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Not Knowing What You With Certainty Can Know Is True and Knowing What You Can’t Know Is True

What you can know with certainty is anything that God says.  You know the Bible is true.  God said it.  It’s true and you can know it with certainty.  More than ever, what God says, people don’t know.  They treat what God said like they can’t know it.

Scripture talks about treating what you can know like you can’t know it.  It’s not about knowing.  It’s about wanting.  Someone doesn’t want to do it, so he eliminates it by not knowing it.  He can know it and he does know it.  He says he doesn’t know it.

What I’m writing about is like a little child who “forgets.”  A parent asks if the child knows.  The child nods, “No,” shaking his head back and forth, when the child knows.  Not knowing is an excuse for not doing.  He does know.  With a very large sample size, I can say that children know more than what they act like they do.

Very often, for what people can know, they stay ignorant.  They could know, but they don’t want to know.  They like what they’re doing.  If they don’t try to find out, then they won’t know.  If they don’t know, they won’t have to do.

Knowing what you can know with certainty very often isn’t popular.  It’s easier just to say that you don’t know.

On the other hand, people treat the Bible like it can’t be known.  It’s just opinion.  It is a story book of preferences.  If it makes you feel good, sure, go ahead with it, but don’t treat it like something you can know.

An example of not knowing what you can know occurred recently in the Senate hearings for confirming the Supreme Court justice, when a Senator asked her to define a woman.  She said she didn’t know that.  She could know, but wasn’t willing to know.

Very often what the world knows is that it can’t know.  It knows with certainty that it can’t know.  The unknowability provides freedom.  You’re not to judge what you can’t know, so you must not know.  That way no one can judge.  Then you get to live like you want.

Unwillingness to know becomes a basis of toleration.  You’re in trouble if you judge something wrong, because you’re saying you can know, when you can’t.  You’re left with tolerating wrong things.  It’s required.  The judgment itself becomes what’s wrong.  An irony is that you can know when someone else can’t know.

I’m not saying, however, that people don’t say they know things.  They know what’s wrong with their meal at a restaurant.  These people write a bad review with complete conviction of their own knowledge.  They know if they got bad service from someone.  They know when someone offends them because it’s what they feel.

People know evolution is true.  Evolution is still a theory.  That status hasn’t changed, but men now know men evolved.  This theory promotes naturalism.  Knowing it frees men from their accountability to God, when they don’t know it.  It’s a theory.  It’s a theory that we actually know is not true.

Critical theory poses as knowledge.  People know your motives.  They know you’re racist.  Climate science says it knows the world will end by global warming.  Man causes the end of the world through natural means.  God tells man how the world will end.  That we know.

Churches are more and more worldly because of more and more preference, a lack of knowledge about scriptural things that were once known.  They are still known, but treated like they are not.  What distinguishes the roles of men and women, what were once known, now not known.  The psychology behind overturning scripture, creating victims, who are not victims, this is now known.  People are sure of this.

What I’m describing is leaning on man’s understanding and not on God’s.  God is always right.  Man is rarely to never.  Living by faith, which pleases God, is living by what man can and should know, not by what he knows, but that he really cannot.

How should someone treat willful not knowing or rebellious knowing?  He should tell the truth.  He should embrace knowing what he can and should know.  As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?”  He should also stand against what he knows men cannot know.

In the Long Prayer of Jesus to His Father in John 17, Has “Of The World” Become Meaningless?

The model prayer of Matthew 6 and Luke 11, Jesus didn’t pray.  He was teaching His disciples how to pray.  Certain few times the New Testament records that He spoke to His Father, He didn’t ask for anything.  He prays for one thing in John 12:28, “Father, glorify thy name.”

On the cross in Luke 23:34, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them.”  He prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, two of which He requested essentially the same thing, and the third time it says he prayed the same thing as the first two.  In verse 39, He prayed, “Not as I wilt, but as thou wilt,” regarding His suffering and death, and then in verse 42, “Thy will be done,” which was about the same thing.We know Jesus prayed other times, but those passages don’t tell us what He prayed.  John 17 most represents what Jesus prays, because it contains more that He prayed than all the other places combined.  I will focus on one point of His requests in the chapter, which were not many, but of all of those prayers, He uses the words, “of the world,” seven times.

Jesus never, per se, prays that believers will not be “of the world.”  Not in those exact words.  However, He is asking the Father that in a practical way they will not be of the world.  Let me explain.  John 17:14-16 say (underline mine):

14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 15 I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

Verses 14 and 16 say something similar that lead into the prayer requests of Jesus in John 17:17-20.

