The Curious Man

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The Curious Man

June 25, 2023

Curiosity is not a word you here very frequently, however, it is a pivotal attribute that God has given mankind. It is the driving force the causes mankind to investigate the world. Curiosity requires imagination, however, and that requires an enchanted view of the world. For The King!!! Key Text: Provers 25:2 Social Media: Facebook page: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/For-The-King-105492691873696/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Gab page: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://gab.com/ForTheKingPod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/ForTheKingPod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Fountain.fm -> ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fountain.fm/show/U78tm316mhRmq1LFZ6HS⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support: Donate Crypto: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/f63fd7db-919e-44f6-9c58-8ec2891f3eb5⁠⁠⁠⁠ Kingly Clothing: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/for-the-king/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Contact: Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠forthekingpodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email: forthekingpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve Him or not, whether you bless Him, curse Him, hate Him, or love Him, He is the Lord of your life because God has given Him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that He is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. But I will not apologize for this God of the Bible.

Hello, friends. Welcome to the For the King podcast. This is your host, Rocky Ramsey.

I'm joined with my brother, Bryce. Thanks for joining me, Bryce. How are you doing this evening? I am doing fine.

How about yourself? Dude, I'm feeling all right. I'm happy that we get to film another podcast episode. Got busy for a while, so I'm sorry if you guys have been on the edge of your heels waiting for the next episode.

I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things here. This will be the first episode that gets me back in the swing of things. So thanks for bearing with us and waiting, and we hope that you enjoy this episode.

We'll be looking through specifically one text this evening and kind of working through this idea that's laid out here of curiosity. So let me read you our text for this episode. Proverbs 25.2. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, to search out a matter is the glory of kings.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. So the idea we want to precipitate out of this verse here is, like I just noted, curiosity.

Curiosity is searching out a matter. That's the glory of kings. That's what kings do.

This is what important men have done all throughout history, have been to search out a matter, to be curious about God's creation. Let me read you a quote real quick by Albert Einstein, one of the most intelligent men, at least at the 20th century, definitely up there in terms of, you know, worldwide minds throughout the centuries. He says this, I have no special talent.

I am only passionately curious. What we want to do this episode is remind the men and women that are listening that God has made us in his image to search out what he's made, to search him out specifically. And curiosity is that driving force, that kind of liveliness of the mind to grow, learn, grow, you know, discern, increase understanding.

This is what has driven humanity into a further knowledge of God's creation. That's mainly how we think of it. But we want to also kind of pose to you tonight that this is also our driving force towards God himself, because we know all truth is ultimately rooted in God's character and what he's done in creation.

Do you have any thoughts, Bryce, as we kind of set the stage here before we get into some nitty gritty? Yeah. Further note of setting the stage is, I mean, this is the most fundamental and basics of all life. Like one thing that drives my daughter to life is a sense of curiosity and discovery.

Yeah. So there actually is no life apart from curiosity. If curiosity is gone, then all life, all virtue, everything is meaningless if there is no curiosity.

So it's an utter necessity for mankind in order to live. Exactly. Yeah.

One thing that comes to mind there, curiosity presupposes meaningfulness. The fact that humans are even curious at all, that somebody decided to be curious, that presupposes in the human psyche that when we interact with the world, we expect there to be meaning. There's something to discover.

Like you said, I like using that word discovery. There's things to be found out, which is glorious. As Christians, we're not anti-science at all.

The scientific method is glorious. It's great. It's a tool by which God has given humanity through the laws of logic and reason to search a matter out, to understand things.

That's good. That's not a bad thing at all. But when you go into something like scientism, when you presuppose the laws of logic and just assume them rather than seeing them coming from God and giving the scientific method purpose, then that's where you start putting your faith and trust in the method of curiosity and you make curiosity an idol.

Searching just for searching sake rather than searching because there's order to the universe that comes from God. So I kind of want to build that framework there too. Let's revisit just the mind of a child.

