Job 8:8

Inquire, I pray you, of the older generation,

   Heed the insight of their fathers.

(Written 5/10, Posted 5/16)

Many aspects of worldly life include an component of ancestor worship. God tells us to honor our father and mother, but He also tells us everything on earth has a season and then ends. I am not saying we should ignore the wisdom passed down to us, but our world learns more every day than people 10 years ago knew. The fact that we have forgotten what people knew a thousand years ago is moot in many cases.

“Ask” was sometimes used in place of “inquire”. “Bygone”, “former”, “past”, and “earlier” were used in place of “older”. None of these really seemed to impact the meaning.

“What they found”, “what they learned”, “what they discovered”, “what they searched out”, and “question” were alternatives for “insight”. “Insight” seemed to encompass how it was gained. “Consider”, “study”, and “take in” were alternatives for “heed”, but other ideas were “find out”, “discover”, “prepare (to question)”, and “set your mind (to question)”. The difference between learning what you parent knew and using what your parent taught is huge. I went with the heed side of the equation based on feel.

One of the stereotypes I feel popular culture uses is that we are better than those who went before. Smarter, faster, prettier, stronger, etc. In reality, I think the average person is just as stupid, or smart, now as in the day of Adam and Eve. There are maybe more well-known extremes of tall or fat or pretty or whatever, but the Bible tells us there is nothing new under the sun and the jest of this is that people have not evolved over the course of history. The average old person seems smart because they lived long enough to be old, have more experience, and have given up on stupid stuff. Even older people seem smarter because they remember their youth more than the recent past and can bring out the things they learned as a child.

I read an article on abortion and this fact stood out: Some areas of New York City have more pregnancies terminated than those that achieve live birth. This statistic is not comforting in most perspectives. The gap in the issue is God. If all the people having abortions followed God, they probably would not be getting pregnant in the first place. Ungodly people in the Bible burned their kids alive. Not sure anyone would argue the right to do so now, but no law is going to convince someone what is right. Drunks still drive; even those knowing God does not like it.

Ancestor worship is wrong. We should only worship God alone. But we do have to honor our elders, appreciate what they can offer.

Thinking we can legislate good values is incorrect. We do have to make laws that protect the groups from the lunacies of the minority. Using a gun to kill and steal is wrong but taking the gun from the law abiding just leaves them at the mercy of the lawless owning and using a gun for nefarious reasons. By definition, the lawless do not follow the laws. Why our society allows the fringe elements to lead is simply a question of who owns the gold. The real golden rule is that those who have the gold make the rules.

My mom taught me many things. The most important was who Jesus was. The rest might as well be forgotten.