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Hebrews 5:13-14   Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the 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 knoe ‘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’ good from 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 in the form of ‘justifying’ our wrong, sinful actions) instead of seeking to discern God’s truth.  The necessary spiritual maturity comes only by ‘constant use’, the tough, jaw-strengthening mastication of solid Biblical truth.  

We achieve it by reading God’s Word frequently, 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, and acting as judges of God’s Word instead of allowing it to judge us.  

I find it very encouraging (but also a little sad) to come across adults who are old enough to have grown up in the era when ‘everyone’ went to Sundsy School (yes, there was such a time in Australia!), and who have been brought to faith in Jesus as Saviour and Lord  in later life, just to hear them express their wonder in discovering the powerful integrity of the insired Scriptures and how the Story of God’s amazing grace is so beautifully and convicingly woven into the whole Bible from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, whereas in Sunday School they had thought the stories were just a series of fictional fairy tales in the same genre as Santa Claus, his North Pole workshop and his reindeers!

– Bruce Christian