After children’s church last week a visiting student excitedly told her
grandpa what the lesson was about. Grandpa was having a hard time relating to
what he was hearing, so he asked the teacher about the lesson. When he learned
it was about Eglon and Ehud (Judges 3:12) he was a little taken back, “Isn’t that story a little gory for kids?” It’s
interesting that we think skewering a fat king, hammering a tent peg into a
man’s head or being eaten by worms is gory. I think much of our weakness on
today’s religious landscape can be attributed to our sanitizing Scripture and
retelling only the warm fuzzy stories.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----With all due respect for your blog yesterday, people engage too much in partial thinking. That is why there are far more opinions amongst people than conclusions. But realizing the reality of the human condition, nobody can do better than doing just partial thinking.
-----If you’ve been staggered a bit by the ambiguity of “partial”, then you’re catching my drift. I mean both senses of the term. No individual can know everything there is available for mankind to know. God knows the rest that is not available. Even that dwarfs the knowledge that is available. And the knowledge that is available dwarfs what one person can correctly know, even given the greatest and most efficient use of his time to know. The truth of the matter is that any one of us knows only a tiny smattering; we know only in part.
-----That’s a little shocking to our consciousness, because the conscious sensation is that of being filled by the knowledge we have. We are completely filled with only a smattering. Just as valid and more needing awareness is that the individual is not the measure of completeness. He is only the measure of what he is. This is humility. But try telling that to a sensation. The completeness of being filled with some knowledge sparks emotional sensations about a thought’s having been generated from complete knowledge. If not countered, these sensations lead to arrogance.
-----So it is true that a person’s opinions and conclusions are partial to what he knows, arising only from what he knows. The Bible’s call for increasing in the knowledge of the Lord goes out in close accord with this fact. The whole of Romans 14 is a “meanwhile” principle upon which unity amongst believers is built in spite of innate partiality. I Corinthians 13:5b, “Love does not insist upon its own way,” is the driving force of that principle, while Romans 12:9-10, “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor,” is the modus operandi of that driving force. By this bit of knowledge of the Lord, partiality towards the concept of others through consideration of the ones you’re with neutralizes the partiality of thinking.
-----Nevertheless, we can’t afford swerving through life being swayed by every opinion and conclusion (even our own) crossing our path. Building the Word of God into our knowledge base increases our stability by reducing partial thinking. Being in this way so critical, what chance will our stability have if we allow partial thinking to filter the Scripture? That gives the classroom to the control of the children and jeopardizes the very truth of a person’s desire to know the Lord.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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