I had a physics teacher when I was in high school who had a reputation for being brilliant. He held patents for manufacturing some of the first solid-state electronic components (selenium rectifiers), and he worked on the Manhattan Project when the atomic bomb was first being created.
It was, to put it mildly, an interesting class. We calculated the speed and movement of bowling balls bobbing up and down on springs; we learned to do Fourier analysis longhand with a slide-rule; we did experiments in thermodynamics and electronics … far deeper than most high school physics classes ever delved.
But one particular thing we studied made a big impression on me, not for what we learned, but for a mistake our over-qualified teacher made. A problem presented to us was: how would an engineer determine what grade of steel was needed in the trusses that hold a bridge up? He drew us a diagram of the truss structure, told us how much weight it needed to carry, and provided the dimensions, and at what points it rested on the ground. Our task was to calculate how much weight was on each steel segment. It was a complicated and fussy calculation, that went through pages and pages of math. It took days before we students even had a grasp on the procedure involved, but we slogged through, and we learned it. And then it got real interesting.
You see, once we had a grasp on the technique, the teacher started varying the designs. And, as we got more comfortable with it, we added our own variations in how we went about solving it. And we started getting different answers. Part of the class would get one solution, and others would get another, but when the teacher went through the solutions, he discovered both parties did everything correctly. It turned out that it mattered which support point you started your calculations from. The teacher didn’t have a satisfactory resolution to this. He confessed it was not his area of expertise, but he was confident in the theory, and from then on, he simply specified whether to work from left to right or vice versa. We went along with it, because we all knew we were in way over our heads anyway.
Years later, I figured it out. What our teacher had missed was that all the possible answers were really incorrect, taken by themselves. If, by working from point A you calculated truss 1 was holding a ton, and working from point B, truss 1 was holding a half ton, it was really holding a ton and a half. You had to calculate the stresses from every resting point, and then combine them to determine exactly what each segment was holding up. But, as I said, our teacher’s theory was perfectly sound, and utterly logical. It was even correct as far as it went; the trouble was it didn’t go far enough. His view was too narrow, and he missed the truth because he was focusing too much on details … to the exclusion of other facts that mattered. In real world application, it mattered enough to possibly make the difference between whether the users of that bridge went for a drive or a swim.
This is a real danger when it comes to spiritual things, because we’ll often hear a thing, and if we trust or like the person we heard it from, we’ll agree with it … sometimes without questioning it at all. A lot of the time, it’s even correct. But what happens in those cases when it is not? Look how the Bereans handled a new bit of information in Acts 17:11; “… they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” These were people who were hearing the gospel for the first time, and they examined the Scriptures in depth (because you don’t search the Scriptures daily if it’s a casual search). They made sure what they were being taught lined up with the Word of God. They took a wider view.
I was reminded of this in another way not so long ago, when I saw a picture of a protest rally, and one of the protesters was holding up a sign that said, “Don’t Judge Me!” It’s a fairly clear reference to Matthew 7:1, where Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” But the protester only thought of the first two words of that statement, and didn’t think of the rest of it at all … and the clincher is in verse 5, where Jesus says, in essence, fix your own problems so you can see clearly enough to fix someone else’s, which absolutely requires making a judgment of some sort. Jesus wasn’t saying, “never judge,” He was saying, judge rightly, and don’t forget you have issues too. In John 7:4, he actually instructs his hearers to judge others, though once again He emphasizes that they do it the right way. So you see, the narrow view this protester took caused him to make a very big error. If he understood the Scripture he was using properly, he never would have dared use it at all. But you can see where a mistake like that may have happened, and for me at least, it makes me want to review many things I think I understand, and make certain that all of the Bible backs up my understanding.
Paul, when speaking of his ministry to the elders of the church in Ephesus, spoke of declaring the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). That is exactly the wider view we all need to have: learning and proclaiming all of God’s Word, that all the truth be known by those who hear us.