And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

2 Peter 3:15-18

Peter was warning — well before internet message boards, YouTube videos, newspaper editorials and late-night TV documentaries — about the dangers of ignorant people weaponizing the complexity of Scripture to mislead.

Christians must be comfortable with their own lack of knowledge. Faith, at its root, is an endeavor which requires some gaps in information or understanding, at least from a material evidence point of view. Christians aren’t Christians because they met God once and he convinced them to be followers. We see evidence of God’s goodness in his people, in his world and in his holy Scriptures. But not one of those things can ever be fully known in a way that will fully satisfy a pure reasoning argument for being a Christian. We need some emotion, some Spiritual pull and some willingness to trust in order to fill in that gap.

Watch out for willfully ignorant people that are willing to weaponize that lack of knowledge into a tool to manipulate the Scriptures to support their own agenda. And while you do, let us as Christians wrestle with what we don’t know, or as Peter says, grow in grace and knowledge!

Ethan Kirl