WE DIVE INTO HOW TRADITIONS CAN HAVE THEIR PLACE IN OUR SPIRITUAL LIVES, AS LONG AS THEY ARE SCRIPTURALLY BASED.

 In the year, 63 BC, a famous Roman general named Pompey the Great showed up to Jerusalem and took it by force. A little background is that up until this point, Jerusalem had enjoyed a position of freedom within the Roman Empire. The reason was that the High Priest and King of Judaea, a man named Hyrcanus, was a puppet for Rome. But his brother wanted the position and power, so he had gained a bunch of followers and began a civil war in Judaea and Jerusalem. This affected the taxes and interests of Rome, so they sent General Pompey to make peace and crack some heads if need be. 

But, when Pompey got there, the brother of Hyrcanus had taken power and refused to allow Pompey and his army entrance into Jerusalem. This only made Pompey mad. He was called Pompey the Great because he was a military genius, so he surveyed the situation and came up with a plan. The walls around Jerusalem were about 40ft tall and 8ft thick and made of huge stones. When Pompey first started the siege, he knew he had to overcome those walls, but Jerusalem was built on a hill, so the machines of war needed to conquer the walls, had to be constructed as close to the wall as possible. 

 However, every time he sent his soldiers to build the catapults and battering rams, the Jewish soldiers and archers would attack from the towers on the wall. This slowed the progress significantly. The soldiers were so busy trying to protect the mechanisms, that they couldn’t put them together. 

  This is the same sort of mindset those Jewish leaders in Pompey’s time had. They showed an outward appearance of being spiritual by keeping manmade Sabbath traditions, but where it really counted, being kind and just and righteous, they were severely lacking, and that lacking is ultimately what led to Pompey kicking down the door. 

In the same way, the Jewish leaders in Christ’s time were really good at paying tithes and looking righteous and following man-made traditions, but when it really counted, they missed the mark, in fact, they didn’t even get close to the target. When you get time, read the entire chapter of Matt 23 and you’ll see a side of Christ many of us aren’t familiar with, but we should definitely take note, because He was very serious.

As we move forward in this study, we need to get a better understanding of tradition so we can know where it belongs, and we can recognize when it doesn’t belong. 

To begin, we first need to separate traditions into 2 categories, secular and sacred. Secular traditions could be “family traditions” or “cultural traditions”, where our family might all meet together for Sunday supper or our friends may all get together to watch fireworks on July 4th. For the most part, (with a few exceptions), there’s nothing spiritually good or bad about secular traditions. Often these traditions serve to keep a family or group or culture unified and sharing common experiences. So there’s a place for them.

These traditions aren’t what the Bible is referring to when it mentions traditions, and not what this study is about. What the Bible, and this study is focusing on is Sacred Traditions.

These are traditions that have a spiritual significance and are linked in some way to our relationship with God and His Word. Examples would be Baptism, Communion, corporate Prayer, even Doctrine. This is where we need to divide Sacred Tradition into 3 categories.    

  The gist is that the Israelites hadn’t heard from Moses in a while when he went up on the mountain and they were ready to celebrate and have some fun and get their worship on. But they weren’t really familiar with God yet, because up to that point, Moses was the middle-man. So they got with Aaron, THE HIGH PRIEST, and they all had the great idea of making an idol of gold to worship. But this wasn’t any random idol, this was a statue of an Egyptian god. 

In Egyptian “Tradition”, the bull god Apis was a symbol of kingship, associated with the creator god, and among other things, symbolized death and resurrection. In essence, the false god Apis was an imposter of the TRUE God YHVH. These folks went right back to the ugly Sacred Tradition that originated in the place of their captivity, because it was comfortable. We can’t be free if we constantly put on the enemy’s comfortable chains. To add insult to injury, they did something even more ugly. I had never noticed this before until about 2-3 years ago, but they insinuated that this false god actually was YHVH!

