AP

Hebrews 5:12-14  In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s Word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!  Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

In Genesis 2:16-17 we read how God gave Man free run of the Garden of Eden, enjoying the blessing of the abundance and variety of its luscious fruit; but he was not to eat from ‘the tree of the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil’.  The word for ‘knowledge’ comes from the verb ‘KNOW’ in Hebrew, a word which has a much richer and deeper meaning than our English word.  It means to have a close, intimate relationship with someone or something, as we see from Genesis 4:1 – “Adam KNEW his wife Eve, and she [therefore] became pregnant …”.

In the Garden, for Man to KNOW ‘good and evil’ implied that he would have some executive power in DEFINING what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’.  Man has been ‘eating’ this forbidden fruit ever since, usurping God’s authority by making up his own mind about what is good/right and what is evil/wrong, writing his own convenient moral/ethical code, and suffering the declared consequence: DEATH.

As the author of Hebrews points out, our place is not to KNOW good and evil but to ‘DISTINGUISH BETWEEN’ good and evil.  God, through his Word, GIVES the definition; it is our job to DISCERN in each and every situation just how God’s definition applies to us.  Because of our innate sinful nature, this requires a fair bit of spiritual maturity; our default option is to fall back into the old trap of KNOWING good and evil (usually taking the form of ‘justifying’ our wrong, sinful actions) instead of seeking to DISCERN God’s truth.

The necessary spiritual maturity to do this comes only by ‘constant use’, the tough, jaw-strengthening mastication of SOLID BIBLICAL TRUTH.  We can achieve such spiritual maturity only by reading God’s Word REGULARLY and OFTEN, meditating deeply on what it is saying to us in our particular life-situation, joining with other Christians for regular Bible study, and sitting under faithful, Bible-centred preaching.  It will never come from just dabbling with the ‘breast milk’ of simplified Sunday School stories, ‘flavoured’ by our own personal likes and dislikes!  In this day of information overload, both we and the children in our care need, more than ever before, the gift of spiritual DISCERNMENT!

– Bruce Christian