1 Corinthians 13:9-10

We know in part, and we prophesy in part.

We know in part

I. The imperfection of our knowledge.

1. We know but little.

2. That little is mixed with much error.

3. Includes much that is useless.

4. Is very imperfectly apprehended.

II. Its causes.

1. Intellectual.

2. Physical.

3. Moral.

III. Its lessons.

1. Humility.

2. Docility.

3. Distrust of our own understanding.

4. Hope. (J. Lyth, D.D.)

We know in part

The apostle says this not simply of the “wisdom of this world,” but of Divinely-given knowledge. A reverence not according to knowledge has led Christians to forget this, and to argue as if inspired writers gave us final and complete knowledge about the ways of God. This is not so, and hence much that is fragmentary even in Scripture, and representations which cannot be harmonised yet.

I. The part we do not know--by far the greater part; and the more we know, the more we seem not to know--as the outside of a circle gets larger as the inside is increased. Only beginners are proud of their acquirements; discoverers, who stand upon the boundaries of human knowledge, gazing with earnest eyes over the boundless untrodden region beyond, feel themselves unable to spell out the very alphabet of the universe of God.

1. What do we know about the material world? Men observe that things have certain appearances, and that changes occur with a certain regularity; but why they appear so, and how these changes take place, which obviously are the most important points to understand, belong to the part we do not know. Why a star moves or a plant grows, it is useless to ask an astronomer or a botanist.

2. So in the spiritual world. How much of goodness and how much of trial make up the facts and events of our lives! But what can we know about them--how they come, and why? What an amount of ingenuity we spend upon these questions, and how much are we perplexed! But vain are our endeavours to get at the meaning.

3. It is the same in regard to the great facts of the Christian revelation. “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Why was that necessary? How was it possible? That is the part we do not know; and we must content ourselves, having appropriate evidence, with the fact that it is so. Paul’s eager mind did indeed press against the furthest boundaries of inspired knowledge; but he once stopped with, “O the depth of the riches,” etc., and then turned to practical matters.

II. The part we no know. It is natural to us to appreciate what we lack, and to undervalue what we have. In this, as in other respects, we are but children of a larger growth. As a thousand natural wonders and beauties lie at our feet which we have not eyes attentive enough to see, or minds awake enough to study, or hearts big enough to love: so with the marvels of Christ and Christianity, of which our tongues often speak parrot-like in hymns and prayers, yet the rich significance of which we seldom feel. Our prayer should be, “Lord, open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.” (T. M. Herbert, M.A.)

We know in part

We wish we knew more. To appreciate the fact that we know but little, and to understand some of the reasons why, will help us to be more reconciled to our own ignorance and to that of others, and will contribute to remove some of the obstacles that lie in the way of a completer knowledge.

I. We are born with an eye graduated to some particular truth or truths, and not with a vision that spreads itself with equal facility over all truths.

1. It is no fault of ours that we cannot see the Southern Cross. That constellation does not form part of the heavens under which God intended us to live. If it had fallen to our lot to dwell in Patagonia, then we should have lived under its blaze, and it would then have been impossible for us to make out the Great Bear. No eye is able to see everything, and each eye has an outlook of its own.

2. Truth is like a diamond, and you must shift your position in order to catch the particular flash from each individual facet; which is what in the matter of truth we do not and cannot do. We can migrate from latitude to latitude, and skip from street to street; but as regards truth, we can change neither our nationality nor our address; truth is fixed, and we are born fixed in our relation to it. We are individually created into a specific angle with the truth. Truth individualises itself to each eye and makes only minute donations to each. It is with us in this respect much as it is with objects in their relation to a sunbeam, where one sort of material will pull the blue out of it; another the green; another the red, and so on through the entire bundle of colour bound up in a white ray. In the same way, each mind picks the particular truth that is native to it.

3. It is the way we are made. It has its advantages; some one aspect of truth we have power to take hold of and to feel keenly. It results in each man having his own little patch of truth to cultivate, and by that means he doubtless gets more produce on to the world’s market than he would do if he had a whole hundred acre lot to cultivate scatteringly.

4. That ought to keep us steadily at work on constructive lines, not destructive ones; telling what little we do see and know, and letting the rest go. A star is not brilliant because I happen to see it; it is brilliant because--it is brilliant. Exactly so it is of a truth. If there is some reality that your mind looks right into, but that your Christian neighbour has no sense of and no care for, it is not because he is a theological idiot, but because your little star does not happen to shine where he stands.

