No Dragons--Just God! (07.14.05--Tomorrow--2 Timothy 2:11-13)
There’s an old adage that a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Often what we think we know, based only on a scattering of a tidbit of knowledge here and there, can prove to be our undoing when we base our actions largely on the unknown as opposed to the known.
The sad thing about this is that, over time, we come to believe as the whole the mere smattering of knowledge that we possess. We may even be given to basing future actions upon the spurious knowledge that we hold as truth when, all along, the truth has evaded our attention and our walk into tomorrow is based on speculation, not real knowledge.
An interesting map is on display in the British Museum in London. It’s an old mariner’s chart, drawn in 1525, outlining the North American coastline and adjacent waters. At that time most of the new continent’s interior had not as yet been explored with but a few hundred miles of coastline being the only evidence of what lie beyond.
The handful of explorers who had visited the Americas had relied upon the scattered Indian tribes for information about the land. In many cases, since the natives had no wish that these strange visitors from the sea should venture forth over their land, they had created fanciful tales and legends as being an accurate description of what the new land held in store for anyone adventurous or foolhardy enough to take the risk.
With these tales in mind, the cartographer made some intriguing notations on areas of the map that represented regions not yet explored. He wrote: “Here be giants,” “Here be fiery scorpions,” and “Here be dragons.” Eventually, the map came into the possession of Sir John Franklin, a British explorer in the early 1800s. Musing over these fanciful, even mythical inscriptions, he scratched them out one by one and in their stead he wrote these words across the map: “Here is God.”
What lies in store for us along the “coastlines” of our lives is known only to God. But, He has not been so unkind as to give us no hope for tomorrow, no foundation of knowledge upon which we can search out the
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