Lost in the Foundation

The foundation is not the building

The Hebrew writer chastises us a bit with his closing statement in chapter five:  We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.  But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. 

Then he begins chapter six with a continuation of the thought:  Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God,  instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.  And God permitting, we will do so.

 There are those elementary things about Christ Jesus that we learn and hold dear, but they are not things we need to have repeated and repeated over and over again.  Do we need to hear that we should not lie?  When did you learn that lesson?  Were you five, six, seven?  To spend sermon after sermon telling the assembly that they should not lie would be foolish, yet we offer similar teachings over and over again.  And because of this, we are those who have to be fed with milk instead of strong meat.

"Leave them!"  The Hebrew writer tells us.  "Leave them!  Move beyond the foundational things."  Those kindergarten things are wonderful truths that bring us into Christ, but if we never get beyond them we will not be able to stand when the Katrinas, earthquakes and tsunamis come.

With every passage of scripture read we should be better able to see what it is that is lying beneath the truth we just read.  Throughout scripture there is so much more given to us than what is actually written, but we have to be able to see it.  As the various writers write they are expecting us to have a deeper understanding than what we see in the few words they give us, and so we should.  But we will only be able to see if we have been looking.  For instance, Romans 4:1ff has much to say about sin, grace and imputation of those sins.  But without the background much of the meaning is lost on us.  So not only do we miss much of the obvious things, we can't help but miss the less clear.

Again, much of what we read must be meditated upon or we will never gain much truth from our readings.  Meditations are much like our memories of some event we have actually been through.  While we are going through the event certain things flood our minds, but later, when we reflect on the event, we see and remember things we hadn't noticed at the time, even though our mind took those things in.  The reliving makes the event bigger and clearer and fuller, because we recognize that there was more to it than what was most prominent in our minds eye.

So it is with meditation.  We get the general picture, but the more we meditate and mull it over in our mind the more other places, passages, ideas and wonders come into our thoughts filling in much of what was lacking in our first understanding of a read passage.  If we fail to look deeper through meditation, rereading, questioning and the like, then we are doomed to be lost in the foundation and we will never really grow much beyond that.