Archives for September 2022

Part 1: And It’s No Secret | Part 2: The Long Range | Part 3: The Short Range: Consistency | Part 4: The Short Range: Discernment

The first thing Paul tells the church to do in the short term, in order to reach maturity in Christ in the long term, is to stop being like a child in his inconsistency and naivete. The second thing comes in the first part of verse 15:

But speaking the truth in love …

Now, the Greek here is interesting. There’s no verbal “speaking”; the verb is rather simply the verbal form of the noun “truth.” We might translate it (woodenly) as “truthing.” “Speaking the truth” is not a bad translation—that’s ordinarily how one puts truth into action—but the word has a broader reference. We should be the truth; we should live the truth. We should be true to who (and whose) and what we are.

We should be true.

This in contrast to the childlikeness that Paul has just used to illustrate his point. Children are easily deceived; we shouldn’t be. Why is that? Because we know the truth; it governs our thinking and consequently our decisions and our actions.

We know that quarters don’t come out of our ears. We know that no one can know—without some kind of mischief—that we’re thinking of a grey elephant from Denmark.

And similarly, we know that discounting the value of the Scripture, or of the person or work of Christ, or of the legitimate unity of God’s people, does not come from those who are interested in God’s cause or our good.

We didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. This isn’t our first rodeo. We know better.

And why do we know better?

Because we know the Scripture, because we have pored over it and immersed our thoughts in it and rolled its truths over repeatedly in our minds, for the decades since he gave us spiritual life. And because we know Christ, both by that time and effort in the Scripture and by our daily walk and communion with him over those same decades.

I’ve been married for over 38 years. Each year I learn more about my wife, both because I’m a slow learner and because she has grown and changed since we began our life together. And now, approaching 4 decades of daily interaction, I know a lot about her. Because of that knowledge I don’t wonder what she’s going to think about this or that, or how she’s going to react to a given situation, or whether she’s likely to do something inappropriate.

I know her. And that answers a lot of questions even as it calms—or dismisses—a lot of potential fears.

If somebody tells me something about her that isn’t true, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to believe it.

Because I know her.

Now, I’ve known the Father, the Son, and the Spirit almost twice as long as I’ve known my wife. Shame on me if I fall for some lie about him, or some distortion of his motives or his ways. Shame on me if I start to believe that he isn’t good, or that his inaction demonstrates his inattention or his apathy.

And shame on us, his church, his people, if we find ourselves distracted by relatively trivial, temporary causes, or divided by temporary social or political issues, hating one another because of our support for this or that candidate or plebiscite or ballot initiative, or the color of our hats.

We need to see things as they are from the perspective of the one who lives forever and who has been working his great and gracious plan from before the world was.

We need to give our energies to that eternal plan.

We need to grow up.

Photo by Nagesh Badu on Unsplash

Part 1: And It’s No Secret | Part 2: The Long Range | Part 3: The Short Range: Consistency 

Children have another quality that we want them to outgrow.

Because of their comparative lack of experience, they can be naïve, credulous, gullible.

In a child, that’s endearing.

In an adult, it’s a flaw.

In the second half of our verse, Paul changes his metaphor to add depth to his illustration:

carried about … by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive (Ep 4.14b).

The KJV’s phrase “sleight of men” (NASB “trickery of men,” ESV “human cunning”) uses the Greek word kubeia. It’s where we get our word “cube.” It comes from the use of dice in gambling and the associated cheating, trickery, fraud.

Nobody likes to be taken advantage of.

But like it or not, there are bad actors out there, who are more than happy to lighten your wallet. And in the field of theology, there are fraudsters who would like to make merchandise of you. It’s pretty obvious these days that professing Christians are suckers for such fraudsters, from miracle prayer cloths on down.

Sometimes they’re not after your money; sometimes they’re after your soul. Maybe they want your following; maybe they just want you to think as they do. But they peddle their doctrinal and practical perversity, and they attack the church “by craft, with an evil plan [methodia] to deceive”—they scheme to trick us into believing a lie.

God’s people are supposed to be streetwise enough that they don’t fall for the doctrinal legerdemain. And where does “streetwisdom” come from?

It comes from knowledge of Christ. Knowledge about him, and knowledge of him.