Now, there are many examples of this kind of Sacred tradition found in the Bible, but brothers and sisters, would you believe it can also be found in the Body of Christ? In this day and age? I say this with love and out of concern, but we can’t be so arrogant to assume that we, in the 21 century and surrounded by a culture of corruption and centuries of deception, that we are immune from the same flaws ancient Israel dealt with. There just might be Ugly traditions we, as the Church keep, that may seem to have spiritual significance or at least seem to be connected in some way to our worship of Christ. I’ll let you search the scriptures for yourselves to find that TRUTH.

But, I will say this, if we really dig into where some “sacred” traditions come from, we’ll find they stand in direct opposition of our God and His Truth. What does an egg laying rabbit have to do with THE LAMB OF GOD? What does a decked out evergreen tree have to do with the LION OF JUDAH? Where did that even come from, and more importantly, how did we not see it sneaking in? Well, I have an exercise to demonstrate how tradition can be used to blind us to the TRUTH. 

   The reason most of us missed those Fs is because of how we’ve traditionally been taught to read. When we read the word of, even though we know it’s spelled with an F, we pronounce it with a V, so when we intentionally try to count the Fs, our brain skips right over the O-Fs. In the context of this exercise with this sentence, tradition has made us blind to the Truth.

Now, this exercise isn’t a big issue and I’m not trying to point out flaws in our language, but it’s a good example to show how certain things we’ve been taught or beliefs we’ve inherited, or traditions we’ve kept, could be used to deceive us. Let’s look at an example from the Bible, that for whatever reason, has been hidden in plain sight. Not because God hid it from us, but because like those hidden “F”s, tradition caused us to not even see it. 

1 Timothy 4:7 But reject profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise yourself toward godliness.

This seems pretty self-explanatory. Paul is telling Timothy to not bother with silly old wives’ tales. I remember when I was younger, my grandmother told me not to mess with a praying mantis because it would spit fire in my eyes. And I believed her. That seems like the kind of “old wives’ tale” Paul is talking about.

So yeah, it’s good to not spread tall tales, unless you’re scaring your grandkids, … but if we read the verses before and after this verse, and indeed the entire letter to Timothy, that doesn’t really fit the context, and it seems like Paul is making a big deal out of something small. 

To refresh our memory of the context here, Paul had just prophesied that in the latter times a false “church” would rise up, full of seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, then out of nowhere, he’s like, “oh btw, silly tales are a no-no”. The reason we usually pass right over this verse is because of how we’ve been taught to view this phrase: OLD WIVES’ FABLES.

We view this scripture and this phrase through the lens of our traditional understanding and a bad English translation. So when we read it, it just means silly fairy tales. But to the Romans and Greeks, myths meant something completely different… Here’s what this phrase looks like in the Greek and what it translates to:

OLD WIVES’ FABLES = {GRAODES MYTHOS} = CRONE MYTHS

And here’s an entry about MYTHS from the Oxford Dictionary:

Myths are "stories about divine beings, generally arranged in a coherent system; they are revered as true and sacred; they are endorsed by rulers and priests; and closely linked to religion. Once this link is broken, and the actors in the story are not regarded as gods but as human heroes, giants or fairies, it is no longer a myth but a folktale. Where the central actor is divine but the story is trivial ... the result is religious legend, not myth." [J. Simpson & S. Roud, "Dictionary of English Folklore," Oxford, 2000, p.254]

•  Myths were doctrines and beliefs to the pagans.
•  An example in Christianity would be Christ walking on water.
•  The famous philosopher Socrates was executed for speaking against the gods, that’s how serious myths were to the pagans.
•  Paul didn’t believe in the myths, but he knew the Ephesians did, and the new converts had brought some of their pagan beliefs into the Church of Ephesus.
•  Timothy was the Bishop of Ephesus and these were the issues he was dealing with; that’s why Paul addresses them in his letters to Timothy.
•  Ephesus was famous for having the Temple of Diana.
•  Diana was known by many names in many cultures, Isis in Egypt, Kali in India, Asherah to the Canaanites, and famously as Ishtar to Babylon.
• Throughout history and culture, this demon took the form and was worshipped as a “Triple goddess”.
• The 3 different forms were- Maiden, Mother, and the wisest and most powerful of all, the Crone.
• These 3 forms are still honored by modern day Wiccans.  
• This is where we get the concept of an old witch from.