March 28 – Babes in Knowledge

Hope for Today: A Daily Devotion from Reasons for Hope*Jesus

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“For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.” Hebrews 5:13

The apostle, with some severity of expression, tells the Hebrews, or converted Jews to whom he wrote, that instead of being capable of strong meat or attaining to the perfection of Christian doctrine and being skillful in the word of righteousness, they chose to continue babes in knowledge and, like children, had all their work to begin again. It is, therefore, a matter of the greatest importance to know what that word of righteousness is, in which they were unskillful, not having their senses exercised to discern between good and evil, truth and error.

Let it only be observed that they were looking back to the law, and consequently in danger of returning to it for justification and thus falling from the doctrine of grace. The design of this epistle was to keep them steadfast in the faith; and it will appear at once that the righteousness which they were ignorant of, or ready to reject, is that of Christ, who “by one offering,” the finishing act of His obedience, “has perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

How many, in the present day, who have the appearance of well-grown Christians, are just such babes as the Hebrews were and have the same need. They need to be told that they are unskillful in the word (the reason or ground of a justifying righteousness) and exhorted to go on to perfection in Christian doctrine, as well as to further degrees of Christian holiness. Lord, teach me to make Jesus my Alpha and Omega: first, last, all in all!

Devotion by Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky (1690—1774)