The Importance of Knowledge

The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge;
the ears of the wise seek it out. (Proverbs 18:15)

Among some people it seems to be the accepted practice to belittle or even ridicule those who value knowledge. It happens all the time in the secular world. Those who despise “knowledge” don’t trust others who have an education; they argue that an education isn’t necessary to get along in the world. In fact, they often accuse those who have a lot of “book learning” of not having any common sense.

But we also hear this quite frequently in the Church. Many people feel that the Bible itself warns against “accumulating knowledge,” that knowledge “puffs up” and actually gets in the way of one’s spiritual growth. It is far better, they say, to live the simple life and love God with all your heart. That’s all that is necessary for a Christian to do.

You will often find, however, that those who think that getting knowledge can be spiritually harmful do not, themselves, have much knowledge of the Bible. Not only does this idea contradict the plain teaching of the Bible, you will probably never meet a person who had a deep knowledge of the Scriptures who regretted having that knowledge. They may regret not using it more, and they may regret not having even more knowledge, but they were never sorry about what God taught them.

Some of those who teach against getting knowledge, if they were cornered, would probably admit that it isn’t knowledge itself that is bad for us, but the way we use or don’t use the knowledge we have. But, they would hasten to say, at least we ought not to be so caught up with accumulating more knowledge when we haven’t yet mastered what we already know. But there are others who sincerely think that pursuing knowledge for its own sake is unbecoming to a spiritually minded Christian.

We must disagree with their argument. Not only does the Bible itself teach against this idea, it actually encourages the accumulation of knowledge — for many reasons. And the very thing that these people fear — the accumulation of knowledge when one hasn’t yet put it all into practice — is, according to the Word of God, the mark of a wise man.

As is usual in such disagreements, there are at least two problems here: first, people have to be more careful about what the Bible actually says about something, instead of reading what they want to see into the text. Second, in order to magnify the problems that can be associated with knowledge, they ignore the benefits (which much outweigh the problems) and so end up with an unbalanced view of the truth. It’s much safer to let the Bible speak for itself; if there are potential problems, God’s Word will faithfully let us know about them without our sincere but misguided help.

Our position here is that knowledge is fundamental to the Christian life and the Kingdom of God. Without knowledge, there is no Christianity, no work of the Church, and certainly no glory to God in our works. Though there are problems that often arise, we have no right to despise or reject the pursuit of knowledge any more than we can the holiness of life, which is also riddled with problems. It is our Christian duty before God to gain knowledge.