The well-known phrase “If you think education is expense try ignorance” is playing out around the world. In Liberia ignorant people stormed an HIV clinic and carried away infected patients. How can we begin to assess the price this is going to cost mankind? In the Middle East extremists are beheading people, burying people alive, crucifying people and doing other horrors in the name of Allah. Paul was one of those extremists and he said in I Timothy 1:13, “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”
Paul was an extremely well-educated man, who could hardly be classified as ignorant. Yet, he orchestrated the stoning of Stephen. Paul knew Scripture but, he didn’t know God. He never knew God until He met Jesus. To the Ephesians he wrote regarding those who don’t know Jesus, “They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.”
He also wrote in Ephesians 4, “. . . we all reach unity in the faith in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Ignorance is expensive because it retards our growth. When we learn about Jesus we can grow into the whole measure of being like Him. That knowledge equips us for an eternity of becoming. Let’s shed the “I want to go to heaven for material things.” Let’s want to go to heaven that we might understand the deepest secrets of the universe and that we might be everything God wanted us to be when He first said, “Let us make man in OUR image.”
Written by Roger Bothwell on August 19, 2014
Spring of Life, PO Box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574
Rogerbothwell.org