Mark 7:6-8 (NIV): (Jesus) replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”
The Pharisees and teachers of the law had moved away from the clear teachings of the Bible and, step by imperceptible step, had been following a faith that was largely based on man’s thinking about God, instead of on what God had revealed about Himself. And they had been judging others, including Jesus, based on their man-centered faith, and had frequently found them wanting.
The process began innocently enough, with godly men adding interpretations and clarifications to the words recorded in the Scriptures. Some of the events in the Bible were confusing to them, or difficult to understand, so they wrote commentaries about them to try to explain them. Some of the commandments and laws left questions as to how they should be applied, so they wrote applications for those commands. Over time these commentaries filled volumes. Many people, desiring to know and serve God better, intensely studied those writings, crafted by men deemed to be more godly and more wise than ordinary men.
The problem began to manifest itself when those writings became more studied, more well-known, and even more cited than the Scriptures themselves. And the interpretations and commentaries began to be read back into the Scriptures when they were studied, biasing the readers to see things in a certain way, whether or not that way was accurate, not allowing the Scriptures to speak clearly for themselves.
The same phenomena are easily seen in our own times. Many people read the latest devotional book, the latest “historical fiction” about people in the Bible, the latest commentary, and do so much more frequently, much more regularly, and with much more focus than they do the Scriptures themselves. They look up to the authors of those other books because of their godly reputation and the obvious research that they have done. And they feel that those commentators help them to understand the Scriptures better than they could do if they tried to do it themselves. It is then very easy to begin reading those commentaries, those interpretations, and even those fictions, back into the Scriptures themselves, experiencing biases that can lead them to see things in the Bible in a certain way, that may or may not be accurate.
God wrote the Scriptures in such a way that, if His people will only read them along with Him, asking for and receiving His guidance (cf. Psalm 119:18), and letting His words speak for themselves, they can be understood by the vast majority of people. And whereas the commentaries, devotionals, and companion books can sometimes help people to understand historical contexts and applications more fully, even the best of them can never substitute for careful, Spirit-guided reading of the Scriptures themselves.
Father, we often do read books about the Bible much more than the Bible itself. We do this under the guise of them being easier to understand, kind of pre-processed. But when we do that instead of reading and digesting the Scriptures themselves, we run the real risk of keeping ourselves mere spiritual infants, instead of spending lots of quality time in Your word, being guided and directed by You, and being purposefully grown up into people who can rightly handle the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). Help us, Lord, to crave the meat of Your word, undiluted, unprocessed, undigested, so that its clear meaning will shine forth in our hearts and out of our lives, challenging us, informing us, and ultimately changing our lives in ways that secondary sources never can. Amen.