Services | Sunday at FPC | Sermons | Podcasts | Home

Trusting the Experts

Rev. Doug Pratt — January 10, 2010
 

Download: Trusting the Experts as an MP3 file
(right click and save as)

Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn't you bring him in?”
      ⁴⁶“No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards declared.
      ⁴⁷“You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted. ⁴⁸“Has any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? ⁴⁹No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”
      ⁵⁰Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked, ⁵¹“Does our law condemn anyone without first hearing him to find out what he is doing?”
      ⁵²They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”
John 7:45-52 (NIV)

Introduction
A few weeks ago my wife and I were visiting at her mother’s home in Ohio. I thought that dentist’s offices and doctor’s waiting rooms were the ultimate repositories of out-of-date magazines, but I think my mother-in-law’s home surpasses them all. I was flipping through a stack of old Newsweek magazines from several years ago. In one of them I decided to read the last-page column by George Will, a commentator I usually enjoy. He was reflecting on the unpopularity at that time of the Bush Administration and the legislative gridlock in Congress. It was quite possible, he commented, that the country would elect a Democrat in the 2008 elections. But as evenly-divided as we are, he reasoned, surely the Senate would never become so lop-sided that a 60-vote super-majority could cut off filibuster; and thus, any new president would surely have to develop bipartisan plans.

Well, a couple weeks ago the 60-vote Senate majority passed a big health care bill without a single vote from the minority party. Whether you agree with the legislation or not, clearly George Will—whom many would consider an expert in politics—missed that one.

Experts, we have seen repeatedly, can indeed be wrong. If we dug out some copies of the Wall Street Journal or business magazines and read the predictions of the experts two years ago this week on what the economy and markets would do in 2008, how many would we find had predicted that, by the end of that year, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would be ghosts and the federal government would own big chunks of our largest banks? Sometimes even the experts don’t see things accurately.

Limits to human knowledge
We live in a highly complex and interdependent world. The world of our society and economy is built on knowledge, on human intellect and skill. But when our knowledge and skills reach their limits, we feel lost. The experts we’ve trusted prove to be fallible. It often frightens us. It should humble us. Even our greatest breakthroughs in science and medicine have not allowed us to completely understand, let alone control, the natural world and the amazing intricacies and unpredictabilities of the human body. Again, we should be humbled.

In our scripture text for today we see another example of experts making a huge blunder (and for them it proved to be a tragic and disastrous one). The experts in our story—who were called “Pharisees”—were highly-educated men, with the first century equivalent of doctorates in theology; they were the leading religious scholars of their day. They knew their Bibles (the Old Testament) backward and forward; they thought they had God all figured out, and were proud of their great learning. The less-educated people of their day revered them as the final authorities, the supreme experts. But here in John 7, in a critical moment, their collective wisdom and intellect failed them. They made a horrific blunder. The Messiah had come to them, the One whom the prophets had foretold for centuries, the Answer to all human questions, the Source of peace and joy that could come from no other source … and they rejected Him outright.

Why are experts sometimes wrong?
Why do the supposed “best and brightest” sometimes make the worst decisions? Why can things at times go so wrong in the world of human events? Let’s think about some of the reasons.

Sometimes “experts” don’t have all the facts. That is certainly at least part of the problem for the Pharisees in John 7. They were anchored enough in their knowledge of the Old Testament to be certain that the Deliverer of the World would be born in the “City of David,” the small Jerusalem suburb of Bethlehem. They assumed, because they knew that Jesus had been raised in the area of Galilee in the north and that is where His public ministry had begun, that He was by birth a Galilean. The experts neglected to perform their “due diligence”—to check their facts and find out exactly where Jesus had been born. Had they gotten the facts, or had access to them, they might have made a different decision.

We see experts in many fields act on the basis of assumptions that are flawed. An investment advisor recommends that his or her clients sell a stock based upon the public information available—not knowing that a week later that stock is going to explode in value as a secret takeover deal is suddenly announced. The advisor simply didn’t have all the facts. In a world of imperfect knowledge, even the experts are limited.

Sometimes “experts” have a personal bias or agenda. That certainly seems to be involved here in the mistake of the Pharisees. Though they publicly stated that they, like all faithful Jews, were longing for the Messiah to come and bring changes, they had a lot to lose personally and professionally if the status quo were to change. Their positions were secure, they were prosperous and influential, and they wanted to hold on to those perks of power and privilege. When Jesus started publicly talking about God’s plan to make “the first last and the last first,” they knew that following His plan would move them to the back of the line. And so their self-interest and their bias caused thick cataracts to form on their spiritual eyes. They couldn’t see who He really was because they didn’t want to see.

