There are times in our lives when it is appropriate to say that ignorance is bliss. Not knowing something can offer surprise, excitement, contentment, and even a kind of whimsical magic that can be destroyed with knowledge. With knowledge, though, comes a responsibility to the truth, and if there is something that modern folk try to avoid, it is responsibility.
In the past, there was “the times of ignorance [which] God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a Man whom He has appointed; and of this He has given assurance to all by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:30). There was a time when God spoke to man directly, but men drifted away from Him. Satan had control of man so much so that by the days of Noah, Genesis 6:6-7 states: “And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.’”
Even after such a catastrophic event, the descendants of Noah still strayed from God. All over the globe, despite many stories which persist to this day of the punishment God had unleashed upon the world for their wickedness and unbelief, the message of who God is and His will was ignored by man and lost to him over time. In ignorance, cities like Sodom and Gomorrah engaged in base passions. When a man was sent to them to be a light of righteousness, Lot was treated with contempt. Eventually the city’s willful ignorance of God’s commands to repent lead to their downfall as fire rained down from heaven.
In today’s day and age, such dramatic events no longer take place. Prophets no longer cry in our cities to repent, and apostles have long passed into the annals of history. Those annals are available to us both in secular history as well as our accurate historical account we call the Bible. We have been given a directive to “rightly divide the Word of Truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), which does imply that we should know the Word. To do so requires study and living in such a way in accordance with that Word.
This is the responsibility that many do not want. The numbers are few who, when they die, want to be cast into eternal damnation. They wish to go on to a place of peace, joy, and happiness. They want to start in life by making themselves happy carnally. A life walking on God does produce worldly happiness as a fruit of the Spirit, but we humans are creatures of the here and now. The idea of delayed gratification is far less attractive than getting all the joy, passion, and desire in the here and now, feeling the maximum that the bodies we have here and now can experience. It leads to a “strong delusion” when combined with the false doctrine that God just wants us to be happy, and we should do whatever it is in our life that will make us happy regardless of whether it is in the Bible or not.
All these things stem from ignorance of the Scriptures. How can anyone do what is right or wrong unless they have been exposed to it? Paul said in Romans 7:9, “I was one alive apart from the law, but when the commandments came, sin came alive and I died.”
Ignorance was once bliss, a carefree life free from the knowledge of sin. That does not absolve any of us of the responsibility to do God’s will, though as Acts 17:30 stated. When that knowledge comes, it opens our eyes to the true sin which is inside of us, and only through that knowledge can we achieve the grace that leads to salvation.
Never be complacent in what you know. Always strive for more. Be hungry and thirsty for the righteousness that is knowledge of God, and you shall always be filled.
Lance Byers