Ya Really Oughta Know …

“ ‘History never repeats’,
    I tell myself before I go to sleep.”

— Neil Finn, 1981

Well, that’s reassuring. We’d never want a second Black Plague, a second Holocaust or even a second Hurricane Katrina, would we? But if Finn is right, we should perhaps ask ourselves the obvious question: Why study history?

After all, if it never repeats, then knowledge of the past is useless to guide us for the future. What use is it to think about the South Sea Bubble or the Cold War when we know that the unique circumstances that made each possible will never exist again?

Is History Really ‘History’?

Postmodern historiographers make the problem even worse: they insist that even the descriptions we have of historical events are really just the opinions of various power concerns or interest groups, each one trying to tell a story that favors its own narrative. So history is just a bunch of pernicious myths, really, and we’d best be permanently cynical about any of them, lest we find our own personal freedoms constricted by someone else’s false historical narrative.

But before we “go to sleep” on that, maybe we’d better consider this: if history never repeats and is, in any case, just a bunch of self-serving claptrap, then you and I have nothing but the present moment to guide us. Such wisdom as you and I may happen to generate between the womb and the tomb is all we’re ever going to have … and when we’re dead, we’ll just be someone else’s “history” — which would be no more worth remembering than our own history.

The Church and History

At the same time as all this is going on in academia, something similar is happening in many congregations today: Bible history is not being taken particularly seriously. In fact, a lot of Christians would probably think the New Testament is the essential stuff, and the Old Testament is the forgettable, obsolete, irrelevant Jewish stuff. So many of us are happy to own a New Testament, but if we even own a copy of the Old, that’s the part where all the pages still stick together.

Not a biblical attitude, that. The New Testament itself does not behave that way in regard to the Old Testament. Consider the honor Christ gave to the tanakh, quoting it authoritatively, referring to it as a collection of true and actual events, and flatly declaring that it would be easier for earth and heaven itself to pass away rather than for one of its precepts to fail. Even if you’ve read it but don’t take it seriously, you fall into stupid mistakes you could have avoided.

The rest of the New Testament takes up the same theme. We’re not just supposed to know the facts of the Old Testament: we’re to believe them, meditate on them, take them seriously, and apply them to the conduct of our own lives. Take Jude’s admonition, for example:

“Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.”

“Remember” What?

Now, wait a minute, Jude: your book was written somewhere in the latter half of the first century A.D. Best dates put the Exodus in the mid-1400s B.C. That means that almost a millennium and a half had passed between the time you were writing this and the events to which you refer. What do you mean, “remind us”? Very clearly, neither we nor the audience to whom you wrote were anywhere near involved with those events. Not even close.

You sound like Paul. He wrote that the events at that same time “happened to [Israel] as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come”.

But hey, bad news, guys … we weren’t alive then. Not even close. So how can you “remind” or “instruct” or “give examples” to us from things we certainly never experienced as if they should prove to us how we should live?

Their Point

Well, we’re not supposed to forget history. Especially biblical history. Because despite all the tommyrot going around today about history being nothing more than “a story told by the winners”, something did actually happen. There may be different versions of events floating around, and yeah, some of them may be twisted and revisionist, but amid the flotsam of human retelling there are true events.

Not only that, but in scripture these true events actually do coalesce into an integrated narrative — not a made-up one, like human histories, but rather a series of definite events that contribute to an instructive and truthful story, the story of God’s dealings with humanity. And if you want to squabble over the details, fine: but the one thing that remains true is that God so ordered these events that they would not just contribute to his plan for the 15th century B.C., but that they would afterward serve as instruction to generation after generation of people, so long as they grasped even the basic facts about what really happened … and especially that God was really dealing with people in the way the Bible describes.

It’s On Us

You ought to know. You ought to know who God really is. You ought to know how he does not endure wickedness. You ought to know how he does not spare those who despise him, and yet how swiftly his mercy comes to those who repent. You ought to know because you ought to have heard what God has said about those events, and you ought to believe it all as fact.

If you do, you get wisdom for life right now. If you don’t, you’re going to be a bit of an idiot. You remember what an “idiot” is, don’t you? It’s a person who thinks that he or she (“id-”, self) is all that matters, and actually lives by (“-iot”, dweller) that delusion. And if our present day society believes that their generation is the only one that matters and that the past is worthless, well then, what can one say but we are a whole generation of idiots? For the past is where we learn things. And while it may not be true (as Santayana is so often quoted as saying) that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”, it is true that those who cut themselves off from the lessons of the past are condemning themselves to make every mistake from now on first-hand, and to pay the full price of their own generation’s particular blind spots.

Not only that, but the dealings of God are opaque to those who look for them nowhere but in their own generation. God’s activities sweep throughout the entire span of time, and the revelation of his purposes is not to be seen in the ephemera of the present time. One sees the character of God far more clearly in the patterns of his providence and righteous judgment, and they pertain to all generations.

History Ain’t Just A Story …

To know God, know history — not merely the fables of man, but true history, the facts of what really happened and how the dealings of God interfaced with the whole narrative of the human race. For if, as today’s historiographers often tell us, history is perspectival, it is only possible as a perspective on something real. To seek the right perspective on the real events is to pursue truth. To abandon the search for this historical truth is to abandon history itself, to relegate the historian to become the mere spinner of fables.

So what our own day has made out of history is not what the Bible makes. In scripture, history is said to be essential to our knowledge of God and his will for us. For while its particulars may never repeat, its patterns — especially its patterns of human behavior — are as relevant to today as the any modern psychology textbook. More, in fact.

According to the Bible, when we read a historical narrative, the thing we are to be looking for is how people interact with God: How they respond well or badly to the Divine intentions, how they put themselves in trouble by ignoring God, or how they get out of trouble by his mercy. We’re supposed to regard the narrative as true, take it to heart, apply it to our own situations, and change our behavior based on it.

We’re not supposed to forget the past. And we’re not just supposed to know about biblical history in a detached way, or with a superficial “what-I-heard-in-Sunday-School” way. We’re supposed to soak in it, ponder it, plumb its depths, turn it over in our minds, and then act on the wisdom doing this imparts to us.

In Short

We do well to mistrust history — for history, particularly secular history — is indeed a difficult business, one troubled by the dishonesty and selectivity of man. Not so the word of God. The historical accounts it contains may not contain every detail of the past, but what is written there is the essence of what we most need to know, not just for now but for all time. It’s real history, true history, history with permanent value.

“Remember the days of old,
       Consider the years of all generations …”