My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. Hosea 4:6 (ESV)

There’s a common assumption in our world that everything we need to be happy, healthy, and successful is already within us. 

All that’s needed is to dig deep and unearth it, giving it room to breathe and time to shine. As such, we believe our own desires and intuition to be the most faithful guides through this life, and therefore the best thing we can do is to simply follow these urges wherever they may lead. To do otherwise is a failure to be true to ourselves, or so we are told.

In light of this, one of the hardest realities for Christians to accept is our own inadequacies and need for daily renewal and transformation.

Through our self-made isolation, we have cut ourselves off from the source of divine life and love. We may eat and breathe, laugh and cry, love and desire, yet this does not inherently mean we are living a fully human life, or that our existence is oriented towards a life-giving end. In fact, our vision of what it means to be truly human is likely far too small!

The law of the Lord is given, not for our destruction, but for our good. 

It is meant to awaken us to the reality of God, to reveal to us the path that leads to life. In truth, it is the commands of God that reveal to us the ways of death that we commonly believe to be ways to life. As we study his word and learn his commands, God in his mercy lifts the veil from our eyes so that we learn to see reality as never before.

Without regular instruction and formation in the way of God, we are left in our state of brokenness and continue on our wayward journey. As Hosea 4:6 reminds us, the people of God are destroyed from a “lack of knowledge.” These words are severe and solemn, and we must not miss the gravity of the situation. If we fail to hear and obey the words of the Lord, we choose for ourselves a life of destruction.

According to Hosea, there are two ways in which we are destroyed by a lack of knowledge: we reject it and we forget it.

At times, our departure from the way of the Lord is active and intentional. We have been shown the way that leads to life, yet we choose to reject it, believing it to be for our harm rather than our healing. This may be rooted in the failures of others (or ourselves), leading to a severed relationship that makes it too painful to continue in the community of faith. Similarly, it may be a theological rejection, in which we fail to believe in the goodness of God, the goodness of his ways, or an outright rejection of his very existence.

For others, this lack of knowledge may be far less intentional or deliberate. Instead of a willful and conscious rejection, a lack of knowledge may be rooted in unintentional neglect, failing to regularly and intentionally tend to our growth in Christ. The forgetfulness grows, not by leaps and bounds, but in small, simple, and often undetected ways. 

While some may walk a road of carefully calculated unbelief and rejection, the majority of people fall into this second category of passive forgetfulness. We may continue to call ourselves Christian and retain some degree of faith in Christ, yet we fail to cultivate or nurture this belief in a way that is sustainable, predictable, or habitual. This path may be less dramatic than the way of willful rejection, yet the results are no less catastrophic. 

In the journey of life, we must take on habits of faith that teach us to persevere in times of temptation and invite the Spirit to carry us in seasons of weakness and exhaustion. The invitation before us is a daily return to the commands of Christ. And while many practices can and should be commended, few are more helpful than memorizing Scripture.

Memorization is a remedy to the ailments of rejection and spiritual amnesia. When our minds and hearts are saturated in Scripture, our view of the world is sustained and preserved by the decrees of the Lord. When we have spent years saturating in the Bible, the truths of Scripture seep deep into our souls, making them all the more difficult to forget and leave behind, even in times of great temptation or trial. In fact, the Spirit uses this spiritual effort to calm our restless hearts, reassure us of his love, and guide our lives. 

What you don’t know may kill you, but what you learn in his word leads to abundant life!