The Most Deadly Ignorance



All people are ignorant of something. To be ignorant is to be without knowledge and understanding of something. The scientist may have great knowledge in many areas but he may be ignorant as to how his car works or how to fix it. But there is a common and very deadly ignorance that we abide in and bear witness of apart from the grace and power of God upon us. Paul confessed it and attributed his deliverance from it to God’s grace alone.

Before Christ coming to him in His saving power, he was an educated, religious and moral man who trusted in his own works of religion, nationality and morality to commend him to God. But when God revealed Christ to and in Paul, he says, “I was before a blasphemer” and trusted my own works of righteousness “ignorantly in unbelief” [I TIMOTHY 1:13]. The unbelief he spoke of was ignorance of God’s truth. Ignorance of Christ who is the Truth.

We are ignorant of the most important things when we are ignorant of who God is, what we are, and how God saves sinners through the righteousness of Another. Paul sadly described his own nation saying, “For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge” [ROMANS 10:2-3]. How did he know this? “For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” [ROMANS 10:3].

They showed themselves ignorant of what righteousness is and where it is to be found by trying to establish a righteousness of their own. This shows the natural ignorance of all people by nature and birth. Paul again describes our state by nature: “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” [EPHESIANS 4:18]. This ignorance is willful. In the word itself is the word “ignore!” We willfully ignore the only truth, the only righteousness, the only way a sinner is made righteous before God and by God which is in Christ Jesus alone.

God plainly tells us that it is “not by works of righteousness which we have done” [TITUS 3:5]. To be righteous we must be “made the righteousness of God in Him.” His righteousness imputed to us is the only righteousness. May God give us an understanding and if He does it will be through the word of truth, the gospel wherein His righteousness is revealed. “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant” [I CORINTHIANS 14:37-38].


-Gospel report by preacher Gary Shepard

Sovereign Grace Baptist church of Jacksonville, North Carolina USA

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