“First Line Of Defense” is October 10’s entry from Dr. David Jeremiah’s ‘Turning Points with God: 365 Daily Devotions’.
"…They [The Bereans] received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so." Acts 17:11
For years, Bible teachers and preachers have used the following illustration: “The U.S. Treasury uses only one method when training new agents to detect counterfeit currency: trainees study the appearance of actual currency so long that they can immediately detect a counterfeit when they see it.” Though the illustration makes for good preaching, it is not actually true.
But consider the premise generally: the more intimately we know the details of the truth, the more readily we can detect error. Such preparation would apply to theological truth as well. When false doctrines are presented to us, how will we know they are false unless we know what is true?
If someone says he knows the exact time of Christ’s second coming, we might believe him if we don’t know what Jesus said in Mark 13:32. We should be like the Jews in Berea when they heard Paul preach–they studied the Old Testament daily to verify what Paul was preaching about the Messiah.
Make sure your first line of defense against theological error is a thorough knowledge of the truth.
To end, a quote from Phillips Brooks, “Truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks; and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks.”
