1.3—Why History? (10 min video)

Transcript

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Well, welcome back. In this lecture, we’re going to talk about why we study history, specifically. And from there, we might even talk about why we study American history. But of course, that’s really going to be an extension of why we study history. I want to actually give you seven different reasons for why we study history. Now, the common reason that you often hear for why we study the past is to avoid the mistakes of the past. And that’s true. In fact, that’s one of the seven reasons. But I never give that one first because I don’t find it very compelling. I don’t find it to be a very encouraging reason to spend all this time learning about all of these dead people and their ideas and their events and their actions to say, “Well, I want to avoid doing what they did if it was wrong in the future.” This doesn’t really seem to be a very good reason to spend so much effort studying the past. And so I want to give you seven reasons. The first reason I’ll give you is going back to what we talked about with why we live and why we do education. We study history primarily for God’s glory. Now the reason why we study history is it shows us that no matter how dark history is, it all happens by God’s leave. It all happens by His permission. As the psalmist says, “Even the wrath of men praises God.” So even all the wicked things that have happened throughout history, they still praise God because they still reveal that He is in control. That of course is a lesson you see in something like Job. In Job, where Satan comes and he does all of these nasty things to the man Job, who is righteous, and then Job spends most of time wondering why these things happened and asking God why these things happened.

When God appears, He doesn’t really answer Job’s questions, at least not directly. He basically tells Job, or he asks Job actually, “Are you God? Did you actually make these things? Do you actually control all that happens in this world?” And so a study of the past should really teach us to be what we call “grave” or to teach us what we call “sober.” It should allow us to be serious and realize that it’s incredible that we even have life. It’s a miracle that we live in a nation or that we even have life day by day because there are so many things that have happened in the past that should have destroyed us, that should have caused us to be destitute or caused us to be without the blessings that we so desperately need.

But God in his mercy and in his wisdom has chosen to give us something else. He’s chosen to give us life often despite ourselves. So History really is a lesson that constantly reminds us of how fragile we are. Secondly, what history always shows is history will always show us redemption. It’s the second reason why we study the past, because a study of the past shows us how God is constantly redeeming us. In fact, a great author, Frederick Buchner, by the way, calls this the “magnificent defeat.” He says that throughout history you always see a wounded church. You always see wounded heroes, wounded villains as well, but it’s really the heroes that we want to emulate. And he says that typically we end up stumbling into our blessings. For example, take a look at the patriarchs of Genesis. Take a look at men like Abraham or men like Jacob, for example. Both of those men were not exactly complete heroes. Both of those men are certainly not without sin in the very narrative of Genesis itself. And yet somehow, despite the sins that both those men commit, they still manage to stumble into the blessings. Why? Because God wanted it to be so. So history shows us that there’s a constant redemption. It reminds us of what Romans says, that all things work together for good for those who love God. Now the third reason why we study the past, the third reason why we study the history, is that we know our own past. The reason why this is important is because it gives us identity. You really can’t understand who you are unless you know the culture you’ve come out of. You can’t understand the present and why things are the way that they are unless you know what has happened before to actually explain the events of the present.

So people who have no knowledge of the past are people who can only live in the present moment and they have no way to explain the present moment and so they’re often overwhelmed. They’re often pursuing the things of this world, particularly wealth, just to try and cope with the present or have a way to actually deal with it.

But the marvelous thing about the present is that we should always be able to live in eternity in the present, as Lewis talks about in Screwtape Letters, because it’s there that we can actually choose to do what’s right. But we really have no great reason to do what is right unless we have a knowledge of the past, a proper knowledge of what God has done.

And of course, the great historical event of Christianity is the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. In other words, if you look at our history, if you look at the faith, what we believe, almost all the primary things that we subscribe to as believers and Christians are historical events.

So history really explains to us who we are. And furthermore, to go along with this third reason, because we know who we are based upon where we’ve been, and we can understand our present situation, history also allows us to anticipate the future. We can see how things have worked out in the past. We know that all men are created in God’s image. We know that all men are also fallen. And so therefore, we can see how certain choices in the past, when they’re done again in the present, they’ll lead to certain future events. So history really gives us a perspective. It really gives us an idea of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we are actually going. Fourth, we say the past to no heroes. One of the incredible misfortunes of modern historians is there often are no heroes. Typically everyone has some kind of dirt on them that the modern historian will bring up to actually show that this person was actually completely not worthwhile.

So Washington was a slave owner. Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer. Or Teddy Roosevelt was someone who had no control when he went on the hunt, for example. Now, while all those things are true, what all those things actually do is they reveal to us that heroes are fallen, sinful man. In other words, all of those heroes, what makes them heroes is not because they were perfect, not because they were completely virtuous. What makes them heroes is that they were redeemed. They were actually able to confess their sins. And I would say that those men who actually fell and who actually appealed to Christ to be their Savior, obviously those men, if they could speak to us today from the grave, would be probably the first to admit their wrongdoings of the past.

Because after all, that is something that a Christian, especially a redeemed Christian, can freely do. Fifth, we study the past and we study history to also know villains. See, villains are always the opposite of heroes. Villains are often popular, whereas heroes are usually unpopular. Villains are often people who enjoy great fame, enjoy great power, and so forth, but they always lack one thing. They always lack repentance. So villains always give us an example of what not to be, but because we’re fallen, if we’re honest to, no matter how bad the villain is that we’re studying, we should be able to identify with that person. We should be able to recognize that if Nebuchadnezzar had a great lust of power, we also have a great lust of power. We should be able to recognize that if King George and his parliament were all about tyranny and bossing someone else and telling them what to do, we also have that tendency.

We should even be able to recognize that if someone like Adolf Hitler was so full of anger and was so proud of himself and trying to find a solution for the world’s problems through the great violence he committed against the Jews, even though we think, “Oh, I would never do that. I never had the opportunity to do that,” which is probably true, we still have those same tendencies in our hearts. Maybe not against a certain people, but certainly against someone. And so history always reminds us that we should be like these heroes who model repentance and we should be careful not to be like villains, because what they had in their heart, we also have in our heart, because of the reality of sin.

Six, we study history, as I mentioned earlier, to avoid the mistakes of the past. That goes along with everything else. We don’t need to explain a whole lot about that. But if we don’t know our past, we will typically repeat it, the same way as it went down before. And seventh, we study history, or we say the humanities, to know what it means to be human. We study the past because it always reminds us that people throughout all time have always made God’s image and they’ve always been fallen and they always desire the same things. They always desire redemption. They always desire faith and hope and love, or at least they should desire it. And so history constantly reminds us that God has a plan for this world. And while the world seems to be getting worse and worse, The world is also getting better because the church is maturing along with the evil of the world, very much like the parable of the wheat and the tares, the wheat and the weeds that might say in your Bible.

Keep these things in mind once again as we study this year-long view of American history.