on the same level as the law of God.
