2 Timothy 3:7 CJB
who are always learning but never able to come to full knowledge of the truth.
This has been an intriguing point for me as I have come into greater knowledge of Torah truths and Messiah, watching and teaching others along the way. Some people seem to grow in leaps and bounds while others sort of swish back and forth. In context, it is a reference to the end times, which makes it pretty relevant I'd say!
In reading your posting, part of me was reminded of how memories can have a dual reality. FOr sometimes, in the pursuit of knowledge, the means become the end rather than remembering that the end was to be more in LOVE with Yeshua/preaching the Gospel...and thus, you have people proud of how much they may think they know---yet their hearts are far from where they used to be when they knew little...and yet the Lord used them greatly due to how they simply wanted to share Him with others.
Everything else is simply the form of what it means to follow Him rather than the substance.....and no matter how much one claims to know, be it the Hebraic or other things, it doesn't take much to love. A prostitute coming off the streets could care less about how much of the Hebraic one knows, for what she needs to know is whether or not a Savior died for her to redeem her/her children....and working with people on the streets who had that reality in view, it's amazing how so seemed to know so little and yet accomplished much
Not surprising, is it any wonder why Christ often went to the prostitutes/tax-collectors and others whom the most learned Jewish scholars often despised because they just seemed too "simple"? (Luke 18--on the two men who went to the temple to pray, Luke 15, etc)
Matthew 11:25
[
Rest for the Weary ] At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have
hidden these things
from the wise and learned, and revealed
them to little children.
Matthew 11
Luke 10:21
At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have
hidden these things
from the wise and learned, and revealed
them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
Luke 10
On the same token, there is a beauty in growing up in knowledge/experiences--both in realizing how the more one thinks they know, the more they realize that they really have no idea...for rabbit hole can always go deep when seeing just how much there is to learn. There are things I wish I knew years ago--and yet, I realize that I would not have been able to handle it. Moreover, as much as I'm glad to be learning of advanced topics/concepts that aided me, I realized years ago that I didn't have to DEVALUE what I was learning in previous times....just as students don't despise their development process/the things they learned in kindergarden, pre-school or even highschool simply because they're at a College level. I may enjoy studying Algebra, but that doesn't mean that I discount how much of a joy it was to learn mathematics....for both are necessary in the development of who someone is....and there should always be appreciation.
If any good teacher is worth His salt, all that he teaches is remembered and applied to daily living. Nothing taught is gone to waste. A good analogy for this is my college books. They are still on my shelf for reference purposes.. like my history book, biology book, social justic books and many others since some things never change. I still have nearly all of my textbooks from college--and hated having to sell some of them back to make funds for college living. I love learning and remembering the things I'm able to assimilate...but within that, I also love progression in knowledge/knowing that what I knew 5yrs ago isn't necessarily the limits on what I must know in the future. There are some things I keep from my college classes not because I seek to apply them--but because of the lessons I learned and what they remind me of when I check them out. Some classes I got through were simply for the sake of advancing onto another class I was able to enjoy---and some things learned are simply not applied 24/7. Statistics class being one of them
But indeed, some things never change. ...and with others, if change occurs, they can still have value. As another Messianic said best, there may be some things the bus driver told you as a child that are still useful today. It's still a good idea to look both ways before crossing the street, and not to get out of a vehicle until it has come to a complete stop. But if you refuse to chew gum because a bus driver forbade it twenty years ago, that'd be foolish---for you are no longer under that authority. The same goes even with college, for there are many classes where professors made clear that what is learned in the class was meant to be surprassed later on by the students who'd also become teachers and professors in differing realms. In my view, when others find an idea in Old Testament law that aids them in becoming the kind of person that exudes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22), then that's a beautiful thing...and they should do that as long as it helps. But that by itself can never aid a person since what matters is person whom the OT points to....and the example he lived.
Life is the classroom, Christ is the teacher....and He definately uses many books (Old and New) to train people in learning how to live as He desired...
But no matter where a person may be at in life, so long as they're looking toward the Lord Jesus, it's all good. Because someone may not be at a stage of understanding/revelation that I may be at does not mean that they're someho wrong for being at that point--and just because I used to be at a certain stage where certain things were not made clear to me did not mean that I need to look back in shame saying "Oh, when I was just a simple little Christian..." For the Lord works with people at all stages. He did the same with His apostles, as many things were intentionally hidden from them.