Bryce, you had brought up before the podcast of a guy that you work for, his son is constantly coming before him and asking his father, what do you do? What are you doing, dad? What are you working on? I remember Bryce, you and I, when we were younger, we'd come up to our dad and we'd do the same thing. Dad, what are you doing? What are you working on? What do you do for a living? Every young boy, every young person is curious about what their parents do. That's why in schools we have your dad or your mom come into school and they tell the children what they do for a living.

We're very, very curious about the world and about what people are doing. So what are some thoughts there, Bryce? You're thinking the mind of a child, just seeing your daughter grow. It's definitely built into humanity and we're making this case here.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, this isn't the direct meaning, but here's an application of Jesus's words when he says that you must have the faith of a child. Like, okay, my boss's son comes up. I'm holding a chisel.

He says, what's that? Oh, this is a chisel. What does that do? Oh, it cuts through wood. Why does it cut through wood? I'm left dumbfounded because I haven't had the intelligence to even ask the question, why does it cut through wood? That's a good point.

Why does it do that? It just shows the fundamental curiosity that the reason that we get so stumped in our old age, and this is something that C.S. Lewis really brings out. This is part of the heart of why he wrote Narnia, is that we need to recover what we had lost as children. We become so boring when we grow into adulthood, and the reason is not because being an adult is boring.

It's because what we're taught adults are supposed to do. You'd be lazy. You sit on your bum.

You watch TV. You're fed things, but you never seek out things. Ultimately, this is just the effects of a bastardized world.

Going back to our original text, it's the glory of God to conceal a matter, but it's the glory of kings to search them out. We haven't had fathers who conceal things for us, and then we don't even know how to seek it out because we don't even know that it's been hidden. When you go on an Easter egg hunt, the reason a child goes out and tries to find an egg is because everybody knows that this is a game.

A bunch of eggs were just hidden in the ground. We haven't even begun to play the game yet. The fundamental thing of parenting, too, is we will quench the imagination of children by giving everything to them immediately without letting them figure it out for themselves.

We need to let our kids have scrappy knees. We need to let them take risks with judgment, but we need to let them take risks nonetheless. Measured risks.

Right. We need to find for ourselves fathers and guides who will help us learn how we ought to properly seek out a matter and to regain and rekindle that curiosity. Curiosity only goes so far.

Curiosity is like an arrow, but an arrow in and of itself isn't good enough. You have to have a bow to shoot it. You can try to throw an arrow all you want, but it must be released.

That's the helpful part of living in God's world, recognizing that there is meaning. That is the bow and that shoots us out into the world into different endeavors. We have different curiosities.

Just like 1 Corinthians 12 talks about, there's different members in the body who each have different gifts. Maybe a little bit of a rant, but we need to recover what we had lost naturally as children and a curiosity for the natural world. Agreed.

Yeah, that's good, Bryce. One thing that came to mind as you were speaking, I've heard this before. I think this rings true just in my life, interacting with people.

Interesting people are interested people. Interesting people are curious people, basically. That's another way I could put that and still have the same meaning.

You need to be the kind of person that God has created you to be in His image. God is always acting. He's always doing things.

He's involved in His creation, I guess is the point. He's always sustaining and caring for in His providence all things that He's doing. We ought to be made in His image.

We ought to see in ourselves the innate purposelessness of a lazy lifestyle that's not interested in anything, that likes meaningless entertainment when we sit down and we watch a show. Rather than go read a book or think about something or interact with another human. I think that these are all in our modern day.

Like you're saying, Bryce, we haven't even scratched the surface of rekindling our imagination. When we see what people pre the 19th century wrote, it astounds us how amazing these stories are that are woven. Modern day film and fiction is just really boring and not compelling at all.

It's because we've just lacked curiosity. We've gotten rid of that. It does come back to your worldview.

Like you're saying, Bryce, you're the bow that's shooting out curiosity. If you think the world is just mechanistic and everything has a very simplistic, reducible answer. If everything can be reduced to one very simplistic physical phenomenon, then life is honestly very, very boring.

