This word of comfort is addressed to a very specific group
of people. “Listen to me, you who pursue
righteousness, you who seek the Lord…” and ““Listen to me, you who pursue
righteousness, you who seek the Lord…”
The promised comfort is intended to reach the ears and then the hearts
of those who seek righteousness because what is promised is righteousness, “a
law will go out from me, and I will set my justice for a light to the
peoples.” Those who will fully receive
the comfort the Lord offers know that the real comfort is not the Land or its
possession and enjoyment, it is found in the comforter Himself, the restoration
not of the nation but of a covenant people worshipping and enjoying Him. We tend to get that wrong. When we look for restoration of some wrong we
set that thing first and not the one who restores. Possession of the Land was something that was
to benefit the people and the Land because the people lived according to the
Law and life was as it should be. The
command was, “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for
the heavens vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they
who dwell in it will die in like manner; but my salvation will be forever, and
my righteousness will never be dismayed.”
Tradition, Jesus says, is a secondary matter. “You leave the commandment of God and hold to
the tradition of men.” It isn’t that
tradition is a bad thing but when it becomes more important than the
commandment of God then we have a problem.
The commandments Jesus gave were simply love God and love your
neighbor. When tradition gets in the way
of those two, we need to re-evaluate the tradition. Sometimes we value traditions over
people. In our worship we certainly
value the tradition and other churches don’t in favor of reaching seekers in
worship. Our choice of traditional
worship means that we need to be more active and involved in personal
evangelism than other people since we have at least half our service that is inaccessible
to seekers, communion, which is only intended for believers. The remainder of the worship can also be inaccessible
as we demand a high reading level to fully participate. If we aren’t engaged in personal evangelism, I
would say that Jesus’ criticism of tradition is validly applicable to us. Let’s make sure it isn’t.
The Law was simply given as a pedagogue, a teacher to lead
us to Christ. It was an intermediate
step that awaited the proper time for its fulfillment. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law in
perfection, as only the Lawgiver can be.
Righteousness isn’t its own reward, it can’t be reached and it isn’t a
competitive game whereby we measure ourselves against others. If we are truly pursuing righteousness, then
we have a picture of it in our heads and yet when perfect righteousness came,
we see that those who were said and thought to be pursuing it had a wrong
picture of what it looked like. Jesus came
to show us what real righteousness looks like, so our picture can be accurate
and we can pursue true righteousness. We
stand in His righteousness when we believe in faith that He is the perfect
sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
The tradition of faith, the tradition that traces back to Abraham, is
the only tradition that truly matters.
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