We have been doing a lot of addition and subtraction drills at our house. Before we can move on to multiplication, we need a firm grasp of what you get when you add two and two.
Sometimes, my son is frustrated.
“How can this and this add up to that?” he demands.
It’s a reasonable request for proof. I give him proof, usually in the form of his own fingers or the beads on the abacus.
You can’t argue with what is concrete.
The inventory has been taken. The computation has been done. If you resist now, you are practicing paralogic- going against what you know to be true.
For our homeschool, we watch a daily news program called WORLDWatch, and this week, it included a segment called “Reality Check.” It was five short minutes of resisting the paralogical advances of a world which resists facts. Male and female, right and wrong, good and evil- God made distinctions based on His truth, and so can we.
The program proclaimed that the essence of truth isn’t being our true selves but instead knowing the truth of Jesus Christ.
You can’t argue with what is concrete, even when others try to bust up the foundation with a jackhammer.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians, he knew the plausible arguments they were hearing, and he wanted to make sure they had a concrete foundation.
“[I want you] to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” he wrote to them. “I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments.”
The Greeks are still famous today for their methods of argument: the Socratic method, rhetoric, sophistry. They used their mental techniques on the Christians of Colossae, trying to convince them and entice them to believe that their true selves just needed to be liberated by secret knowledge. Their argument sounded plausible, but sprung from erroneous suppositions.
Paul knew that the only way to get the Colossians to see through these arguments, avoiding delusion, was to get them to count on their fingers, so to speak.
They needed something concrete to defeat the paralogic of the abstract.
He pointed them to Christ. In Jesus, two plus two is always four. Good is good, and evil is evil. It is no longer a mystery, no longer hidden. Jesus revealed the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge to us, and we can spend an eternity exploring them, forsaking the prison of self.
Just because we’re ready to move on to multiplication doesn’t mean that we forsake the addition facts. When we have the concrete knowledge that two beads and two beads make four beads, it will be so much simpler to learn that two sets of four beads make eight.
We don’t need the delusion of our own efforts or wisdoms to save us.
As Paul told the Colossians, “As you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith.”
We can count on Him even more than we count on our own fingers.
Sarah Dixon Young 