The Tree of Knowledge
The Corinthians for all their giftedness [1 Corinthians
1:4-7] were missing the person and character and purpose of the God who
had shown himself in and as Christ. Knowledge had become the
center-piece of their religion and many of them by their intellectual
ability found themselves separated in some ways from the pagan world
around them. Not really by Christ, you understand, but by their grasp of
the truth about Christ. They had found truth; they had become knowing
ones! But, in sinners, the capacity to know, and knowledge as its fruit,
has the almost invariable effect of "puffing up" (8:1).
Their
intellectual grasp had freed them from polytheism and other pagan
superstitions but it was this very sense of freedom that was going to
their heads.
F.W. Robertson said:
"The real emancipation from
false gods is reverence for the true God. For high knowledge is not
negative, but positive; it is to be freed from the fear of the Many in
order to adore and love the One. [in youth] the pride of intellect
sustains us strongly; but a time comes when we feel terribly that the
Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life...Separate from love, the more
we know, the profounder the mystery of life becomes; the more dreary
and the more horrible becomes existence. I can conceive no dying hour
more awful than that of one who has aspired to know instead of to love,
and finds himself at last amidst a world of barren facts and lifeless
theories, loving none and adoring nothing."
A man isn't getting
to know God if the more he learns the more he leans on himself. An
expanding stock of knowledge isn't the same as an expanding heart. True
knowledge should increase the mystery of what is wondered at even if it
is better understood. This is true of God or a dandelion. If looking at a
fluffy dandelion drives us to wonder, we ought to be casting a glance
heavenward and wondering about the God who made the dandelion. We ought
to have the experience of one boy who grew up and found:
As wider skies broke on his view,
God greatened in his growing mind,
Each year he dreamed his God anew,
And left his older God behind.
God greatened in his growing mind,
Each year he dreamed his God anew,
And left his older God behind.
And
how could someone truly know "there is no God but one; and there is one
Lord Jesus" [8:6] and still hold his brothers and sisters in contempt?
Once they were all fellow-pagans, filled with ignorant superstition,
self-service and happy immorality. Friends together in a great moral and
spiritual darkness. Then some of them met God! The God who made himself known in and as the crucified One;
and everything was filled with light. Caught up by the grandeur of the
message they joined it (not quite) as they would join a new school of
thought. And when they discovered some of their brothers and sisters
couldn't grasp the exalted concepts of one God and one Lord, they came
to despise them.
Through coming to understand and to be blessed by the cross (!) they learned to despise those for whom Christ died on the cross?
This
whole section shows there were tensions and cracks in the fellowship
between the "strong" and the "weak". The strong thought the stupidity of
polytheism was obvious (compare 8:4) so the only thing for the weak was
for the strong to teach them and for them to grow to be like the
strong. In the meantime, not everyone had the freedom that comes with
correct views (8:7).
The ignorant were weak in knowledge, but
that's not the same as being weak in purpose to please God (compare
Romans 14:6-8). If the strong, claiming to "know" God walk all over
their weaker brothers and sisters to their destruction (8:11), they are
despising and slaying those ignorant ones for whom Christ died. If
that's the case, then who are the truly strong and weak? But more to the
point, how could they know the God who in and as Christ Jesus became on
of the weak to save the weak?
The cross is strength operating from the position of weakness. The
cross is God standing alongside and siding with the weak against the
world-spirit and its corrupt powers that enslaved the sinful weak.
The
cross says the weak are worth dying for. To act in opposition to that
in the name of "knowing" God is not to know the God of the cross who
died for the weak and ignorant (among whom the knowing ones were once
numbered).
Jeremiah 9:24 (quoted twice by Paul in the Corinthian
literature) says: "'Let him who boasts boast about this: that he
understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,' declares
the Lord."
The job of the strong is to make the weak strong (no
bad thing) but they wanted to carry it out from a position of power and
strength rather than to become weak. "Make them come up; after all
they're the ones with the problem, they're the weak and we are the
strong. We have truth on our side."
In this they refuse the
pattern of the Christ who was crucified "in weakness" (2 Corinthians
13:4) and who in becoming weak became strong to carry out God's purpose
[Romans 1:16, 2 Corinthians 4:5-7]. If He who knew God in completeness
made the ultimate move toward weakness to gain the weak what does that
say about the knowing ones who despise and isolate the weak and the
ignorant?
Paul makes the point that because of Christ's
example in showing us what knowing God means (1 Corinthians 9:22; 11:1)
the weak have veto power over our knowledge and the true and genuine
liberties that come from it.
Well, it isn't quite veto power
over our knowledge, but veto power over some of the things we do with
that greater knowledge (which is the potential for greater power). The
needs and vulnerability of others places limits on our power and puts a
fence around our liberties. The loveless heart that worships knowledge
will resent such restraints, but the lover doesn't wish to be completely
free.
Greater knowledge is not despised, nor is it ever
consigned to oblivion. It is given a context it is knowledge "en
Christo" and its purpose is to serve the God who has shown himself as
the reconciler of the world in and as the crucified Christ, the one who
identified with the weak.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com