Knowledge Is Good (October 24, 2004)

Learn things.

God built into our nature the thirst of inquiry and the joy of discovery. These instincts are generally to be encouraged - though, like any instinct, they can be indulged wrongly. Eve wanted to know what it would be like if she ate the wrong fruit, and Saul wanted to get military advice from a dead man's spirit. Those forays into forbidden knowledge were disasters. But the general rule remains: ask, seek, and knock, and you will receive, find out, and walk through open doors.

I believe that God deliberately created an insanely complex universe so that we could never get to the bottom of interesting things. We are his guppies, his goldfish, and I suppose he could have poured us into a featureless glass bowl with no place to go and not much to look at. But he dumped us in an ocean - an endless expanse of scientific, historical, philosophical and spiritual complexities that beckon us to swim around in them and marvel.

I confess I sometimes wish things were simpler. I wish there were an elegant formula that produced all and only the prime numbers. I wish I knew why head injuries affect morals. I'm so flummoxed by an exegetical/spiritual issue that I toyed with calling Pastor Cole on WMBI's Open Line this week (but what if people who know me recognized my voice? It would be so embarrassing).

Things aren't simple, and everywhere the mind looks it finds problems to wrestle with and puzzles to wrangle over. The good news is, some things are actually comprehendible. The search for wisdom does in fact yields results. In Luke 11, where Jesus is condemning people who have clogged their brains with hostility, he pauses to commemorate the example of Sheba, "Queen of the South," who came from the ends of the earth to learn from Solomon. 1 Kings 10 tells how she tested Solomon with hard questions, and came away saying (I paraphrase), "Wow! You're smart!" She made the effort to learn, and was rewarded.

Preachers have always liked pointing out that St. Paul, who knew he was about to die (see 2 Timothy 4:6) still asked Timothy to bring him his scrolls, especially the parchments (2 Timothy 4:13). The aged missionary on his deathbed still wanted to study!

You're busy, I know, but take time to learn stuff. Researchers are telling us that active learning can stave off the effects of age-induced senility, and they may be right. (You can't be sure because they seem to keep coming out with new studies that contradict the old ones.) Learn good stuff. As I tell my boys, it does not count if you can expertly recite the dialogue of a 1000 edgy cartoons. It does count if you can quote C. S. Lewis on a 1000 subjects because you've read everything he's written at least twice.