There is a sentence you can hear in almost any church, from almost anyone. The Bible is clear on this. Said over coffee by a brother who has thought about a question for a while, it is an opinion offered with some confidence. You can ask him where it says so. You can disagree with him, and lunch goes on.
Now put the same sentence at the front of the room. Same words. An elder says them in a members’ meeting, or a pastor says them from the pulpit, and the room hears something different. It no longer sounds like one man’s confidence. It sounds like the church’s teaching, and to many in the room it sounds like God’s.
That is not because the room is gullible. It is because the room is doing what it is supposed to do. A church sets men over it to teach it, and then it listens to them. That is how it is meant to work.
Scripture understood all of this long before any of us sat in a church, and it has a good deal to say to the man who stands at the front.
Seek Instruction from His Mouth
Near the end of the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi brings God’s word to the priests of his day. In the middle of a hard chapter he stops to say what a priest is for.
“For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts” (Malachi 2:7 ESV).
Notice what that verse says about the people. They are not being naive when they come to the priest for instruction. They are doing the right thing. People should seek instruction from his mouth. And notice the reason the verse gives. Not his gifts. Not his personality. His calling. He is God’s messenger. His instruction carried weight because God had put it there.
Then the next verse.
“But you have turned aside from the way. You have caused many to stumble by your instruction” (Malachi 2:8 ESV).
Look at where the stumbling is laid. Many stumbled. People who sought instruction, as they were meant to, went wrong. And God does not say to them, you should have known better. He says to the priest, your instruction. The charge goes where the trust was placed.
I want to be careful about two things here.
First, Malachi does not excuse the people in general. A few verses later he has hard words for them too, about their own faithlessness. I am not saying the prophet holds them blameless for everything. I am saying that in this verse, the stumbling of the many is laid at the feet of the one who taught them.
Second, elders are not priests. The New Testament never calls them that. It calls them shepherds and overseers, and it gives the name priest to the whole people of God. So I am not handing Malachi’s priesthood to the elder board. What carries across is narrower than that. The priest was charged to teach, and the people were told to listen. Elders are charged to teach as well, and a church that listens to them is right to. Where the charge is the same, the weight of it is the same. James says as much to the church in his own words, when he warns that teaching is a calling to enter carefully, because those who teach will answer for it more strictly.
The Commandments of Men
Jesus met the same problem in the teachers of His own day.
In Matthew 15, Pharisees and scribes come from Jerusalem to question Him. These are not men on the edges. They are the recognized teachers, the men the people had been taught to listen to. Their complaint is that His disciples do not keep the tradition of the elders about washing before a meal.
Jesus answers with an example of their own. God commanded His people to honor father and mother. But the teachers had a tradition that let a man declare that what he owed his parents was given to God instead, and once he had said it, he was released from what he owed them. A human rule, wearing God’s name, used to set aside God’s own command.
“So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God” (Matthew 15:6 ESV).
Then He reaches back to the prophet Isaiah and describes them as men “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9 ESV).
That phrase is worth slowing down for. Jesus is not condemning tradition as such. Every church has practices, and it needs them: how we gather, how we pray, how we keep the Lord’s Day. The problem was not that the teachers had customs. It was that they taught their customs as God’s commands, and the people who kept them were keeping them because their teachers said God required it.
That is the move this article is about, and in a church it looks very ordinary.
A leadership prefers a practice and announces it as what Scripture requires. A man in the pulpit says the Bible is clear about a question he has not actually studied, and he says it with all the confidence the pulpit gives a voice. An elder offers his own reading of a hard passage and gives it as the meaning, with no hint that faithful people have read it another way. Most of these men mean well. But each has taken his own conclusion and let his office carry it into the room wearing God’s authority.
What the Office Carries
If you were the one sitting in that room, I want to say this plainly.
You did not trust a stranger. You trusted the man your church had set over you, and Malachi says that is exactly what God’s people are meant to do. The trust was rightly placed. What was done with it is his to answer for, not yours.
And I have to say where I am in this.
I have sat at an elder table in the seat the room looked to, and I learned something there that I am still learning. A room does not hear you the way it hears a brother in the hallway. I could say “I think,” and some in the room heard “Scripture says.” The weight was not in my words. It was in the seat, and the seat was never mine. There were times I did not notice the difference.
That is what an office does. It carries whatever is put on it further than the man could carry it alone. That is why it is a gift to a church. It is also why the man who holds it has to be more careful with God’s name than anyone else in the building, not less. When the claim goes wrong, Scripture lays the charge exactly where it laid the trust.
If You Are the One at the Front
If you sit at the table, or stand in the pulpit, two habits will do more than any policy.
The first is to say which it is. When it is your reading, say so: I think this passage means. When the text says it plainly, show the room where. The room will hear more in your words than you put there. The least you owe the people listening is an honest label on what you are handing them.
The second is harder. When the room hears more than you said, correct it. If you offered an opinion and the room received a ruling, say so out loud, and soon. Nobody else can do that for you. A member cannot easily stand up and say, I think the elder was only giving his view. Only the man at the front can take the extra weight back off his own words.
The Many
Malachi’s word for the people who went wrong is many. Not a few careless ones. Many, and they went wrong by doing what they had been told to do: seeking instruction from the mouth God had set to give it.
The office is a trust, given by God for the good of the people who sit under it. The man who holds it is handling two things that are not his: the trust of those people, and the name of God. No one in the church has more reason to handle both with care.
All of this has been about the man at the front. But the habit is not his alone. And the one mouth any of us will finally answer for is our own.