Signposts | September 27 | The Fruit of Their Zeal
5 Minute Bible Study
Signposts | September 27 | The Fruit of Their Zeal
Proverbs 19 verse 2, "It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way." So in my commentary I asked a question, "What happens when zeal is delinked from the knowledge of God?" My answer to that is when this occurs, communities, towns, and cities become increasingly dangerous places to live and work. Fear becomes the predominant response to almost everything. And the biblical truth is slowly strangled, zeal in the hands of the ungodly is a deadly weapon. And obviously I've lived a long life but not long enough to remember World War II, or of course World War I, or the Civil War, or the French Revolution. All the people that promoted war in those days were people with zeal, with the philosophy like communism. Deal for a political ideology like fascism, and all these other isms that had actually come in and become replacements for God actually. You know, Nietzsche said in the 19th century that God is dead. I mean he wrote that in a piece he had written. But what he meant by that is people had found that idol, which we talked about, or something else that conformed to the way they thought life should be lived, which is whether we, I mean basically the assumptions of the time and still live today is there is no God, and that we have to make our own world good, and we have the capacity to do that. And all of history actually says you're crazy. Yeah, you're talking about zeal for our own idols, or zeal without God. You know, but I think there's actually an even closer warning in this that word zeal as you know, it comes from the zealots. This was one of the four groups of people, followers of Torah, followers of the Bible in Jesus' time. You have the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the zealots. And the zealots were known as the ones who would just, you know, they always had a sword in their hand. They're always ready to kind of take out the Romans by force, by military battle, and all their very, you know, there was zealous, right? But what I find, the reason I say it's a closer warning is they thought the zealots thought they were following Yahweh, that they're following the God of the Bible. They were defending him. They were sticking up for, you know, God gave us the holy land. We have to defend it. And that, you know, that to me is even scarier. In what ways do I ever become zealous in a not helpful and a not holy way thinking that I'm fighting for God when actually he doesn't call us to fight that kind of battle at all. You know, he calls us into something entirely different that actually lives in the reality of the fact that the war's already been won by him on the cross and in the resurrection. But anyway, I think you can be a zealot striving towards your idol and you can be a zealot thing, even though you are striving towards another, you think you're actually honoring God. And that's really scary. And I hope that I hope that gets corrected if there's any of that going on in our time. It's going on over the all over the place. I was looking in my mind for the right word for it. But a lot of these ideologies that come along have been basically heresies. They have their roots in and heresies were happening back when the what were they called the first heresies came in the first century when Gnostics, Gnosticism, which implies I think the word suggests knowledge. Knowledge. Seagull agnostic is why I just can't but somebody that is Gnostic is actually saying that they know what they actually don't know. And it became an affliction within the church. More contemporary forms of Gnosticism are in these ideologies. Political ideologies, for example communism, has many Christian aspects to it helping the poor on and on. But at the root of it though is human progress, human management, humanness, human that because that person is and getting rid of the church. So Stalin and Hitler had that in common. They made a peace agreement in 1939 but they also agreed getting rid of the church was really important. Stalin had a head start on it but Hitler made a big move to strip the church of believers, send them off to prison camps and install their own people who would preach the Reich. I mean this still goes on today. This is going on over the place and it's very interesting to see you know because the church is vibrant and alive in America but a lot of churches you know they don't want to rock the boat. Well yeah I think what I was really getting at wasn't so much like communism. They're trying to get rid of God and being zealous. I'm really talking about people who they think that they've merged the God of the Bible with their political zealotry. And that's that's less of a left-wing thing and more of a right-wing temptation. And I think that that's the warning I'm trying to just bring up as well that that can happen. And I think God is particularly not offended by that but God is particularly concerned by that. It's like he's saying not in my name like please don't be violent or do that and yet also say you're you know raising the flag of the cross or something that's you've got it all wrong. Yeah but all of us can be humbled by the awareness that like I said earlier the victory has already been won and we can walk in the victory and we can bring peace or people of peace. Right the time the left and the right together tying them actually what links them is my question and the answer to that is self-righteousness. Totally yeah.