And as much as I appreciate/miss revelations I learned at earlier stages, it doesn't mean I dwell upon them since I may miss out on the beauty of what I have available today. By no means am I for the thought that one can't miss things that may've happened before, for there are many times I have those thoughts when seeing the sheer destruction of the family and loss of understanding in history/valuing the arts. CeCe had a powerful song on the issue that always comes to mind:
And yet within that, I know that there can be times that I can end up doing damage when asking the wrong questions at the wrong times. A scripture that always comes to my mind:
Every age has its bright and its dark sides...and this division of light and shadow between the past and the present shows a lack of understanding of the signs of the times and of the ways of God.
At one conference I was able to go to last year, a woman by the name of
Priscilla Shirer shared her thoughts on what happens when we're so focused on looking forward to the next thing that we can end up missing the best thing. She shared how she was going through her past stuff in her parents' attic. She found her old journals. She read in her past journals about the time a house caught fire in the cul de sac where she lived. Everyone saw the fire outside her window, but she slept through it.
She later saw the same theme arise when seeing in her journals (all the way from highschool to college to marriage and having children) how her main phrase was "I can't wait..." kept on coming up....for she kept wishing that she was somewhere different than where she was. She realized that she slept through whole seasons of her life. She kept on wishing her life away, wanting to get to the next season. Hurrying through every single season. Never being present where you are, what you're experiencing. And it really served to remind me of how many times I can devalue where I'm at because of how much of a rush I can be in.
The same theme applies in reverse when it comes to wishing you could go BACK to what you used to have..and yet never realize how some things were NEVER as good as you thought them to be (and some of the bad things you hated you forget).
As another
believer said best on the matter of
Ecclesiastes 7:10:
Life was easy in the fifties. Most of the shows on television were about cowboys. The good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats and it was easy to tell them apart. The good guys never did bad things, and the bad guys never did good things. The television shows that were not about cowboys were about happy, loving families, such as Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, or they were about superheroes, such as Superman, who was always on the side of right and his personal faults never tripped him up.
But those days were not really so good, you only remember them that way. What you forget as you reminisce about the fifties is the terror of that decade. We began with the hysteria of the red scare and ended it terrified of the bomb. On the weekend, we went to the local school to see the latest fallout shelters, which if we had enough money, we could bury in our backyards so that we could survive the nuclear holocaust. No matter what town it was, everyone in it knew that they were the number one target on the Russians list. We stared up into the nighttime sky in fear and awe at Sputnik, the first artificial satellite ever to orbit the earth, and in our terror we flocked to the theaters to watch movies about oppressive invaders from outer space. In those days, a black family traveling cross-country to visit relatives had to sleep in the car, because decent motels didnt take colored people. Instead of eating in restaurants, they had to satisfy themselves with a specially designated take-out window, and they had to plan their route to avoid towns where the decent folk didnt like colored people driving through.
Later we discovered that the actors who portrayed our domestic ideals on the television tube did not live them in their daily lives. They suffered divorce and went through child custody battles; they had drug problems, and George Reeves, who was the 1950s Superman, ended his life with a gun to his head. Many of the he-men whose manliness we admired at the movies turned out to have been gay all along. The decency that separated black and white in the fifties is now an unspeakable moral failing. Nothing turned out to be what it seemed at the time! Not only were our pleasures illusions, our terrors were as well, and as for the Communist Bloc we feared so muchit evaporated like a bad dream at the dawn of a new day.
The sixties werent any better. We began that decade with the assassination of the president of the United States and ended it with the Viet Nam war and filled the middle with racial strife. The seventies contained the inglorious end to the Viet Nam war, the resignation of a president, and war veterans who were denied the glory we promised them.
I could go on and on, but my point is clear: the good old days arent good, they are just old. And so Ecclesiastes tells us not to ask why the old days were better than these, because such a question arises, not from wisdom, but from amnesia.
Would you like to go back to the fifties in a time machine? I dont think so. Even though you know how things turned out, it isnt a place most of us would like to live. Back then, hearing aids were the size of paperback books, there were no computers, television was only black and white, and there was no air conditioning in private homes. There was no Heimlich maneuver, no CPR, no open-heart surgery, and no effective treatment for epilepsy, depressive disorders, or migraine headaches. Remember whiplash? There were no headrests, seatbelts, or airbags in cars, and most of the good highways had not yet been built.
So why do we forget the trials, tribulations, and troubles of former times and remember them fondly? Why do we yearn to return to a time in which we lived in terror day and night?
We remember them as the good old days, because we know how they turned out. We have anxiety about the present age, because we do not know how things will turn out, and in being anxious, we reveal our lack of faith.