Very, very boring. But if there's actually layers to creation, if there's a spiritual plane, if there's more to life than just the physical phenomenon, but there's also things like love and how love plays out in every single situation. You get a layered life.

It's exciting and spectacular. There's a lot to figure out. There's a lot to look into.

I heard you want to chime in there. What are your thoughts? Yeah. That just reminds me.

I've been reading GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. He was talking about how an insane naturalist, when he's asked a question by a child, dad, why does the leaf fall from the tree? He replies back and he says, son, the reason it falls is because of gravity. He fundamentally stunts and destroys curiosity.

Okay. That's an extremely easy thing to understand. When we try to live in a world that we can grasp, then we've become God.

But Chesterton says off of that, that when a child asks him, why does a leaf fall from a tree? He says, it's pure magic. We have lost the wonder in our society. We've forgotten how to be imaginative.

Yeah. Ultimately, I think this is fundamentally why Christianity is on the decline, not because we've grown more reasonable, but actually because we've grown more insane. Instead of positing the pure wonder of how a seed can turn into a plant and say that's magical.

Instead of saying that, we want to list out the specific biological responses for how this is happening. Exactly. The causal relation is only a biological physical matter.

What is growth? How does growth happen? Well, the Bible tells us God gives the growth. We've lost the magic and wonder in our society. That's why atheism is on the rise.

It's not because we're mystics, because it is, Chesterton says, it's more radical and mystical to just posit a causal relation of a leaf falling to the ground than it is to just throw your hands up and say, this is just pure magic. This is insane. How does this even happen? It's much more mystical to just posit a naturalistic world.

That is insane. That is being a lunatic, essentially. Yeah.

It's simplistic and like you're saying, there's no wonder in it. It makes life a bore and takes all meaning and value out of life, which is why it's more mystic. It's more radical than your Christian belief and worldview, which I just love Chesterton on all that.

It's great. Yeah. Those are some good points.

We had talked briefly, Bryce, about curiosity as founded and driven by an understanding of humility, being humble. Let's maybe discuss that a little bit as we can start closing out here. When you are a curious person, a person that's intrigued by the world and isn't satisfied in one element, which the materialistic element may be one facet.

Yes, the leaf is falling because of gravity. That's one component. But why is it falling? Why is it there in the first place? Why is it that kind of species? Why this? Why that? There's more to life than just that one element.

I guess what I'm trying to drive out here is when you view yourself, the knowledge of you as a human, when you self-reflect, I guess when you're acting in your consciousness and realizing yourself, you notice yourself. There should be a humbling experience there. The fact that I noticed myself rather than just experienced life should expose you to this multi-layered reality and humble you that I can't even understand me.

No matter how much materialism I try to shove down my throat in my mind, I can't. I've noticed myself. I've become aware of myself.

I can't explain this life that I'm living. It causes you to be curious in the world. There should be a humility that you're not the center of the universe, I guess.

There's more to life to be explored, and it's enchanting. Right. So Calvin kind of gets on that in his first book when he's talking about the knowledge of man versus the knowledge of God.

And not that they're like verses in the sense that they are opposed to one another, but how they work together. And that humility that comes with curiosity is what exposes you to interacting with God for maybe the first time in your life when you actually notice yourself. Right.

Does that kind of make sense what I'm saying? Am I describing it well? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The old Greek philosophers used to say something like, know thyself and you shall know God and the universe. Yeah.

There is such an important thing like, okay, when you start noticing facts in the world, a leaf falling, you're still confronted with the fact that I experienced a leaf falling. Yeah. So immediately you're confronted with yourself every time you even interact with the physical world that you come in contact with, right? You watch a show.

I watched a show. You're always confronted with I, I, me, others. You can't get rid of that reality that you are placed in this time and space.

You have to reckon with that. Why do I exist versus not existing at all? Yeah. Existence is the fundamental reality of all of our lives is that we exist and we can't break past that barrier.