17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. 18 As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. 20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.

The Lord Jesus Christ has sent His own into the world, which not only includes His disciples at that time, but all of them into the future (v. 20).  Since they are not “of the world,” even as Jesus was not “of the world,” He prayed that the Father would sanctify them through the truth.  The prayer is that believers would live out in a practical way who they were by nature.  That would occur by sanctification through the Word of God.
Let me further elaborate.  They would be in the world, but since they were not “of the world,” Jesus wanted it to continue that way.  Not being “of the world” directly relates to sanctification.  They would need sanctification through the truth to keep them “not of the world” even as Jesus was “not of the world” (v. 14).  By nature they were “not of the world” (v. 16), but sanctification would be required for them to stay “not of the world” in a practical way or manner.
Of all that Jesus could have or may have prayed, He associated a big chunk of it with “not of the world.”  It seems that the Apostle Paul understood this when he wrote a crucial command of sanctification in Romans 12:2, “Be not conformed to this world.”  It seems that the Apostle John comprehended it, because he wrote in 1 John 2:15-17:

15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

Two verses later, he connected these verses with this (v. 19):

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

“Of the world” and “of us” seem to be a contrast with the other.  If they were not “of us,” based on those previous verses, it seems that they “loved the world” and were “of the world” instead.
John says that “the lust of the flesh,” “the lust of the eyes,” and “the pride of life” are “of the world.”  This will enter into the right understanding of worldliness.  In Titus 2:15, Paul says that the grace of God teaches us to deny “worldly lusts.”
It also seems for sure that Peter understood what Jesus prayed, when he later wrote in 2 Peter 2:20:

For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.

This parallels also with what Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:14, “As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts.”
Much more could be said about the phrase, “of the world,” since it is found in the New Testament many times.  Many related phrases also occur with the “the world” in them, that add to this overall teaching.  However, a believer being in a practical way “not of the world” was a prayer of Jesus in John 17, when coupled with His prayer for sanctification.
Since Jesus did not want true believers to be “of the world,” should we not assume that we can know what “of the world” actually means?  Since Jesus prayed for this, should we also not surmise that Satan would want believers to be “of the world,” especially since John 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11 say he is the “prince of this world.”  In John 17:15, when Jesus prays that the Father would “keep them from the evil,” this would relate to Satan, as likely Jesus was praying, “keep them from the evil one.”  This is how the adjective, used as a noun with the preposition (ek, “from”), might imply the noun, such as “evil thing,” “evil person,” or “evil business.”
What is it to be “of the world”?  If someone is not to be “of the world,” then he needs to know what “of the world” is?  Can he know?  I am contending that “of the world” has become meaningless in evangelicalism and much of fundamentalism.  People know the words, but they do not give an interpretation or an application of these words.  “Not of the world” is not some arbitrary concept.  It means something.
The adverb “worldly” can represent the prepositional phrase “of the world.”  If someone is not worldly, then he is not of the world.  What is worldliness?  When is someone worldly?  It’s nearly impossible for an evangelical or most fundamentalists to be worldly anymore, because they’ve made it meaningless.
For someone not to be worldly, which Jesus prays for all true believers, he will not think worldly, act worldly, wear worldly dress or have a worldly appearance, listen to or play worldly music, or love worldly things.  For all of that to occur, worldliness must have meaningIt does have meaning.
To love the world (1 Jn 2:15) is not the same thing as loving chocolate cake or donuts.  It is to love the world system, which results in conforming to the spirit of the age (Rom 12:2).  Those who conform to the spirit of the age love the world.  They are of the world.
A vast majority of churches today are worldly.  That means they are not “of God.”  They are “of the world.”  Because of a particular view of the grace of God, they think they are saved.  It is not the grace of God.  It is the grace of God having been turned into lasciviousness (Jude 1:4).
With worldliness having no meaning, churches can be worldly and it doesn’t matter to them.  Professing believers can be worldly and it means little to nothing.  By staying worldly, churches keep their worldly people.  Since they don’t preach against worldliness or at least explain what it means, the people most often don’t know anything is wrong.  They don’t even know that worldliness clashes with being a Christian.  If they stood and preached against worldliness, they would shrink to almost nothing.
More to Come

AUTHORS OF THE BLOG

  • Kent Brandenburg
  • Thomas Ross

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