I was watching Good Morning America this morning. The Duchess of York and BP seem to have something in common. And yet, how the physical parallels the spiritual. Also, how amazing it is that it fits in with this latest theme of man’s knowledge. At the risk of trivializing either story, I want to narrowly focus in on one aspect and ferret it out to a larger principle.
Sarah Ferguson selling access to Prince Andrew? Well, that is what it appears to be on a videotape. Yet, “Sarah Ferguson Claims She Was Drunk During Sting Operation”. Therefore, she did not fully know what she was doing.
Well, she obviously didn’t know about the camera, and there is a bottle of wine in the video. Whether she was blinded by drink or blinded by her own ambition, she was blind to the fact that there was a hidden camera.
BP doesn’t seem to know what it is doing, either. It seems to have a lack of knowledge, even with top executives allegedly denying that there is even a “plume” of oil gushing out of the well. It doesn’t seem to know how to stop the oil leak in the gulf right now.
Now, I’m no engineer (or at least I’m not that type of engineer), but I’m scratching my head. I understand that you might not be able to completely stop the leak, but the fact that it is still gushing out practically unabated after all this time is striking. It would seem that crimping the pipe would stem the flow. It must be amazing pressure to have such difficulty capping it off.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been a shut-off valve closer to the source. Or, perhaps some of the alleged safety violations were the real cause of this accident.
Sarah Ferguson as well could have protected herself by not having all that wine. Perhaps even better would be if she learned to control her spending.
Friends, these are just recent examples of a lack of ability to deal with very real problems.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” says God in Hos 4:6. He goes on to say, “Thou has rejected knowledge.” What knowledge? His knowledge! Spiritual knowledge.
In the Garden of Eden, the serpent promised Eve her eye would be “opened” if she partook of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Human beings rejected revealed knowledge and chose to learn by experience. They would learn good and evil by trying different things and either enjoying the benefits or suffering the consequences. The tree represented an experiential knowledge.
Essentially, you and I are part of a huge scientific experiment. God, however, knows the outcome. It is we that do not.
Without God’s Spirit within us, we are almost completely blind. Even with God’s Spirit, we see things darkly (1Co 13:12; cf 1Jn 3:2). However, what is evident is that as spirit beings in God’s Kingdom, we will at last have our eyes fully opened.