Confessions of an Ignoramus...Continued from page 1

1. Can we know anything we want?

Answer: No.  Moses divides knowledge into two categories.  First, there are “secret things.”  The word “secret” means covered, concealed or hidden.  God has left some things concealed.  Try as we might, those “secret things” are not available to us.  Research won’t uncover them.  Science won’t lay them bare. 

We only see a tiny portion of reality.  At this moment you don’t see what the person behind you is doing, nor your children in Sunday School.  You can’t see what politicians are cooking up, what the city council is deciding and what your neighbor’s throwing over your fence.

Limited knowledge has some implications.  For one, what we can not know is by design.  We don’t know them, not because of a lack of study, but because of humanness.  They simply have not been brought within the orbit of finiteness.  That doesn’t mean that what we do not know is necessarily by design.  God has given us so much to know that there is virtually no limit to our discoveries.  If we do not know something it may well be because of laziness, or the fact that the speed of progress hasn’t allowed us to discover it yet.  But there are things we cannot know, and God arranged it this way.  It also means that what we can know is by design.  More about that momentarily.

What are these “secret,” unknowable things?  Put yourself in Moses’ sandals.  Deuteronomy is a series of sermons delivered as Moses and the people sat across Jordan from the Promised Land.  This was an entirely new generation of God’s people.  Their parents died in the wilderness after rebelling.  It had been forty years since God gave the Law and confirmed the covenant.  The people didn’t have a solid grasp of the covenant and its demands.  Knowing he’d never enter the Promised Land, Moses preached to call this new generation to a renewed commitment. 

Among the “secret things” is the future.  Dean Acheson said, “I try to be as philosophical as the old lady from Vermont who said that the best thing about the future is that is comes only one day at a time.”  Study all you want, “the future’s not ours to see.”  Through prophecy God has let us know a bit of what will take place, but not all about how it will take place.  The Israelites knew God would take them into the Promised Land, but as they looked across the Jordan, they worried about how He’d do it.  We, too, worry over details regarding the future. 

When I look back over the details of my life I realize that it took seven years after I came to faith to know that I was to follow God in the ministry.  It took another four years to know it meant pastoral ministry.  It took almost twenty more years to know it meant I would pastor this church.  If, from the beginning, God had shown me these things I’d have died of fright!  How merciful of God to withhold some of the details of His will!