And we find the same oh-so-human tendency in many areas today. Our objectivity and wisdom become clouded by our preferences and politics and loyalties. Whatever the actual data and scientific facts might be (and I am not an environmental scientist or climatologist with the capacity to speak authoritatively), the recent scandal of the leaked email communications by top researchers in England (dubbed “Climategate”) has cast a pall of suspicion over claims of man-made “global warming.” Even those highly-educated scientists apparently had a personal bias. Like the Pharisees in John 7, they were unwilling to consider any opinion but their own. And like the Pharisees, they were determined to stifle other viewpoints at any cost—rather than being humbly open and willing to consider new truth and new possibilities.

Sometimes life is more complex than we can possibly grasp. We hate to be reminded that there are limits to our human ability to understand and control, but sometimes even the smartest among us are stumped. The Pharisees did not know the mind of God. Even though tantalizing hints of His plan for the salvation of the world are scattered throughout the scriptures, only the Lord knew how every piece of the puzzle would be assembled.

This is true of the wonder of the human body, with its complex interaction of organs and systems. Though we were not designed by our Creator to live forever, yet our bodies have remarkable ways of surviving and repairing themselves. And God sometimes works in ways beyond what we expect.

I spoke a couple months ago with a man who was not supposed to be alive. Seven years earlier a medical specialist (who obviously flunked “Bedside Manners 101” in med school) told him bluntly that he had just a few months to live, and that there was nothing anyone could do for him. This man’s family and friends decided to take the matter to the Lord daily in prayer; he also decided he’d talk to some other doctors. And today he is very much alive and healthy! Even the smartest experts in the human body are surprised sometimes.

I’ve experienced that in my own family lately. My wife’s mother, after nearly three months in hospitals and nursing homes and a pessimistic prognosis by several physicians, has now moved back to her home and made a remarkable recovery. We don’t know how long we’ll have her, but clearly it was not God’s time to take her this past fall.

The same unpredictability is actually the norm in economics and politics, in science and psychology, in every field we can name. We’ve learned a great deal, but we don’t know it all. The longer I am a pastor, the more humbled I become by the mysteries of life: its unforeseen tragedies and its unexpected blessings.

A man who grows in understanding
Let’s return to the story in John 7. We find one man who rises above the blunders and blindness of the rest of the Pharisees. His name is Nicodemus. If you know your Bible, you have heard of him elsewhere.

He was just like the rest of the religious elite of his day: educated, self-confident, secure in his knowledge and his position. But something wasn’t quite settled in the heart of Nicodemus. He decided to pay a personal visit to this preacher from Galilee to discuss a few things, privately. Their conversation is recorded in John chapter 3. Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to experience a spiritual rebirth—that graduate degrees and professional credentials and following all the religious laws couldn’t make him right with God. At first Nicodemus was clueless and stumped. “What, I’m going to crawl back into my mother’s womb?” he asked. Jesus said, “No, Nick, I’m talking about the life of the soul. I’m talking about a personal relationship with God. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

And so the change in Nicodemus began. Jesus began to take a crowbar to his mind and heart and pry them open. Here we are, four chapters and several months or even a year later, and Nicodemus stands alone among his hostile peers, revealing that he is open to God doing a new thing. [And ultimately, at the end of the book of John, after Jesus has died on the cross, we see the change completed in Nicodemus.]

He is our role model for dealing with the complexity and the uncertainty of life. Nicodemus is the one who demonstrates the right attitude: openness to God, rather than hiding behind pride and human efforts.

Conclusion
In the year ahead of us, there will be times for each of us when we will need to consult an expert, to seek the wisdom and help of those with more knowledge than we have in some area. It may be a doctor, a lawyer, a tax accountant, an insurance agent, an investment advisor, an auto mechanic, or an air conditioning repairman. We need these specialists and the expertise they have. But we need to remember that even the brightest of experts is not perfect. They can and do make mistakes; there are limits to their knowledge and skill. And when they fail, rather than reacting in bitterness and seeking revenge, let’s have compassion on their fallibilities.

Some of us have been called to a profession in which we seek to offer excellence in help and counsel and leadership to others. And it’s critical that we always keep open to learning and growing and developing new skills and understanding. The finest scientists never lock in to one hypothesis but keep open to new data. The finest dentists want to keep learning, and the finest real estate agents want to stay informed about the fluctuations in their local market. We pastors want to keep studying and finding new truths in God’s Word, and to continue to learn more about our congregations and how God is working in each person’s life.

The more we know in this world, the more we should be humbled by how much we don’t know. If only the other Pharisees had followed in the path of their brother Nicodemus and been open to learning more from God, they would have been able to find a relationship with the Lord as well. In this year some of us are going to take that road. God will become more real and personal to us than we have ever imagined. We will pray about a desperate need for ourselves or someone we love and will find God’s healing touch in ways we didn’t expect. Others of us will undergo an unexpected loss or sadness this year, and we will have to draw more deeply on the well of God’s unlimited strength than we ever have before to get us through it day by day.

If we place all our faith and trust in human wisdom and cleverness, in our experts and technologies, ultimately they will fail us. But if we place our faith in the Lord, He will be with us now and forever.