You don’t need to know anything about the Freemason fraternity to understand what I was experiencing in this next part of the story. I was receiving advanced degrees in Freemasonry, listening to dialogues about Moses, Abraham, and other Old Testament characters, having no clue who they were or what they had to do with anything in my world or even the ancient world. My lack of knowledge was in danger of being exposed. I may have been the most “educated” man in the room as I looked around at men I respected, knowing that at any moment, I may be asked a question about the lecture and narrative. From my early attendance at Sunday School, I knew there was a difference between the Old and New Testament. My instinct was that Jesus was a New Testament person, but I wasn’t sure about much else. My other instinct was that asking questions during the lecture would only disclose my ignorance. I was right about that!
Pride was causing fear of being exposed as uninformed about things taken from the Bible and used by an ancient fraternity to influence and educate men seeking what the fraternity had to offer. The gap in my knowledge and basic understanding of the Bible was coming to the surface. Not knowing the Bible is only a problem if you pride yourself on being fully educated and can speak fluently on several topics. Pride was taking me in a direction I could not anticipate and a place I did not want to go. There was a gap in my self-image, and I needed to either continue with denial or resolve the issue.
At this point in my journey, I believed that the path to knowledge is reading, and with sufficient knowledge comes truth. There are many places to learn Bible stories and their meaning, but I decided to go to the source. I had a Bible given to me when I was a child, which looked almost new since I had left it untouched in my library for many years. I don’t know what version of the Bible I had, but it was slightly more readable than the King James Version. Of course, I started at Genesis, chapter 1, and decided to read a chapter every morning. By the time I was in Leviticus, I knew I needed help. My brother came to the rescue and gave me a copy of the Good News Bible, and things rapidly improved. The truth was my ignorance of scripture was more severe than I had imagined.
Just a few words about pride before closing this section of the story. Pride is a sin, but it is also culturally acceptable. The Bible says several essential things about pride, including that pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before the fall. I had many lessons to learn about pride, but for the present discussion, it was a motivating factor in starting me to read scripture.
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