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Why not get back to the Bible? Why not teach and
practice only what it says? Do we believe we can improve on what God has
told us to do? Do we think that we know better than God does what will
please Him? Do we think to honor Him with our traditions, our innovations
and our ideas? Do we think pleasing the flesh is pleasing God?
Isaiah
8:20 says: “To the law and to the
testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is
no light in them.” All teaching and
practice of those claiming to follow the Lord are to be according to the
Bible! The fact is, true children of God love and treasure the Bible! King
David said, “My soul hath kept thy
testimonies; and I love them exceedingly,”
(Psalm 119:167).
The Jews were given the Old Testament. It
should have been enough for them in that time. But they thought they could
improve on what God had told them. So they came up with inventions and
innovations which became traditions. Jesus never had anything good to say
about human traditions. In fact He told them that they made
“...the word of God of none effect through your
tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye,”
(Mark7:13). The Holy Ghost through Paul also condemned religious traditions
saying, “Beware lest any man spoil you
through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the
rudiments of the world, and not after Christ,” ++++(Colossians
2:8).
And yet a great many professing Christians
supplement and contradict God's Word with religious ideas from many sources.
It might not be so serious a fault except that in adding their own ideas and
the ideas of others to
God's Word the truth is distorted and
nullified. For instance, regarding the all important matter of the new birth
or as the King James Bible marginal reading has it, being “born from above.”
Many people will say that it is necessary to do this or that or the other
thing in order to be born again. But the fact is, nowhere in the Bible did
any New Testament preacher tell a lost person that if they would do this or
that or the other they would be born again. Men prescribe works thinking
human effort will produce the new birth although the Paul wrote:
“Even as David also describeth the blessedness of
the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works,”
(Romans 4:6)
Christ, who is in all things to have the
preeminence must share His glory with eggs, bunnies, crosses, sun worship,
Ishtar, Tammuz, baptism, altar calls, Santa Claus, and other things equally
foreign to the Bible. Let us go back to the Bible! Let us purge our
thinking, our worship and our service from human ideas which almost always
go back to the false idea that there is something a lost sinner can do to
please God.
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