Too many Christians are still falling for Satan’s simple tricks: materialism, broken marriages, pride of recognition and acceptance. These are old tricks—which means Satan’s good at them, because he’s had a lot of practice—but precisely because they’re old tricks, we should be well aware of them and see through them.

Fool me once, and all that.

I occasionally use a little trick on my students when we’re talking about divine election and foreordination. I tell them to think of any positive number. Literally any one, from the billions available. Then I tell them to multiply it by 9. Then add up the digits of the product, and if the sum is more than one digit, add the digits again, until they get a single digit. Then subtract 5. Then take that letter of the alphabet—1 is A, 2 is B, and so on.

You with me so far? Ok, now think of a country that starts with that letter.

Take the second letter of the name of the country, and think of an animal that starts with that letter.

Then think of a color that animal could be.

Then I ask how many students are thinking of a grey elephant from Denmark, and there’s an audible gasp in the room.

I’m a mind reader—no, a mind controller, you see.

Nope. And you math people know exactly how the trick works. It’s all based on the fact that they multiply their number by 9.

For any multiple of 9, the digits will add up to 9. In magic, that’s called a “force”; no matter what they do, you’ve forced them to a certain result. They subtract 5 from their 9, and they have 4. The letter of the alphabet is D.

Now, I’ve learned that this trick isn’t as reliable outside of the US and Europe. Westerners tend to pick the country of Denmark, which is what I’m counting on. There’s Djibouti, and the Dominican Republic, and Dominica, and the DRC, but Americans and Europeans are highly likely to pick Denmark.

So the second letter is E, and they’ll probably pick an elephant rather than an ermine or an eel or an eagle or an elk.

And elephants are grey. Or at least that’s what everybody thinks.

It’s simple probabilities.

Don’t fall for it.

There’s one more directive in this passage. We’ll talk about it next time.

Part 5: The Short Range: Truth

Photo by Nagesh Badu on Unsplash

Part 1: And It’s No Secret | Part 2: The Long Range 

God designed the church to grow—together—in unity and in the knowledge of Christ. What’s the process for doing that?

Paul gives us steps through which we work toward that goal. By using the term “steps,” I don’t mean to imply that they’re in series, so that we do the first one, and then, once we’ve accomplished it, we work on the second; rather, they’re presented in contrasted form: don’t do these things, but rather do this other thing instead.

I suppose I should start by acknowledging an unstated assumption here. I’ve assumed that the church hasn’t yet arrived at the long-range goal of unity in Christ. I suppose I could give evidences, but truthfully, I don’t know anyone who would argue that we’re fine just as we are. Both as individuals, and as a body, we’ve got issues. So I’ll just acknowledge that I haven’t proved that, and if anybody wants to argue otherwise, I’ll be happy to demonstrate it, after I’ve picked myself up off the floor.

So then. How do we make progress toward being what God has designed and equipped us to be?

For starters, Paul says, stop being children:

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive (Ep 4.14).

Now, children are delightful. We all love their energy, their curiosity, their quickness to grasp new things, their fresh perspective on things.

Assuming, of course, said children are letting us get enough sleep.

We even have a word for those delightful qualities: childlikeness.

May there always be children.

But we don’t say, “Long live children”—because we want children to grow up; we want them to mature. We don’t want them to stay children, despite all our protestations that they grow up too fast.

Paul identifies a couple of specific ways that children, because they are immature and inexperienced, have negative qualities, things they need to outgrow.

First, they’re inconsistent, “tossed to and fro,” “carried about with every wind of doctrine.”

Wind can be a good thing. It can lift a 747, or more recently, an A380, right off the ground to “top the wind-swept heights with easy grace”; at a much more mundane level, it can help dry your laundry and save on your electric bill.

But it can also do a lot of damage. It can wipe out an entire town in 15 seconds. (In June 1998 I visited Spencer, SD, which a tornado had obliterated just like that a month earlier. The town was just gone.) It can topple a tree onto a car, killing everybody in it instantly. (That happened to a weather crew from a TV station here in Greenville a few years ago.)

You don’t play with dangerous wind.

And, Paul says, you don’t play with dangerous doctrine.

No need to be afraid—God leads his dear children along—but don’t be careless.

