Panning for Gold

It is amazing how God can use past experiences to provide wisdom in the present and future.  I was reminded of a school trip when I accompanied my eldest son as a chaperone to a historical site of the gold rush in California.  I was tasked with overseeing six very energetic year 5 boys who had their hopes on finding their fortunes in gold like thousands before them.

As our bus drove over a bridge one of the lads shouted with excitement, "I saw a gold nugget!  I saw a massive nugget in the middle of that stream!"  After arriving at the campsite where we would spend the next couple nights, the whole group was given instructions on how to pan for gold.  Each group was stationed around wooden troughs filled with water and sand that had been "salted" with real gold.  Our guide explained the gold in the river had long ago been mined and these troughs were an opportunity to find gold ourselves.

With the attention span of squirrels, it was mere minutes before some happy campers started whinging and complaining:  "I can't find any gold!" or "I'm tired!" or "This is too hard!"  Every time I dug the pan into the sand I was finding flecks of gold and helped each of my campers to give it a go.  I even found gold for them and poured it into their small vials.  But the lure of the bigger, better gold in the river by the bridge was too sweet a siren's song to endure.  A few of them wanted to go to the river.  I explained, "Boys, there's no guarantee of gold down at the river.  In these small troughs we have the guarantee of real gold right here."  After a discussion with the boys it was decided we would spend 30 minutes panning for gold at the troughs, then head down to the river to pan for gold there.

Now I bet you can just guess how the river excursion went.  Needless to say, no gold was found.  The gold nugget so easily seen from a driving bus was strangely elusive.  By the end of the afternoon we had a bunch of kids with wet clothes, muddy shoes and jackets, misplaced gold pans, and missing hats.  Somehow some kids lost their vials or poured out the little gold they had by accident while playing with it. Panning for gold was hard enough in the troughs, and it was doubly difficult at the stream because of the flowing water, the myriad of distractions and places to explore--not to mention the lack of gold.  We lacked the necessary equipment to dig deep enough in the sand or to go through the volume of material needed to find even a little gold.

The situation illustrates to me the childish notion which can surprisingly exist among Christians, to lay aside the word of God and the Gospel because they believe the real treasure is found elsewhere.  Like Boaz instructed his workers to intentionally drop grain so Ruth would find, gather it and be sustained with her mother-in-law Naomi.  Gleaning barley is hard work, and so is faithfully digging into the word of God.  God has treasures beyond compare in all the pages of scripture He provides for our benefit, yet our interests lie on the deeper, hidden truths.  In the Bible we have the guarantee of God's wisdom and truth, and praise the LORD He has given people insight and ability to illustrate old truths in a fresh way.

Believer, are you content to feed on the word of God or do you find yourself lacking an appetite because you've developed a taste for something else or have begun to major on fringe topics?  Learn from the experience of those year 5 boys:  leaving troughs of gold for a trip to the river led by a gold nugget mirage left us empty in the end.  Chasing satisfaction and wisdom from God apart from His word and the Gospel will prove to be a fool's errand because it leads us away from the good stuff He has generously supplied by His grace.