Luke
11:52
Because men,
in their sin natures, do not want to be ruled by God they do all in their power
to cover-up the truth about God. The evident
truth in our own consciousness regarding the special and intelligent creation
of the Universe by Almighty God has been covered over by man’s arbitrarily
imagined philosophical materialism in forms such as pagan polytheism (the
deification of ideas), and modern evolutionary scientism. Maybe in the future I can address that
issue. In this brief article, I want to speak
about how man-made pseudo-christianity has veiled the Bible. The religious power brokers have refused to
enter into the God-given truth and they have constructed an apparatus to hinder
you from entering.
In Luke 11 the
Lord Jesus was not rebuking those afar off and obviously contrary to the Bible,
the Word of God; Jesus was rebuking those that claimed to know and believe the
Bible and represent God. The closer a
lie is to resembling the truth the more dangerous it is. In the statement by the Lord Jesus we are
speaking of in Luke 11:52…
“Woe unto you,
lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in
yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.”
…the lawyers
mentioned are not practitioners of civil or criminal law, as we might think
today, but practitioners in the laws and teachings of Judiasm. If you assume that Judiasm and the Law of God
(the Old Testament Scriptures, called the Torah by the Jews) are one and the
same you would be wrong. The key of
knowledge is a figure of speech for the means of knowledge. Jesus had already spoken of the means of
knowledge in Luke 11:28 where He states, “…blessed are they that hear the word
of God, and keep it.” You want the
truth? Hear the Word of God—take God at His word, and do what God says. The following event and exchange between the
religious leaders and the Lord Jesus recorded in Matthew 15:1-9 is a case in
point, illustrating this veiling of the truth.
You can read that here.
The scribes
and Pharisees complained to Jesus that His disciples were eating without washing
their hands. This was not hand washing
for hygiene, but as a religious rite.
Here is the problem, the Pharisees appealed to the tradition of the
fathers and not to the Bible directly for authority. These men were appealing to the fathers—the
foregoing generations of Judiastic teachers (Rabbis). The Lord brought them up short, rebuked them,
and exposed the wickedness of their hearts, asking, “Why do ye also transgress
the commandment of God by your tradition?”
Jesus continues by giving an example of how they had superimposed
man-made tradition over the Bible and hid the truth from men. The Law of God commanded that a man was to
honour mother and father and the man that cursed his mother and father was
guilty of death. But the ‘fathers’ had
imposed a tradition which said that if a man has goods by which he should be
looking after his aged parents in their need but claims those goods as a future
gift to God he is free from obligation, leaving his parents in poverty. What is the source of this self-righteous rebellion? Their hearts were far from God, regardless of
how much they said they honoured God.
They were GUILTY of the SIN of teaching for “doctrines the commandments
of men.”
When you
superimpose anything over the Bible you take away the key of knowledge. Said another way, you veil the truth from
people. In my experience what most
people know about Christianity comes from Roman Catholicism and, its
off-spring, Protestantism. This is so
heart breaking because these large religious groups, have departed from the Bible
(a long, long, long, time ago) and have taken away the key of knowledge by
their traditions, which is the teachings of the (so-called) “church fathers.” That is why they speak of Catholic Tradition
or Christian Tradition. God warns us
about the traditions of men… “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.” (Col. 2:8) The
history of man’s philosophizing and religion-izing has long proven itself to be
a worthless exercise where men are “ever learning, and never able to come to
the knowledge of the truth.” (2Tim. 3:7)
For your own
eternal good, please, do not abdicate your personal responsibility to know and
believe the truth to another man, or group of men—priests, scholars, clergy,
etc. Set aside the commentators, ‘experts,’
scholars, creeds, traditions, catechisms, etc. and study the Bible
directly. I am not inciting you to make
your own religion. There are too many of
those now. Neither is the point rebellion
against organized religion. The point is
that you would not allow yourself or others to superimpose a tradition over the
Bible so as to hide what God has said. I
appeal to you to go directly to the Bible yourself and take God at His word
according to the normal laws of language. You may have religious and family loyalties
that would attempt to bar you from this.
You may have religious prejudices that would attempt to bar you from
doing this. You may have vested
interests that would be threatened by doing this. Well, you have to decide if those things are
worth your soul.
“For what is a
man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26)