II. We allow the one particular bent that we are born with to assert a despotism over us.

1. If, e.g., there is some particular truth of God’s Word that we have a native bias for, we shall be almost certain to make that determine for us the portions of Scripture that we shall admit to our thought and our confidence; much as the one glowing constellation that is in the direct range of our vision will be almost certain to prevent our scouring around to detect others imperfectly disclosed.

2. The same holds of other books as well as of the Bible. Look at the library of any Christian thinker, and you will be able to determine what his theological bent is. The very particularity of his view operates to keep it narrow, and his will only be those that he can use as whet-stones upon which to whet his particularity down to a thinner edge.

3. Then, too, the habit of thinking along some congenial line, not only weakens our interest in truth lying upon other lines, but sometimes even impairs our power of appreciating truth lying upon them. Just as a creature needs a different bodily construction to enable him to live upon land from what he does to exist in water, so, to a certain degree, a different equipment is required to live and think in a region of spirit from what is required to adapt one to a world of matter; and the more exclusively we are habituated to the former, the more awkward it will make us when we undertake to make any headway in the latter. Some of us use our scientific faculties so little that they become aborted and we lose all power to appreciate scientific facts. And the converse of that is equally true.

4. So that in these days, when there is being so strong a pressure brought to bear in behalf of those branches of knowledge that deal with matter only, if you want your boy to be a Christian, see to it that he gets his mind trained in those faculties that will especially be called in play in the discernment and appreciation of spiritual truth.

III. By a deliberate act of our own will we veto the truth.

1. Truth depends for its power upon the concurrence of the mind as much as light depends for its power on the concurrence of the eye. A truth coming to us always knocks at the door and then stands outside waiting till some one comes and answers. No man is likely to be persuaded against his will. We personally decide just how much God’s Word shall do for us and how far it shall go with us. The preacher never drives it in; we let it in, and just as far as we choose. Good hearing is a far more difficult art than good preaching.

2. Christ had perfect confidence in the truth, and He had just as much confidence that when once the heart had taken the truth fairly in, something would come of it; the parable of the sower teaches that. It may rain as hard as ever it did in the days of old Noah, but the rain will start no grass so long as the downpour falls on to frozen ground.

IV. There are certain elements of Christian knowledge that can come only with the years and indeed with the centuries.

1. Experience is the only perfect teacher. We can of course crowd ourselves with facts, but that is not wisdom. Wisdom is gained by the process of somehow letting the threads of truth weave themselves into the tissue of our own life; and therefore it is not a thing to be hurried any more than you can hurry the growing of the corn. You will have to visit the country before ever you will quite understand what you have so painstakingly learned. Experience is expository; the Bible illuminates us but we illuminate the Bible. We make the Bible ours by our becoming its. We do not understand the publican until we have been on our knees by his side. We do not fathom the story of the prodigal until we have returned from the far country and have known what it is to stand in restored relations with that father. Is there any one of us who feels that he has more than merely begun to understand this chapter?

2. The simple change, too, that comes with our steady departure from childhood to manhood brings us on to a new side of some matters. Perhaps we have found out that life is not what we once thought it was going to be. Possibly the present is not quite so real as it used to be, and very likely the great future is growing upon us. One day I was looking at two large telescopic photographs of the moon, one taken when it was at its full, the other a week later. In the latter, some of the mountains that showed dull and lustreless in the earlier view, came out bright, as in the meantime the sun had passed along to the point where it could illumine the evening slopes, I remarked this to the dealer whose hair had been whitened by the years. “Yes,” he said, very quietly, but quite cheerily, withal, “Yes, the lights are very differently arranged when you get into the last quarter.” (C. H. Parkhurst, D.D.)

Limited knowledge

Knowledge is not always good. It profited our first parents little. God knew this then and He knows it now. Consider--

I. The assumption made--“Now we know.” It is knowledge that makes man better than the brute, that makes him like God, that develops his power, that is his salvation. We know, indeed, and therefore stand out before the heathen, the Jews, the early Christians. We have privileges which are peculiarly our own, and which none have ever enjoyed before.

II. The limitation enforced. “We know in part.” Of all things finite, human knowledge is the most limited. It is limited--

1. In its range.

2. In power.

III. The significance implied. This state of limited human knowledge has its purpose.

1. It places us in our own proper position. We are tempted to make our own knowledge an absolute standard. We fix rules for morality, doctrine; we organise parties and call them perfect, because we imagine our knowledge is perfect; but the authors can only see in part. It requires a serious effort to understand that others have the power of seeing what we cannot see.

2. It alters the whole tone of our spiritual life on earth. It should

(1) Remove fear, for what appears to us to be dark may in reality be light.

(2) Remove doubt, for we must trust.

(3) Lessen grief, for trials may be blessings in disguise.

