No Charmed Immunity

Ofttimes in the face of some eventuality that has overtaken us, we find ourselves saying regretfully: “If I had only known, I would have done differently.” Sometimes this is true, but more often it isn’t the fact that we don’t know that gets us into difficulties, but rather that we choose to ignore what we do know. We mix so little wisdom with our knowledge. We know the facts of history. We know what causes have produced what results in the past — but time has a way of making the past seem different from the present. We may believe that Babylon and Rome fell because of their moral and spiritual dissolution. It seems so easy to believe this because it is all far in the past. But it doesn’t seem so easy to believe such probabilities of our own time and our own generation, however true they may be. From history and from scripture it seems quite easy to believe that men have always paid a price for disobedience; that the breaking of a law has always exacted its penalty; that the terrible luxury of over-indebtedness has always brought a day of disastrous reckoning. It seems easy to believe of the past that the Lord God has often permitted evil men to pursue their purposes for a short season before overruling their evil works. It seems easy to believe of the past that those who would rather mortgage the future than curtail their appetites have always been brought low in remorse. But what is not so easy to believe, but is also solemnly true, is that these same causes will still lead to these same results in our day. We have no charmed immunity from the consequences of our own doing. On this point the Father of all men has said: “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise.” Knowledge of the past we have- both of scripture and of history. It would be well to transmit that knowledge into wisdom, by believing of our own generation what we so readily believe of other times.