KNOWLEDGE IS SLIPPERY

Hebrews 2:1 NET
Therefore we must pay closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.

Dear Believer,

Knowledge has this annoying quality of gradually leaving the person who doesn’t renew it. If you want any kind of knowledge to stay with you, you will have to keep revisiting it, building on it and using it.

Whatever you have been taught by God must be cherished. This is very important because it can slip away, and you can drift away from it if you are not careful. That means you paid the cost of learning it in vain.

It is a bad thing to make your own experience your teacher. Experience isn’t the best teacher in the issues of life. The only kind of experience that is good to learn from is that of another person. In fact, God wants you to look at the mistakes of people who have gone on before you and learn not to make the same mistakes, and that is the context on which the writer of Hebrews was writing.

Belshazzar was the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar the king. When you think of Nebuchadnezzar, one of the things that come to mind is that he was once turned to an animal as a divine judgement for pride.

When his grandson became king, he began to live a life of debauchery. At some point, he decided to do what nobody had ever done. The vessels that were taken from the temple in Jerusalem were kept somewhere safe as a way to respect the God of the Hebrew. This petulant king sent men to bring them and started to use them to drink intoxicating liquor while praising heathen gods.

Then this happened:

Daniel 5:5-6 NET
At that very moment the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the royal palace wall, opposite the lampstand. The king was watching the back of the hand that was writing. Then all the color drained from the king’s face and he became alarmed. The joints of his hips gave way, and his knees began knocking together.

The scariest thing was that no one could interpret what the hand wrote on the wall.

Until Daniel came.

I want to call your attention to something that Daniel said to the disrespectful king, among other things.
He reminded Belshazzar of the sin of his grandfather, Nebuchadnezzar and what befell the proud kind. Then he said:

Daniel 5:22 NET
But you, his son Belshazzar, have not humbled yourself, although you knew all this.

He knew his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar was turned to an animal because he was proud, yet he went ahead to develop a personality on pride, the albatross of his grandfather.

Belshazzar let that lesson slip. He drifted past the all-important lesson. That night he was overthrown and his kingdom taken over by foreigners.

When you read the Old Testament, know that the moral and spiritual lessons there are for you.

That is true of the New Testament also.

Of those who wasted away in the wilderness, here what the Bible says.

1Corinthians 10:10-11 NET And do not complain, as some of them did, and were killed by the destroying angel. These things happened to them as examples and were written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the ages have come.

The lesson here is that we have history to learn from. It is there so that we won’t make the mistakes our ancestors made.

So we see that the Word of God is the best teacher because in it we can see read and learn . We can feed our spirit and make informed decisions. That is the best way to learn.

May you never fall into the same trap that those who went ahead of you fell into. May the light of the Lord be bright on your path. Amen.

Have a great day.

Your friend,
Deon.
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For further study read Daniel Chapter 4