As I’ve been writing my way through the Bible, I’ve recently been engaging with Paul’s letters, and his focus on knowledge in the life of the Christian has stood out to me. Since the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, for much of Christianity knowledge has taken a back seat to feelings, emotions, and the human will. In typically American fashion, the focus of much Christian teaching has been on the Christian’s personal choice, both in terms of salvation, and growth in the Christian life. Too many Christians are taught, or pick up from teaching, that what we do or don’t do, can or can’t do, should or shouldn’t do, is what drives the Christian life, instead of what God has done for us in Christ. Big, huge, amazing difference! The former is self-focused, the latter God-focused, and that makes all the difference. Here are some verses that tell us what the Apostle Paul thinks of knowledge, which is fundamentally outside of us:
until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13)
9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. (Philippians 1)
9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12 and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. (Colossians 1)
2 My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2)
9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. (Colossians 3)
In case you haven’t noticed, we live in an Empire of Lies. It is the very air we breathe. We live in such a blatantly post-modern context, that Friedrich Nietzsche himself, the father of post-modernism, would be proud. Our political and cultural elites are far more committed to “the narrative,” whatever that may be, than the truth. For them the truth is malleable because it doesn’t really even exist. Never before in the history of the Church has it been as imperative for Christians to seek knowledge to counter the lies, spiritually, culturally, politically. The problem is that too many Christians are lazy when it comes to seeking the knowledge of God, although lazy people are often just unmotivated.
So we might ask, what should motivate Christians to seek knowledge. I don’t know, maybe that Christianity is true, and God is real? Is there anything more important than the knowledge our faith and the God who gave it to us? Why then is it then ninth or tenth on so my Christians’ priority list? I don’t write this from any sense of superiority because, as the saying goes, there but for the grace of God . . . Intellectual curiosity and a hunger for knowledge is something that’s always come “naturally” to me, so God gets all the credit for that, but that doesn’t let any other Christian without that natural inclination off the hook. The problem is that the human heart is, as Jeremiah puts it, “deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” He asks rhetorically, “Who can understand it?” But if we’ve been born-again, if our heart has been transformed from death to life, from an enemy to a child of God, what is our excuse?
Christianity is a religion of content, of certain specific propositions, and truth statements. It is based on certain historical facts, things that actually happened in space and time. God’s ultimate revelation of himself in Christ was preceded by 1,500 years of revelation in the history of the Jewish people, events that tell us the meaning of that revelation. The New Testament tells us exactly what it all means. Not only is salvific knowledge on which our forever depends available to all of us, at our fingertips, God’s truth in Christ teaches us about the nature of all reality, what it really, actually is. As I’ve told my kids all their lives, the Bible is knowledge priority one, but everything else is almost just as important. All people without God in Christ have is isolated puzzle pieces, but we have the whole picture into which every puzzle piece fits. C.S. Lewis said it perfectly, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” I implore you, with the Apostle Paul, to seek knowledge!
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