You’d think that such a man would believe that he knew what he knew. But no. Paul knew that his knowledge was narrow and hindered by life in this world:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).)Paul freely confessed the limits of what he knew.
We Americans today are unlike Paul. At the risk of simplifying: spiritually, we are a People Who Know. We do not, like Paul, know the limits of our knowledge. The Unknown is a stranger to us.
Instead, we make a friend of Certainty. We are certain about religion. We are certain about scripture. We are certain that scripture is inerrant. And we are certain about our interpretation of scripture. We believe that scripture is easy, and that to interpret it, we need only to "believe" it, which often means to read it literally. Sometimes, a biblical answer is as simple as finding a Bible verse on an internet-Bible search engine.
Because we are certain about scripture, and because we are certain that we understand it, we are certain about our salvation. We quote Acts 16:31:
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. (KJV)We are more certain than we should be.
We are certain because our world seduces us into false confidence. Technology hides spiritual risk behind the mirage of easy living.
See how we live. Jets whisper us to far places. Computers in our cars warn us about engine problems before we are stranded on the freeway. Unemployment insurance protects us from the economic wreck of job loss (somewhat), and social security and 401(k) plans shelter us in old age. Police and firemen are a 9-1-1 call away, and 9-1-1 also summons an ambulance to rush us to an emergency room. Please do not infer that I am against these things; I say only that they hide the uncertainty of life in this world by making our lives more cocooned than the lives of our forebears.
Our forebears were moved to accept uncertainty by the uncertainty of the lives that they lived. In this country, they might leave behind what they knew and travel for months by wagon to the unknown. Death along the way was a known risk – death by heat, cold, hunger, thirst, sickness, injury, or attack. Pioneers carried guns because government protection was days or weeks away. Their wagons carried supplies that they would need, because chances to re-supply were few. A lame animal could doom a family.
Even urban life in times past had risks that are rare in our time and in our country. In times past, doctors could help only if you did not get too sick. A wound that modern medicine easily treats could be deadly in the times before antibiotics. Doctors did not wash their hand or clean their surgery tools before cutting into flesh, because they did not know about germs. Pregnancy came with danger, and birth came with only a hope that the child would live to adulthood. This was important, because children were the chief hope for livelihood in old age.
There was no social safety-net.
Diseases regularly decimated populations.
So the lives of our forebears were filled with risks that our own are not. Our benign world must affect the way we see our God, our lives, and ourselves. It leads us to see differently than we would see if we lived in the harsh world of our forebears. The ease and seeming-certainty of our material world mask the danger and uncertainty of the spiritual life.
The world of our forebears taught the right lessons; ours misleads us. They were hardscrabble; we are rich. And riches, we know, deceive. (Matthew 13:22.)
We are all on a countdown to the end of life. This countdown has no visible clock that tells us when our time will be up. That uncertainty is a metaphor for the uncertainty, corporeal and spiritual, of our lives. We turn away from this broad uncertainty at our own risk.
This is the beginning of my argument that we should bind uncertainty to our hearts.
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