TRADITIONS OF MEN

Fellow grace believer Rita Bauschard of Bible Ambassadors shares her insights on how easily the errors of religionists can creep into the thinking of even genuine believers who seek to honor the word of God in all they do, say, and write. Thank you, Rita, for this and everything else you do so tirelessly for the gospel of Christ.

Here's Rita's post:

"Satan (diabolos, devil) means "something that is thrown between." He is a separator; He is an adversary; He’s someone who tries to separate you from God."

The above quote is another example of something that editing has helped me learn. But not only editing. Learning where various Bible translations come from impacted me so much that I CANNOT simply ignore capitalization of every pronoun that may refer to our Lord Jesus Christ or God in the writings of men. Why? Re-read the above sentence and notice that doing so becomes such a habit we do not even notice when we have attributed the "honorary" (religious type honor) capitalization to Satan.

At first I merely looked up the verses in question, or the words in question, and learned that the King James Version (the Bible we claim to be our authority) had no such capitalization.

Then I decided to look further into this and found that the 'tradition' seems to have embedded itself into our minds before we adopted the KJV as our only trustworthy authority. Are we hanging on to a 'religious tradition' that came to us through the Roman influence in modern translations?

Col. 2:8 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.

Read Chapter 7 of Mark's gospel to learn how God feels about the "traditions of men." These of course refer to 'religious' kinds of traditions which become rituals. It seems very definitely to have become a ritual to use capitalization of all pronouns when writing of God or his Christ.

But, praise be to God, we can change it! It was easy for me to make the decision to stop giving honor to Satan by following a tradition passed on in apostate writings. How about you?

Think about it.

Additional comments from Rita (2/14/11):

Some have read my "rantings" on over-capitalization of pronouns as dictates against grace and as establishing law in writing. They were not intended in that way, but as an encouragement for each to examine his own heart motives when about to capitalize the pronouns "he, his and him," etc. believed to refer to God or the Lord Jesus Christ mid-sentence or mid-paragraph.

In our human wisdom and human good, we think we shall honor God if we capitalize these words. Or we may think it will clarify of whom we write. I am not against honoring my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ and Jehovah God. Regardless of which reason, what I have endeavored to point out is a recognition that this act of human good leads to HABIT and habit leads to error, as demonstrated previously in several paragraphs quoted from non-secular writings.

I am presently reading a secular book that attempts to educate the un-educated (which is why I am reading it ) about the Muslim world. And again, I have come across a sentence that demonstrates my point about our "human good" habits.

The following is from the book, The Grand Jihad by Andrew C. McCarthy:

"Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor (sic) evaded. Allah has ascribed great importance to Jihad and has made the reward of the martyrs and fighters in His way a splendid one. ... "

I am willing to bet the author did not intend to honor "Allah" by capitalizing "his" in that sentence as it is a book exposing the errors of Islam.