IV. The privilege bestowed. Our present limited knowledge is to some extent a blessing.

1. It gives us something to look forward to--“Then we shall know even as we are known.” All mysteries shall one day be revealed, and then all errors shall cease.

2. It prevents much sorrow. How fearful to know all that is before us!

3. It engages our thoughts on the practical rather than the theoretical. Love is the practical duty at present; for we can love even if we cannot know. (J. J. S. Bird, M.A.)

Partial knowledge

There is a partial knowledge that is--

I. A necessity. The knowledge of the highest creature must by the necessity of nature be partial. What he knows is as nothing compared with the knowable, still less with the unknowable. “Who by searching can find out God?”

II. A calamity. Our necessary ignorance is not a calamity, but a benediction. It acts as a stimulus. But ignorance of knowable things must be ever a disadvantage. Ignorance of ethics, political economy, laws of health, religion, entails incalculable injuries. Ignorance of these things is the night, the winter of intellect.

III. Sinful. A partial knowledge of our moral condition, the claims of God, the means of redemption, where a fuller knowledge is attainable, is a sin. Ignorance of Christ in a land of churches and Bibles is a sin, and theft of no ordinary heinousness. It is a calamity to heathens, it is a crime to us.

IV. Beneficent. Our ignorance of our future is a blessing. Were the whole of our future to be spread out before us, with all its trials, sorrows, death, life would become intolerable; it is mercy that has woven the veil that hides the future. Conclusion: Our partial knowledge should make us humble, studious, undogmatic, devout. (D. Thomas, D.D.)

Our partial knowledge

is:--

I. A discipline to diligence.

1. We require our children to know, and then we give them, not the knowledge that they seek, but the key of that knowledge. Doubtless the teacher imparts knowledge, but his greater function is in wisely keeping it back until it is fairly won. So God teaches without telling; sets alluring objects of knowledge almost within sight and reach; sets ajar the doors of science, and writes up, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” etc.

2. And no faithful seeker seeks in vain. Perhaps he finds somewhat other than he sought, as Saul sought the straying asses and found a kingdom. Men sought by alchemy for the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, etc., and found them not, but found marvellous things in the quest, and by and by found themselves at the splendid portals of the great treasure-house of modern chemistry. Geography explored unknown seas for a new route to Cipango and Cathay, and lo! a new continent was given as her reward. Astrology adventured out vaguely among the stars, seeking she knew not what, and became transfigured into astronomy.

3. But ever with what is given is something yet reserved. Each new discovery discloses new questions yet to be answered. And what is true in the study of material things is even more impressively true in the higher study of man, and duty, and God. “Ye shall know, if ye shall follow on to know the Lord.”

II. A discipline to humility and patience. And so good a discipline is it that they who have learned the most are commonly the humblest, for they know how inadequate their knowledge is. For running through the very midst of human life, in its most intimate concerns, is a line of unanswerable questions. Along the seam between will and motive, foreknowledge and responsibility, eternity and time, spirit and matter, the absolute and the conditioned, are ranged the antinomies over which the only wisdom is to despair and be patient. And that is the wisdom which after these six thousand years of discipline, theology and philosophy are only now at last beginning to learn.

III. A discipline to charity towards others whose knowledge is yet more narrowly limited or is on a different side from ours. We are vexed at their narrowness, and do not think what reason we give them or others to be vexed at ours. Probably none of us are aware where our knowledge is nearest akin to ignorance and error. Likely enough it is at the very point where we are most positive. We need, as a training in charity, to “look upon the things of others” as well as “upon our own things.” Vinet says, “The men of two hundred years hence will be looking back with astonishment on some monstrous error that was unconsciously held by the best Christians of the nineteenth century.” This is the constant story of the past. And it is right that we should be reminded of it; not that we should cease to hold the truth or hold it with timorous or hesitating grasp, but that we should learn to hold the truth no longer in unrighteousness or in self-righteousness, but in love.

IV. A discipline to faith. We speak of a man of great and settled faith, meaning a learned, confident theologian, who has surveyed and triangulated the whole field of sacred knowledge. Eternity, Trinity, Atonement, all these are quite clear and definite to him. Nay, rather, he is a man, so far as this goes, of no faith at all. He has not the necessary antecedent condition of faith that should bring him to the feet of the great Teacher, and to lay his hand in that of the only Guide. And you who, vexed by doubts and uncertainties and limitations, have been wont to say, “But for these I might believe,” learn now to speak in a higher strain, and say, “In spite of these--no; because of these I must--I do believe. To whom can I go but to Him who hath the words of eternal life? Blessed be God, who hath fenced up my way of knowledge that so I might learn to feel for the leading of His hand, and walk by faith, not by sight.”