Because we push everything outside of ourselves and we don't reckon with that first fact that we exist, we actually can't make sense of the world at all. Yeah, exactly. Again, why we don't make any sense of God or the universe around us is because we don't even know ourselves.

I mean, a listener could say something like, okay, why does this really matter to Christianity? This is actually central to Christianity. You talked about Calvin's first chapter in his Institutes, and I'll just read a little section here. He says, every person therefore on coming to the knowledge of himself is not only urged to seek God, but is also led by the hand to find him.

Curiosity, that is how God, that's God taking us by the hand to seek after himself. That's what Paul says in Acts chapter 17 when he's at the Aragopolis talking to all these different philosophers. He calls them as their blind men searching out for something.

They're with their hands extended seeking the true and living God, yet not able to grasp him. When we know ourself, part of knowing yourself is, I don't know everything. Also, I've sinned.

Exactly. Immediately points you straight to the gospel that cuts you and causes you to realize I need salvation. If there was no curiosity, we also wouldn't be curious about our sin.

Yeah. This is something natural to mankind too. You even have pagan psychologists like Carl Jung who recognizes a thing called the shadow within him.

There's this evil part that causes him to want to do heinous crimes that he would never actually act on because it would not allow him to do what he wants in society, but even all that shadow is there. Even that most of philosophy of ethics, that's even a branch of philosophy that you're dealing with ethical living and you're recognizing there's such a thing as evil. Then one of the biggest philosophical questions of all of humanity's existence is the problem of evil.

Why is there evil? Like you're saying, you're immediately confronted with that, this ethical dilemma when you view yourself. Right. Yeah.

You see, okay, there's evil in this world, but you're immediately again confronted with the reality I've experienced evil. It always goes back to yourself fundamentally. Exactly.

I mean, there's so much that we can go off on there, but the fundamental point of curiosity is the fruit of salvation. Yeah, it's good. Like we would never have Christ if we weren't curious about what that God man was doing on the cross.

Exactly. You know, and that seed of curiosity is planted by the spirit. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah. And one other thing I guess I'll bring up here is just, again, back to these basic things that God gives us in his word that we're made in his image. And that's why when you're confronted with yourself, we're the crown jewel of his creation.

So, well, maybe not crown jewel, we're the highest order of glory here on earth, I guess, in terms of his creation. And because of that, whenever we, there's a lot of data about God that's built into us because we're made in his image, I guess is the point, which is why we're discussing all this, right? Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, yeah. So that's what's going on in Christianity here when we do have this category of curiosity.

And the thing that you're most acquainted with all the time is your own existence because you're you. So that's why we're going here, like being curious about yourself, being curious about life always includes this viewer, which is yourself, you know, and you have to come to terms with that. And that is usually, you know, somebody contemplates their death, you know, their own mortality, or somebody contemplates, like we've been talking about the problem of evil, ethics, you know, that they don't understand everything, they feel inferior and very small in this big, huge world.

That's what drives people to God. And that's one of the tools, that's the means of grace that God uses is that image he's implanted on you, when you do, by curiosity's hand, are confronted with your own existence. Right.

And to be confronted with your existence is to be confronted with God's existence, which is Calvin's point in chapter one, that they're inseparable. Exactly. Why do you exist? Exactly.

Yeah. And then when you're confronted with your existence, you are the next logical step is you're confronted with your inferiority and your sinfulness. And then when you contemplate God after that, his existence, then you see him as perfection, holy and righteous, you know, these are just like these natural inferences, which is why we can see in Romans one, Paul's making that inference that we can see God's divine attributes.

He is divine. He is God, you know? Yeah. So any more thoughts there? I have one more thing I wanted to wrap up, but I didn't know if you had something else there.

Go for it. Okay. So here's what I want to wrap up on.

We need to kindle curiosity and wonder and look at the world in an enchanted way, that it is magical. These questions that the materials think they can answer mechanistically, what a boring way to look at the world. What a sad, boring world.

I wouldn't want to live in it, but God's actually created these things. He designed them. So you'll never get to the bottom.

