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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.
A False Kind of “Unity” Sought by a Typical Evangelical
In the area in which I am evangelizing and starting a church, there are several congregations from the Calvary Chapel movement, which started around here in 1977 in the Rogue Valley. The first and biggest of these has its own radio station, which I listen to very often when I get in the car to go somewhere or do something. Listening the past few weeks, based on what I’m hearing, there’s at least a concern for unity in the church, because it is a constant theme from the two main teachers, a father and his son.
The son was talking about unity in the church and the trouble seemed to focus on a political divide in the church between Democrats and Republicans. I imagine it. There are two factions in the church, the young and Woke and then the older and conservative, which right now would be clashing more than ever. There is a wide chasm between these two and probably some anger. This ravine is so wide that the two can’t come together. A question should arise: how are they in the same church in the first place with such diversity of belief and practice? But they are. Now there’s the attempt to procure this unity with teaching. What would that teaching be?
Unity in scripture is the same belief and practice. Unity isn’t putting up with differences in doctrine. Some evangelical churches today have redefined biblical diversity. Diversity is when you have different genders, ethnicities, gifts, abilities, and socio-economic levels. They work together, but the togetherness is the doctrine and practice based on the truth of scripture. The new and counterfeit diversity is a diversity in doctrine and practice, so the unity is something also different. Evangelicals often celebrate the diversity of doctrine in a church and conflate it to a welcome diversity taught in scripture. In fact it’s just disunity being tolerated.
The unity of the Bible is what Jesus prayed for in John 17, which is the same unity as Jesus had with God the Father. This is perfect unity based on the truth. They don’t agree to disagree. That’s also reflected in every single passage on unity in the Bible, which are many. None of those passages differ and none of them teach what evangelicals say unity is. They are disunified with the unity passages.
If I were to offer one verse that provides the biblical teaching, I would provide 1 Corinthians 1:10:
Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.
I’m not going to break it down. It’s self-explanatory. It’s almost redundant in its emphasis on what unity really is and in contradiction to how it is being perverted.
Why is unity defined so much in scripture? One, God wants it. Two, it’s going to be attacked and perverted. And it is.
So what is the perverted view that I heard on the radio, an attempt to conform two such divergent groups into one? He said that the one faction needed to see the other faction as its enemy. The Bible commands, love thy enemies. He said that when you treat an enemy with love, then the next thing you know, he won’t be an enemy any more. Then that person will be your neighbor. Then you just love your neighbor. He didn’t prove any of this assertion, but is it right? Or what’s wrong with it?
How does someone love his enemy? He doesn’t murder him, steal from him, and bear false witness against him. As much as possible he lives peaceably with him. He preaches the gospel to him.
Loving your enemies is not overlooking their false beliefs and practices. It is confronting them and rebuking them and finally separating from them. You can’t fellowship with false beliefs and practices. You can only reprove them (Ephesians 5:11). You don’t become friends or neighbors of an enemy by accepting his false belief and practice. You can’t keep enemies in a church. They have to become friends and that comes by alignment with the truth. If they are enemies because of doctrine and practice, which is what this evangelical leader is talking about, the false doctrine and belief must change.
What is being taught is that the false doctrine and practice must be tolerated. This is loving the enemy. “It’s okay fellow church member that you hold to false doctrine and practice.” This is disobedience to scripture, it isn’t unity, and it isn’t love. Toleration of sin isn’t unity. For much of evangelicalism, keeping together a coalition is more important than pleasing God.
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