V. A discipline to hope. It is not for always, this which is in part, even though it is expedient for us now. It is the dimness which turns our mind toward the day-star and the coming dawn. This hunger and thirst unsatisfied are a continual promise of the coming time when I shall be filled. In this mood I can well afford to await that glorious time for which I am not yet prepared, but for which God is preparing me, when that which is perfect shall have come and these things which are in part shall be done away--when I shall see face to face and know even as I am known. (L. W. Bacon, D.D.)

Present defect and future perfection

I. A statement of present defect.

1. The gifts themselves.

(1) The knowledge is not ordinary but extraordinary, being the effect of supernatural influence (1 Corinthians 12:8).

(2) The gift of prophecy comprehended much. Sometimes it meant the power of foretelling future events; sometimes celebrating the praises of God by a Divine afflatus; sometimes the power of teaching the doctrines of the gospel by the influence of the Holy Spirit of God. So it means here.

(3) We may, however, apply the terms to that more ordinary knowledge and teaching which is the present qualification of all who have received the Spirit and have the knowledge of the truth of God. This is knowledge which none can possibly surpass, and which very few can equal.

2. The imperfection ascribed to these gifts.

(1) The Spirit of God never gave a full development of all His revelations. Even the apostles themselves did not know all that it was possible to know respecting Jesus Christ. Paul, with all his knowledge, says, “I have suffered the loss of all things--that I may know Him.” And as the knowledge was imperfect, so was the prophecy. The inspired apostle found himself on the shore of a boundless ocean, and exclaimed, “O the depth of the riches!” etc.

(2) And so to us the same imperfection attaches most strongly. The pride of our nature may induce us to imagine otherwise; but that pride will very soon be checked. The man who has studied the hardest, who has been most frequently wrapt into visions of future times--even he must still say, “I know in part--I prophesy in part.” And I would ask a Christian of the highest class, if any illuminations, in which he has been enabled hitherto to rejoice, have permitted him yet to say, “That which is perfect is come”? Consider what you know of God--of His government of the universe, of the councils of His will, and of the connection of these with His actions--and then say how incomplete is your knowledge! Consider what you know of the mediatorial influence of Christ--of the fall transformation of the soul into His image--of the future state. You have, it is true, facts to believe, but you cannot comprehend their fulness; you study, you meditate, you explore--but you are soon lost; and you come to the conclusion, “I know in part.”

(3) And then some will say, “Where there is so much mystery, there should be no faith.” But if you will reason thus on religion, extend your reasoning to life, to nature, to all around you. You know that you live; you sit, you think, you hear, you speak; but how soon will you find your knowledge, even on these subjects, limited and nonplussed! Here we must be content to see imperfectly--to comprehend as in enigma. We can only stand as it were on the threshold of the temple; it is in the future age that the veil will be rent, that the inner sanctuary will be open to our gaze, and the fire that burns on the golden altar revealed.

3. The reasons on which this imperfection is founded.

(1) Man’s moral pollution. The most sinful are always the, most ignorant. Adam by transgression lost much of his knowledge; and in proportion as transgression increased, ignorance abounded. Sin has a tendency to pervert the imagination, and forms an hindrance in the way of attaining the pure and sublime knowledge of religion.

(2) Man’s intellectual weakness. There is much in Divine knowledge that we have not a capacity for knowing. Engaged as we all are on material objects, and able to see only through the medium of our senses, what wonder is it if we be compelled to confess, “We know in part”?

(3) The designs of God in connection with man’s present and future state. It is not the design of God that we should know all. The future state is to make up for the defects of the present. It is this which makes heaven an object of such ardent desire to the Christian.

II. An anticipation of future perfection.

1. In regard to some future state of the Church upon earth. Look at the Church in our own day; see how abundantly our information has increased. Yet the Church is now in a very imperfect state compared with what it shall be in the last days; then “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” None shall say to his neighbour or his brother, “Know the Lord,” etc.

2. In reference to the state of the Church in heaven. Then it will be truly said, “That which is perfect is come.”

(1) A perfection of purity.

(2) Of power.

(3) Of knowledge.

(4) Of happiness. (J. Parsons.)

Present imperfection and future perjection

Observe--

I. The imperfection of our present condition.

1. Gifts are but partially distributed.

2. Are imperfect.

3. Are adapted to a state of imperfection.

II. The perfection of heaven.

1. Certainly anticipated.

2. Implies the removal of all imperfection and its causes.

3. The consummation of our nature and its consequent happiness. (J. Lyth, D.D.)