You'll never be fully satisfied in this purely mechanistic understanding of the world. You need to see God as creator, that he's enchanted the world. He's made it beautiful and wonderful, and he's put his imprint on the creation.

And look at Christ, the exact imprint of God. And if you meet a man or a woman that's not curious in the world about the world, then I might even make the jump that you ought to pray for their soul. That's a good indication that they may not be born again.

And I'm not talking about this empty curiosity just for searching for searching sake, but I'm talking about the kind of curiosity that produces life, which is found in Christ. So, yeah, I mean, I think we need to be curious people, and we should be known for that, which is why Christians have historically been the ones that have discovered many, many of some of the world's greatest inventions. Because we're just a curious people, we need to rekindle that and return back to that.

And if you know a brother that's not curious, you need to encourage him and help him somehow pray for him in a way. That's a defect in his walk with Christ. If a man is not curious, that's a defect.

That is a vice, not a virtue. I would venture to say that. I don't know if you would make that claim, Bryce, but I would say a man that's not curious, what that instructs me is that this person has not been confronted with the reality that God created the world, and He's a wonderful creator, and He's made things spectacular.

If you really believe that, then you're going to necessarily be curious about something in His world. You don't have to be curious about everything, but you will be a curious person. And if you meet someone that's stagnant, that they're not growing at all, and they're not even slightly curious about the world God has made, and they just want mindless entertainment from the world, and they never are growing, then that's why I would say that's a vice.

And I would venture maybe even this person may not be born again. So I don't know if you have any closing thoughts there, Bryce, but we need to rekindle curiosity. Yeah.

And just as maybe a closing qualification, and this is just what you're saying, but you must be curious about something, not everything. Yes. It must be something.

Exactly. Yeah. I think that's pretty good.

Yeah. If you've caught a glimpse of God as the creator, and He's made things spectacular, then you will be interested in something. And if you don't feel like you're—you don't have to be the most curious person in the world, but it should be an attribute, I think, that all Christians have.

And I think that's where it's tied to the doctrine of vocation that we were talking about before. Your vocation ought to be something that you're interested in. It should be something that you are curious about, God's world, which is why you're good at it and you're called to it.

So God will equip you to what you're called to, and the way He equips is curiosity and actual love, a love for the world He's made. So yeah. Let Bryce and I just encourage you in this episode to be curious.

That's the main takeaway. And we'll follow up this episode with ways we can hone in our curiosity. But this is a great, great virtue that has been lost in our society, especially in Christian circles, because we're so pietistic, we're so concerned with just filling our heads with knowledge of theology.

We're just tunnel vision on theology. But some people, God hasn't given you the curiosity of really in-depth theology. Maybe He's given you curiosity about plant life or carpentry, something else, but that's still His creation.

That's still something He's called you to. So we're going to give some more tips and tools about how to think about your curiosity you've been given and see it as a gift, and to not stifle that, but to always root it back into our knowledge of God. So yeah.

Is that good, Bryce? Yeah, man, that just was really revelatory. You can find God in the plants just like you can find Him in theology books. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's good. I'm glad that came out at the end here.

I guess that was one of my main thoughts going into this. Just being curious about God's world, you'll learn a lot about Him in many different avenues because His imprint's on it. He created everything.

Therefore, if you're interacting with something He created, you're going to see a bit and piece of Him on it. But you need to have faith, right? You know, faith to categorize it correctly. You know what? Let's keep going on that for another 20 minutes.

I am tired. I should probably go to bed. But yeah, hopefully that was helpful and you guys are encouraged and can walk away with something.

And we'll follow this conversation up here two Sundays from now. So thanks, Bryce, for joining me. Love you, brother.

Appreciate you. Thank you guys for listening. You can reach me at forthekingpodcast.gmail.com or go to the website forthekingpodcast.com. You can see a few things I've put on there.

If you feel inclined, I would always appreciate you partnering in the gospel with me and supporting. Yeah, thanks, guys, for listening. I love you a lot.

To the king of the ages, mortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. Sole Deo.