Knowledge / Understanding
Barnes on Hebrews 13:9
The meaning is, that it is better to have the heart established with grace, or with the principles of pure religion, than with the most accurate knowledge of the rules of distinguishing the clean from the unclean among the various articles of food. Many such rules were found in the Law of Moses, and many more had been added by the refinements of Jewish rulers and by tradition. To distinguish and remember all these, required no small amount of knowledge, and the Jewish teachers, doubtless, prided themselves much on it. Paul says that it would be much better to have the principles of grace in the heart than all this knowledge; to have the mind settled on the great truths of religion than to be able to make the most accurate and learned distinctions in this matter. The same remark may be made about a great many other points besides the Jewish distinctions respecting meats. The principle is, that it is better to have the heart established in the grace of God than to have the most accurate knowledge of the distinctions which are made on useless or unimportant subjects of religion. This observation would extend to many of the shibboleths of party; to many of the metaphysical distinctions in a hair-splitting theology; to many of the points of controversy which divide the Christian world.
Spurgeon on Psalm 131
Sermon I have seen many men always vexed and troubled because they would exercise themselves in things too high for them. These things too high for them have been many, but I will mention only a few. They have expected to comprehend everything, and have never been satisfied because many truths are far above and out of their reach. Especially they have expected to know all the deep things of God—the doctrine of election, and how predestination coincides with the free agency of man, and how God orders everything, and yet man is responsible—just as responsible as if there had been no foreknowledge and no foreordination. It is folly to hope to know these “things too high for us.” Here is a little child that has just come off its mother’s knee and it expects to understand a book on trigonometry, and cries because it cannot? And here is another little child that has been down to the sea, and is fretting and kicking in its nurse’s arms because it cannot get the Atlantic into the hollow of its hand. Well, it will have to kick, that will be the end of it. But it is fretting itself for nothing, without any real use or need for its crying, because a little child’s palm cannot hold an ocean. Yet a child might sooner hold the Atlantic and Pacific in its two hands, without spilling a drop, than you and I will ever be able to hold all the revealed truth of God within the compass of our narrow minds. We cannot know everything, and we cannot understand even half what we know! I have given up wanting to understand. As far as I can, I am content with believing all that I see in God’s word. People say, “But you contradict yourself.” I dare say I do, but I never contradict God to my knowledge, nor yet the Bible.
Brethren, there is a certain highway of truth in which you and I, like wayfaring men and women, feel ourselves safe—let us travel thereon! There are some things that we do know, because we have experienced them—some doctrines which nobody can beat out of us, because we have tasted them and handled them. Well, if we can go further, well and good. But to my mind, we are foolish to go further and fare worse. If a man has reached the Land’s End (the westernmost point of England), and some great genius should tell him to walk on farther than Old England reaches, and ridicule him because he will not go a step in advance into the fog which conceals an awful plunge—I think, upon the whole—he may be content to put up with the ridicule. Put your foot down, brother, and see whether there is anything under it. Check whether there is a good text or two underneath—whether there is a little personal experience underneath, and, if you do not find it, let the advanced thinkers go alone—you had better keep on the rock. “Prove all things”—do not run after their novelties till you have proved them. But what you have proved hold fast. Be conservative in God’s truth, and radical too, by keeping to the root of the matter. Hold fast what you know, and live mainly upon the simplicities of the gospel, for, after all, the food of the soul does not lie in controversial points—it lies in points which we will never have controverted, for, “Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.” There is the food of the soul where there is no controversy in any devout Christian spirit! Exercise yourself, then, in the plainer matters, and do not imbibe the notion that you must read all the quarterlies and master, “The Contemporary Review,” and the like, or else you will be a nobody. Be content to be just such a nobody as a weaned child is, and say, “I exercise not myself in great matters or in things too high for me.”
The same evil comes up in another form when we want to know all the reasons of divine Providence—why this affliction was sent and why that? Why father died—why those two children that we loved so well were taken from us? Why we do not prosper in our various enterprises? Why? Why? Why? Ah, when we begin asking, “Why? Why? Why?” what an endless task we have before us! If we become like a weaned child, we shall not ask, “Why?” but just believe that in our heavenly Father’s dispensations there is a wisdom too deep for us to fathom, a goodness veiled but certain.