Be Cautious In Your Curiosity
Word-of-the-Day: ‘Death and Destruction <or Sheol and Abaddon> are never satisfied, and neither are human eyes.’ (Proverbs 27:20); ‘All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.’ (Ecclesiastes 1:8)
I don’t watch too many horror movies as I’m just not into that genre, and most of them are rather silly in their premise. I also get the ‘willies’ when something creepy occurs on screen, and screaming like a little girl doesn’t go well with a grown man of my looks and stature. Most horror movies are the same, however; it usually involves someone being a little too curious.
The storyline goes with the nosy neighbor, or the inquisitive young woman or child going up to look into a window or entering a dark house and going down into the basement or up into the attic. Usually, as most scary movies go, the evil spirit or maladjusted creature is living in this spot and, sure enough, the next hour or so either the victim spends time trying to get away from the said creature, or is killed. If killed, the next victims line up trying to find the victim or victims until someone defeats the creature, killing it or locking it back into its box or other type of enclosure – until the next sequel is released, with the same storyline but with different actors.
Though horror movies are fiction and are voluntary to watch (I volunteer not to watch them, as I don’t enjoy screaming like a little girl), in real life we sometimes allow curiosity to get the better of us. There are appropriate times to be inquisitive and there is a need to investigate what is happening around us. We realize that something scratching in our attic is not some mutated creature but a squirrel or mouse that found its way in, and we must act to capture it or get it out and keep it out, so it doesn’t chew away at our electric or water lines that may run through the attic.
Obviously, there are occasions when we may take appropriate actions, when our curiosity over a noise finds an issue that we are then able to take care of. When my spouse was growing up, she heard a faint cry coming from a flower shop close to her home. She went and found the owner of the shop was pinned down, and she was able to get help to get the man freed. So, curiosity is not always bad to act upon.
Curiosity is natural as we all want to discover that which we don’t know, and want to understand or answer the question of ‘what if?’. Inventors are curious individuals who try to answer ‘what if’ by creating solutions to that question. We would not have many of our modern conveniences if someone did first ask ‘what if’ and then develop an idea to resolve that question.
However, throughout the history of man, starting with the Genesis 3 incident in the Garden of Eden, we find people are indeed curious, sometimes too curious for our own good. Curiosity is not sinful, but how we act upon our curiosity can be; Eve was curious about the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge, but instead of simply asking God, or her husband Adam, about it, she gave into the temptation of disobedience and in curiosity proceeded to bite into the fruit.
Many people have died due to the sin of acting impulsively on their curiosity instead of careful study or inquiry. They fail to ask ‘what if’, or what are the consequences of their actions they are about to take. Some act out with partial knowledge; taking drugs can be euphoric at the beginning for the curious, but in the end, they find themselves in dependency and ruin had they simply looked at the evidence of others who had made the same mistake.
Proverbs 27:20 states this, that we sometimes ignore the warning signs that are around us, and act to our detriment. Some parents tragically continue to leave their infants in hot cars, despite all the stories over the years of children dying in such terrible ways. Often, we who heed those warnings find it both troubling and tiresome that we continue to be bombarded by the repeated news reports of parents forgetting their children in the back seat of their cars, and we become discouraged.
As Christians, we can also become tired and discouraged when people ignore the Gospel of Jesus. We find it troubling that some do not look for Christ to be their Savior, but only are curious about Him for mortally selfish reasons. In Luke 23:8, Herod wanted to see Jesus, not because he was curious about Salvation but for the ‘magic act’ he thought Jesus would perform for him. When Lazarus was raising from his tomb in John 12:9, many came to see Jesus and Lazarus out of the curiosity of seeing a dead man walk, unlike the few who came to see the One who gave Lazarus a new lease on life.
It is not wrong to be curious, but how we respond to our curiosity can be. We should entice those around us to be curious about Jesus, and then steer their curiosity into the proper ‘what if’ question; what if you had the opportunity to be forgiven of your sins, and redeemed by Jesus for an eternal life with Him? What would your eternity be like without Him? The real-life horror story all should fear is an eternity without hope, without the opportunity to ever receive His Salvation, and that should scare all who don’t know Him.
