The Sharp Sword of Truth 9-21-08
Proper nutrition as a major health concern is a fairly new development in human experience. I am not saying that mankind has only recently begun to suffer from malnutrition, but that only recently have we been able to focus on choosing what to eat and when to eat it. For most of human history, we ate whatever we could – a lot of it consisting of things that most Americans would find inedible and disgusting. Meats that we would declare rancid and spoiled were eaten as normal fare; fruits and vegetables we would see as rotting would be the norm. This is not because people have only recently developed delicate palates, but rather because food is far more plentiful today than ever before. In short, we are choosy because we are not beggars.
Nutrition is so important to us that we use it as an analogy for demonstrating how things should work; for example, instead of saying that a fire is extinguished due to a lack of a sufficient supply of fuel, we simply say that the fire was starved – the analogy of starvation illustrating that the fire died because it could not continue to feed. With that in mind, we look at learning as a process of nutrition: we feed our minds information that we digest and use to build our identities. And just as good nutrition helps a person build a healthy body, good learning helps a person develop themselves in a healthy way. Conversely, poor learning leads to unhealthy development in much the same way as poor nutrition leads to an unhealthy body.
I remember that I was told to eat a certain way so that I would be healthy. I have seen commercials declaring that their particular cereal was a “part of a balanced breakfast”. There were vitamins shaped like cartoon characters, fortified breads and milks, and even shakes and candy bars promising nutrition. Today, we are told that some vitamins are able to be used by the body only in certain ways, that some should be taken with others or the body won’t absorb them well, and a vast host of information (many of these pieces of “truth” contradicting each other).
In the same way, we are often given information that is proclaimed to be the “truth” and that we are told will help us develop in a healthy way. Some of us seek earnestly after truth and take the truth given us, not realizing that we are ingesting poison instead; this is much like the first emperor of China who desperately wanted to live forever and so he ingested vitality potions whose base was mercury (highly toxic to humans). Some people take a verse (or a part of a verse) and fashion their whole way of thinking around that, not realizing that they are wrapping a nutrient in toxic sludge. For example, there are people today who take Ephesians 5:22 and say that the wife must submit to the husband in everything, and that if she is obeying him she does not sin no matter what she does (they say that the husband bears that sin for what he ordered her to do). This is an example of taking a portion of the nutrition of God and wrapping it in poisonous filth. The result of this is much like eating an apple covered in arsenic.
The truth of God must be what we adhere to, without mixing it with the poison of the world. The Nicolaitans were a group of people who took the ideas of Nicolas (one of the Seven from Acts 6) about eschewing worldly pleasures to mean that no matter what you did physically, it was only the spiritual things that matter (and so they practiced unrestrained indulgence of their desires, claiming to be indifferent to the flesh). They quickly went from hearing that the worldly pleasures should not be our pursuit to believing that anything done in the flesh did not matter!
The church in Pergamum was praised for not renouncing their faith in Jesus, even when some of them were put to death publicly. But Jesus goes on to say this:
Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: you have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality. Likewise you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. (Revelation 2:14-16 NIV)
The warning is that they need to repent – those who were following the teachings of Balaam and the Nicolaitans needed to repent of that, and those who were tolerating the evil among them needed to repent of that tolerance. Jesus warned that if they did not repent, he would come to them and “fight against them with the sword of my mouth.” The implication is that Jesus, who said in verse 12 that he had a “sharp, double-edged sword”, would destroy the evildoers and punish too those who tolerated the evil.
We must take heed to this warning as well. We need to take in the proper nutrition of the Word of God, taking the manna of his blessings and growing in a healthy and Godly way. He promised to give to those who overcome some “hidden manna” and a “new name”. But remember: if we grow unhealthy on the world’s beliefs, that sharp sword of truth might just be used to cut the fat away.
-Charles Peterson