Ideas have consequences; doctrine matters. Existentialism brings self-centeredness and despair; polytheism brings confusion and fear; Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of the LDS Church belittle the person of Christ and thereby make themselves slaves to good works.

To press Paul’s illustration, little children can be tossed about despite their best determination to do right. I was, and I suspect you were too. Children are like that.

But we’re supposed to grow up.

Over the years I’ve known Christians, even pastors, who seem to be suckers for every doctrinal aberration that comes down the pike. I wonder if they’re constituted like the Athenians, who “spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Ac 17.21). The stuff they already know is boring to them; they want something new, something contrarian, something that will give them a buzz, something to get the adrenaline going, something to feed their love of conspiracy theories.

Something to catch their eye, to make them reach up from where they’re lying in their crib.

Nope. Paul says we need to mature out of that. We need to be stable in the things we already know, well founded, solid, standing firm against the winds of the day, able to provide support to one another in a storm.

As you might suspect, there’s more to come.

Part 4: The Short Range: Discernment | Part 5: The Short Range: Truth

Photo by Nagesh Badu on Unsplash

Part 1: And It’s No Secret

When you were learning to drive, you tended to focus on the road immediately in front of you—a tactic that made you basically a reactionary, jerking the wheel in response to whatever suddenly popped into your field of vision. As you gained experience, you began to look farther down the road, your peripheral vision taking in pretty much everything from here to the horizon. It’s much less jarring to make tiny corrections with long-range significance than to react to every little thing as if it’s a crisis.

So we start with the long view, the big map, with the little tiny star that says “You are here.”

That’s what Paul does in this passage.

Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ (Ep 4.13).

God’s goal for us as his people is that by the end of the story we will be grown up—mature. That’s what “perfect” here means.

Mature in what?

In unity.

We need to be united, inseparable, fiercely attached to one another, a band of brothers.

What’s the basis of our unity? Some people are united by their love for motorcycles, or quilts, or cocker spaniels, or Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee.

We’re united by our faith, and by our knowledge of the Son of God.

That statement needs some clarification, some delimitation.

In the Bible the term “the faith,” with the article, refers not so much to the fact that we believe as to the content of what we believe. To put it more bluntly, it refers to doctrine.

Isn’t that interesting. In Paul’s mind, doctrine isn’t something that divides. It’s something that unites. Because we believe the same things, we are pulled together and become inseparable.

I should note that this doesn’t mean that we agree on everything. The Scripture elsewhere urges each one to “be fully persuaded in his own mind” while extending grace to those with other convictions (Ro 14.5). No, “the faith” is the most important stuff, the doctrines that define Christianity, beginning with the gospel, which is “of first importance” (I Co 15.3-5).

That’s reinforced by the next phrase, “the knowledge of the Son of God.” The doctrines that are most central, our unifying principles, are those that have to do with the Son—who he is (person), what he is like (attributes), what he has done (work). It’s a truism that the easiest way to spot a false teacher is to ask him who he thinks Jesus is.

But I think Paul is saying more here than just that our Christology has to be right.

The word translated “knowledge” is epignosis, with a prepositional prefix that functions as an intensifier. Greek lexicons often render this word as “full knowledge,” “true knowledge,” “recognition.” I’d suggest that it means what we mean when we say, “Now I get it!”

A look at some other biblical passages that use the word reinforces this idea—

• Through the Law comes the knowledge of sin (Ro 3.20).
• They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge (Ro 10.2).
• … with knowledge and all discernment (Php 1.9)
• That you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding (Co 1.9)
• Ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth (2Ti 3.7).
• … the full knowledge of everything that is in us for the sake of Christ (Phm 6)

So what is “unity of the knowledge of the Son of God”?

I’d suggest that when people know who Christ is, through his revelation of himself through the Word, and when through that knowledge they come to know him as Creator, Savior, Lord, Shepherd, Friend, they’re going to be drawn together into a unity that simply cannot be compromised.

And then they grow, united, as a single body, to a spiritual stature that is appropriate for the size of its head, who is Christ (Ep 1.22-23).

Now, how do we get there?

Paul has some very practical observations about that, which we’ll get to in the next post.

Part 3: The Short Range: Consistency | Part 4: The Short Range: Discernment | Part 5: The Short Range: Truth

Photo by Nagesh Badu on Unsplash