II Ths. 2:15 ... "Stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us."
When I was young, an elderly man told me about an experience he had as a boy not long after the year 1900. He was helping his father harvest wheat on their farm in West Tennessee when a tornado passed within a short distance of them. It came upon them so quickly that, being in the middle of a large field, they did not have time to run for cover. His father yelled to him to lie prone on the ground and cling to the bottom of a small sapling. Although he was battered by the terrific force of the wind, he was not swept away and killed because the young tree enabled him to stay in place.
The word of God serves the same purpose in the life of anyone who is willing to use it. As the seasons of life pass us by, we are all subjected to mighty storms. Excluding the natural phenomena of weather, there are still the tempests that rage just as surely in other dimensions of life. We each must face such gales as evil temptations, failure to reach desired goals, the disloyalty of friends, accidents, disease, the death of loved ones, and countless other calamities and tragedies assault us. God offers us all the help we need to meet and cope with adversities by giving us the Bible, the book of His wisdom. We are assured in II Pet. 1:3 that God "has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence." There is no upheaval in life, no catastrophe, no affliction, that can move us away from our place in the Lord when we stand fast in our faith in God and hold on to the truth we have learned from His word.
In the lead text above, God's word is referred to as "traditions," some of which are oral ("by word of mouth") and some of which are written ("by letter from us"). Tradition is usually understood to be a custom or pattern of human activity which has developed over time and has become established in culture. In fact, critics of the New Testament claim that the gospel was for many decades mainly in an oral form. And as such, it was not united or consistent in content. Those who related it are claimed to have gradually embellished the original material until the result lost sight of reality. They assert that the true personality of Jesus, the literal details of His ministry, and the actual content of His teaching, are lost behind the successive accretions of exaggeration and fanciful myth. For well more than a century liberal theologians have devoted their energy to the "quest for the historical Jesus" and to the effort to "demythologize" the New Testament.
But the word "traditions" in II Ths. 2:15 does not indicate the oral transmission of a body of doctrine that gradually changed until it was finally committed to writing late in the First Century and early in the Second. The transmission of the gospel was certainly oral at first, but it was as fixed in form as if it had been engraved in stone. Jesus told His apostles that upon His departure "the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name ... will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you," (Jno. 14:26). This Spirit from God was in the apostles as they came into the nations and cities of the First Century, guiding them at they taught so they would present nothing other than the truth of Jesus' life, the reality of His miraculous deeds, and the actual content of His message. Nothing was added to it from human imagination, nothing was taken from it that challenges human credence, and nothing was altered within it to make it more palatable to human taste. When this oral tradition was finally put down in written form to become the book we call the New Testament, its content was still the fulness of reality. It is because of the utter reliability of this ancient document that we may accept it with total confidence as the truth and use it as the unmoveable foundation upon which to build lives that will extend into a beautiful and glorious eternity,
