Knowledge and Responsibility

“For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.” (Mt 13:17 AV)

 What an astounding statement.  It is a statement of both blessing and responsibility.  The LORD is speaking to His disciples.  They asked Him why he spoke to the people in parables.  His answer was the parables were a response to the people’s willful ignorance.  If they would not consider the truth Jesus had for them, he would obscure it by parables.  Truth was not obscured beyond the ability of someone to discern it as truth even if he could not understand it.  Rather, by speaking in parables, Jesus stirred in the hearts of some a desire to learn.  If there was no desire, they remained blind from the truth contained in the parables.  Our LORD’s statement above is not a critique of the prophets and the righteous who had come before.  They indeed did desire to know truth, particularly where it applied to the Messiah and His kingdom.  What they had was a foreshadowing.  Obscurity about the truth in which they needed to place their trust.  The disciples did not need to do as such.  They had the Messiah and His kingdom in real-time.  This is what the prophets and righteous desired to see.  This brings us to our point.  We live in a most blessed time of God’s dispensational plan.  Outside of the millennial reign of Christ, the church age has the most truth available to mankind.  There will be no greater age other than the reign of Christ wherein the truth contained in the word of God is available.  With that blessing and privilege comes responsibility.

In the last two years of High School, one of my electives was technical drawing.  Drafting is it is commonly known.  I stuck with mechanical drawing rather than architectural drawing because the physics involved intrigued me more than that which architectural drawing required.  At least to the level, a high school will teach architectural drawing.  Anyway, this class was one I excelled at.  I mean, really excelled.  The teacher routinely gave me a 99 on my drawings.  I asked him why I never got a 100.  He said there was always an element of human imperfection in anything we do so he would not give out 100s.  Each semester, there was an assigned number of drawings.  I finished them well ahead of schedule.  This left me about a quarter of a semester with no required work to be done.  So, the instructor gave me advanced college-level work.  I love learning.  It makes one feel young and like he is growing.  Something else the teacher required of me was to help some of the slower students.  Once the teacher had given me a more advanced understanding of the drawings and why they had to be a certain way, I could explain by words what I instinctively knew.  With the knowledge, he gave me came the responsibility to help others who desired to learn.  With that extra knowledge came the responsibility to take on some simple engineering projects, especially in Boy Scouts.  With the knowledge the teacher gave me, I was expected to do something with it.

It is a blessing beyond words that we are born and spiritually raised during the church age.  We have the complete word of God.  We have those portions of scripture that have not been fulfilled yet.  The old testament saint and prophet did not.  They were looking at the Messiah through a misty glass.  They saw some details.  But they could not see the whole picture.  The tribulation saint will have to deal with a famine of the word of God.  Biblical truth will be hard to come by when the AntiChrist reigns.  We do not have to deal with surviving on mere oral tradition like Old Testament saints were burdened with before Job and Moses.  We have so much light.  Yet, what are we doing with it?  Some are not satisfied with applying the light they have.  They are in pursuit of the flashlight with the greatest lumens possible.  But it stays in the top drawer and doesn’t help anyone.  We can boast that we have the brightest flashlight known to mankind.  We can show the receipt.  We can expound on its virtues.  But if it remains in the drawer it is good for nothing.  Others will bring out the flashlight for one’s own personal use.  He uses it in the vicinity of the dresser that keeps it, but it never comes out for others to be blessed by it.  We have the greatest amount of light that any generation has ever had before us.  What are we doing with it?