If A, then B…or not.

Bob says my head is a scary place to visit.  Truth be told, he does occasionally admit that that’s one of the reasons he married me 35+ years ago.  To this day, he says that I’m “irregular”.  In the common sense, it’s both a blessing…and a curse.

I tried teaching myself logic from an authentically academic book.  Not the term “logic” that is generously used in everyday usage, although that idea harkens back to the true definition, I suppose.  One of the few things I got out of this autodidactic exercise, (besides that fact that I probably wasn’t going to learn this without a qualified teacher…), is that false premises lead to faulty conclusions.  In other words, my conclusion, or interpretation of the data, may seem to make sense, until I find out that the data was incomplete, or worse, downright wrong.

A clear case of this is the story of the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, confronting a bunch of women hell-bent (literally) on idolatry.  The Hebrew nation was now under severe attack from the Babylonians, something God had been warning them about for a L-O-N-G time, trying to ward off the ensuing destruction.  (And one lone male facing down a bevy of angry females in various states of hormonal upheaval is not to be under-appreciated…)  I could summarize, but it reads well as is.  We open the scene with the women~~

 “For in those days we had plenty to eat, and we were well off and had no troubles! But ever since we quit burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and stopped worshiping her with liquid offerings, we have been in great trouble and have been dying from war and famine.”

“Besides,” the women added, “do you suppose that we were burning incense and pouring out liquid offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and making cakes marked with her image, without our husbands knowing it and helping us? Of course not!”

(That’s right, bring the men in on it…)

“Then Jeremiah said to all of them, men and women alike, who had given him that answer,… ‘It was because the LORD could no longer bear all the disgusting things you were doing that he made your land an object of cursing— a desolate ruin without inhabitants— as it is today.  All these terrible things happened to you because you have burned incense to idols and sinned.’”

The outcome resolved quite badly since their thinking about the situation was woefully inadequate:

To begin with, these gals totally misunderstood authentic relationship with God.  To their credit, they knew they needed to take care of their families, but never is it justifiable to use God as a cosmic cash-cow.  I can’t serve Him with the caveat that He’ll take care of all my earthly desires, or sometimes even (gulp!) my temporal needs in the way that I expect. That’s not the kind of relationship He died on the cross for!  There’s the wholehearted, all-embracing part, and the come-what-may obedience that is borne from that trusting relationship. 

Secondly, they missed the part about heavenly timing.  God’s blessing “overtakes” us, or catches up to us as we consistently and relentless walk in this sold-out intimacy with Him. 

Their original premises were wrong.  Therefore, (that’s a word they actually use in logic; there’s even a symbol for it!), therefore, the women—yes, and the men—got their conclusion completely wrong.  Because following the God of the Universe is always the best option…

From: sites.millersville.edu, but it’s all Greek to me….

…it’s just logical.

 

 

Jeremiah 44:17-23  Tyndale House Publishers Inc (2008-06-01). The One Year Bible NLT (One Year Bible: Nlt Book 2) (Kindle Locations 35356-35364). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition.