To know wisdom and instruction,
To discern the sayings of understanding,
To receive instruction in wise behavior,
Righteousness, justice and equity;
To give prudence to the naive,
To the youth knowledge and discretion,
A wise man will hear and increase in learning,
And a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel,
To understand a proverb and a figure,
The words of the wise and their riddles.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction. – Proverbs 1:2-7
Have you ever been called a Know-It-All? That’s when people are under the impression that because you are loaded with information and because you share that information regularly, you want to appear smarter than everyone else. The hard truth is that sometimes, they are right. Most of us know the tremendous urge inside to share our special nuggets of trivia and factoids with anyone who would have ear to hear.
That urge, though, doesn’t necessarily mean that we have an ego problem. One of the great benefits of possessing knowledge is to be able to pass it on to others where appropriate. We want others to benefit as we have benefitted from that knowledge.
Another great urge is the one that has us ferociously gathering knowledge from as many different sources as we can tap into. Try to imagine a day when Google and Wikipedia and Amazon didn’t exist. Books were bought in brick-and-mortar stores. Libraries provided understanding through the musty pages of old texts. Today, we simply do not have the brain power to absorb the volume of information available at the speed with which it can be obtained. The Information Superhighway forgot the sobering truth that those who drive up and down it still have very slow vehicles.
Maybe the most noteworthy warning we receive in this grand pursuit of knowledge comes from the opening chapters of the Bible. Genesis 3 tells us that Adam and Eve were given maximum freedom to do what they liked in this garden existence God created for them. They received only one restriction. God said that there was a tree in the garden called the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It had fruit on it that supposedly would give them this specific knowledge, but God commanded them not to eat of it. Furthermore, He in no way indicated that He would give them this knowledge directly Himself either. In essence, He was asking them to be cool with remaining ignorant on something called good and evil.
Imagine that there was a top-secret website that only the web designer in question knew about. You discovered that this site held the answers to many questions that society had never known the answers to. Is there really intelligent life on other planets? How many years left did the earth have? Now imagine that the person who created this site refused to let anyone visit it. You tried pulling it up in your browser, but it kept telling you that you were unauthorized to see the page. How would that make you feel?
That is possibly how Adam and Eve felt when God forbid them from eating fruit from a tree with exclusive knowledge about something. God said, “I don’t want you to know that, and I want you to know that I don’t want you to know that.”
I suspect they were frustrated, and I suppose I would have been, too. And, in that frustration, they chose to gain that knowledge in spite of God’s command. The first thing that happened after eating the fruit, even before the curse, was that they discovered they were naked, and they became ashamed. What a rip off. Knowledge of good and evil wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, apparently.
We are no different today. The Bible presents a lot of mysteries for which there appears no clear answer. It even goes so far as to tell us that it has unsolved mysteries. Yet, we don’t seem able to handle the ignorance. Christians read into the text answers that aren’t there. Is the earth young or is it old? Regardless of your opinion on the matter, you must acknowledge two things. First, there is and always has been major disagreement on this matter, and second, God did not see fit to provide an explicit answer to such a question. We can give educated guesses, but true humility must acknowledge that we just don’t know.
When we force an answer out of the Bible that it doesn’t provide, we find ourselves eating the same fruit that Adam and Eve did.
Does that mean that the acquisition and pursuit of knowledge is in and of itself bad? Not at all. Consider the verses above. God describes a method for finding wisdom and instruction. It starts with a fear of God, something that Adam and Eve abandoned when tempted. This fear should cause you to commit to doing only what God says. He calls us to know, to receive, to give, and to understand (see above). Notice that stronger words like acquire and pursue are not mentioned. It’s not that God is forbidding the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge, He is simply saying, “I am the source. Pursuing it at the expense of ignoring Me will only lead to disappointment and shame.”
So, is it okay to take a class in astronomy? Of course. Is it okay to watch YouTube videos to gain a better understanding of how to cook a beef tenderloin? Absolutely.
But our pursuit of knowledge (and the reasons behind that pursuit) must always be re-evaluated. Why are we running after such information? Is it out of a healthy interest to understand something that the Lord has put in our path or out of a feverish desire to know something God has hidden.
Consider Proverbs 25:2. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” God wants us to search. To ask questions. To be curious. To dig deeper. But He also wants us to be cool with the reality that we may not get the answer that we dig for.
I leave you with 1 Corinthians 13:12. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully.” The answers are coming. Be encouraged.