Proverbs 18:13: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.”

I thought about this blog on the way home from the hospital yesterday. Thursday, I visited a dear friend and shared with him and his wife about a preacher that jumped to a conclusion only to be immediately embarrassed because he didn’t have all the information he needed. Let me share the story with you now. This took place in the 1980’s. It has been a minute. A large church out West had built another church complex at a different location. The pastor walked over to his office window on the second floor of the new facility and was looking at the back parking lot. He saw a young man crawling out of the dumpster. Once out, the young fellow shook a cassette tape to make sure nothing was stuck to it. He put it in his shirt pocket. Two or three minutes passed. The pastor heard a conversation outside his office (his door was open) between one of the secretaries and a young man. The young man told her he’d like to get another cassette of the sermon from last Sunday because this one was broken. The pastor, hearing this, walked out into the secretarial pool area and confronted the young man. “I saw you get that cassette out of the dumpster. It isn’t right for you to try and deceive like this.” The young man was shocked. He sheepishly said this., “I volunteered to help move the things from our old church location to this new one. I get the sermons on tape every week. The reason I was climbing out of the dumpster was this. I was throwing a big bag of trash over the rim of the dumpster and when it went up it knocked my bad cassette from my pocket into the dumpster. I had to crawl in to get it back.” The pastor was dumbfounded, apologized profusely. He had made an assumption, and it was wrong.

Don’t we do things like this? We all have been guilty of jumping to conclusions. We think we know, but we may not. Let me give you five examples from the bible.

  1. Hannah. I Samuel 1:12-18. This godly woman was burdened because she had no children. The worth of a woman during those days was counted by her ability to bear children. She is so heart-broken as she sits by the Tabernacle. Her head is lowered, and she is praying silently. Lips are moving, but nothing audible can be discerned. Eli the High Priest says to her, “How long wilt thou be drunken? Put away thy wine from thee.” He thought she was blitzed, and she wasn’t. He made an assumption.
  2. Unnamed woman at the Well. John 4:1-30. We know some things about her. Racially, she wasn’t purely Jewish. She was of mixed race. Her people were hated by the religious Jewish people. She came at a time when she would most likely not be bothered with insults. We know that she had had five husbands. Now is when the assumptions begin among the commentators. They make the statement that the prostitutes came to the well at noon. I personally have never seen a single source for this statement. The statements about her divorcing all five of her husbands speaks to her loose character. We don’t really know what happened to the five husbands. It could be that they all died. We do know that she was living with a man out of wedlock. She didn’t even try to deny it. It could be that life knocked her in the teeth and Jesus showed her living water and gave her hope which she couldn’t wait to share with everyone she knew. We jump to conclusions and may not be exactly right.
  3. Acts 2:7-17. Many of you know this passage tells us about the day the Holy Spirit came upon the early church in the upper room. It was Pentecost. These 120 Christians began to speak supernaturally in other languages. If you take time to count you will find seventeen groups representing languages and dialects from people that had swelled into Jerusalem for this special holy day. Some of those in the crowd began to accuse them of being drunk. Peter addresses this in 2:15-17. They aren’t drunk. It is only 9 AM in the morning. What you are seeing is what the prophet Joel prophesied about. They jumped to a conclusion and were wrong.
  4. Acts 16:15. This is a great assumption some of our Christian brethren make concerning infant baptism. There isn’t a single instance in the Bible for this practice. Lydia was a lady with some means. She was the first convert in Europe. The assumption that is made is that when the Bible declares she was saved “and her household” that must have included babies. Later in this same chapter the jailer at Philippi was saved “and his house.” Again, the assumption is there must have been babies in the house so infant baptism is good. Once I was discussing this with a man and I declared, “The jailer’s wife was a fair skinned white woman with red hair.” He shot back, “That’s not in the text.” I responded, “I know, and you assuming Lydia’s house and the jailer’s house had babies isn’t either. It simply says, “house or household.” There may have been teens or aged parents or in Lydia’s case possible employees. Assumptions are just that, assumptions, not facts.
  5. Luke 11:15. Jesus was casting out a demon that was causing dumbness. The person couldn’t speak because of the binding of the demon. Jesus cast the evil spirit out and the accusation was that he did it by the power of “Beelzebub, the chief of the devils.” This is perhaps the most egregious because it deals with people that assumed Jesus had been doing these miraculous good deeds because he was in cahoots with Satan. That kind of assumption sends a man to Hell.

Why do we assume and not give the benefit of the doubt? There are many, many reasons, but perhaps the major reason is pride. It gives us the chance to lift ourselves above others. To make us feel better about ourselves. Let’s remember this truth. We are all sinners. Yes, that includes us. Our standards aren’t each other; it is the Lord. I want grace given to me and in turn I should be willing to give it to others. I want to give my brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt until I can’t. May we all be slow in assuming until all the facts are in hand. Let’s not have to suffer embarrassment like the preacher at the beginning of the blog because we jumped too soon.