I recently did a Google search, and it yielded 8,830,000,000 results in 0.34 seconds. That’s a lot of data! How am I supposed to know which one of the nearly nine billion results is most relevant to my query? We all know clicking the first result is no guarantee of finding the best answer. It’s like throwing a dart blindfolded and expecting to hit the bullseye.
College freshmen can feel similarly bombarded by a mass of information with no way of knowing how to sort through it all to get to the important stuff. They are entering a vast universe of knowledge. The term university originates from the same term from which we get universe, meaning “all things.”
Learning to navigate a galaxy of information is an important skill, but it will produce the same sorts of questions as a Google search: Which of these data are the most reliable? How does this information apply to the problems I want to solve? Which of these data sets do I need to master to find a good job or get into my desired graduate school?
But Christians must also ask, how can this information be used to serve God and others?
The Insufficiency of Knowledge Alone
Whether your major is political science or computer science, you will spend an inordinate amount of time learning important aspects about your discipline: its history, vocabulary, and fundamental principles. You will be required to attend lectures, read sources, commit important facts to memory, and be examined to prove how well you’ve mastered the material.
Your ability to acquire and assimilate information can improve your professional career, but it can’t bring you happiness. Knowledge on its own does not lead to the improvement of human life. In fact, the vast advances in information and technology in the modern period seem to have produced the opposite: despair.
A recent Gallup article charts what it calls “The Global Rise of Unhappiness” around the world, despite all the access to knowledge in the modern period. According to this study, anger, stress, sadness, physical pain, and worry are at record highs around the world.
Gaining knowledge isn’t going to solve the world’s problems or yours. You’re going to have to find a way to sort and prioritize it according to meaningful criteria that lead to the improvement of life, both your life and the life of your neighbor.
Knowledge is not the end goal. It is a tool. In college, you are being given a box full of tools without being told what you are supposed to make. The way you use a hammer, for example, will vary greatly, depending on whether you’re building something or doing demolition. Are you using these new tools to hammer the nails or to pull them out?
Colleges are often good at giving you tools but are poor at giving you a blueprint for the life you are to build with them. I think this is in part what has contributed to the current state of despair.
As a college student, you have access to more knowledge than in any other period of human history, whether you are using Google or your college library. But knowledge alone has proven to be insufficient for creating a better world. We have lots of knowledge, but we lack wisdom. Humans cannot flourish unless they use knowledge wisely.
Fearing the Lord
Ancient sages like Socrates and his followers emphasized that the right use of knowledge required deeper questions about the nature of the world. But long before Socrates, the Bible answered this same question.
According to the book of Proverbs, true learning takes place when we understand that God is the source of all knowledge. Whether you are studying literature or law, you are exploring and engaging God’s world. Even though Shakespeare and Cicero never referenced the Trinity, their work and wisdom come from the God who made the world and everything in it.
The book of Proverbs tells us all knowledge is connected to the fear of the LORD: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Prov 1:7, NIV). You can only use knowledge well when you see it as belonging to God. All facts you encounter in your studies are God’s facts, and all truths are God’s truths. As we grow in knowledge, we should thank and honor God for his wonder that fills the world.
The biblical phrase “fear of the LORD” doesn’t mean living in terror of God, though it certainly requires a reverential awe. Instead, it primarily means acknowledging God as the source of all knowledge and submitting our lives to him. The fear of God encompasses the whole person: thinking, feeling, and doing. It means that your motives are being shaped by God’s motives, that your behaviors are connected to God’s behavior, and that your mind is being shaped into the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Because God made all things, God knows what all things are for. God knows what leads to human flourishing, and it is arrogant for us to think we can know the good life apart from him. When you look at samples under a microscope or admire a work of art, their value derives from the God who is himself true, good, and beautiful.
Knowing facts is one thing. Knowing the God who is Lord of all the facts is another. You are going to be tempted to think of the world in impersonal ways. But the Bible reminds us that the world is deeply personal because it is the handiwork of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ultimately, a human can only flourish in the world as they live in fellowship with the One who made it.
Wisdom Personified
God doesn’t merely dispense wisdom from his heavenly throne. He became human to show us the way to wisdom. In 1 Corinthians 1:30, the apostle Paul says that Christ became the wisdom of God for us. If you want to understand what it means to learn and live according to God’s design, then you must look to Jesus. Jesus measured truth by whether it aligned with God’s Word. He refused to believe the stories offered to him in the wilderness by Satan because they contradicted the words spoken by his Father.
If you are a Christian, fearing the Lord means trusting in the Son he sent. Jesus is the center of human history and will stand alone at the end as Lord of all. Your study is not in vain. You are exploring the world that God spoke into being and Jesus holds together. Your reading, studying, and writing all matter. As a Christian, you are called to do everything “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). Though the world encourages us to find our own sense of purpose, the Bible reminds us that our purpose is found in worshiping and serving God’s Son.
Even more, Christ made all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17). Whether you are studying biology or business, your professors will assume the facts they teach you today will still be facts when you graduate. Birds will continue to fly and interest will continue to compound. But the reason behind this is that Jesus is holding all things together. The stability and continuity that undergird every academic discipline has its origin in the rule of Jesus Christ over creation.
What is knowledge for? The Greeks were right to realize that question can only be answered inside of a larger framework about meaning and purpose. When we understand that Jesus Christ is the source of wisdom and that he brings life to the world by accomplishing his purposes for all creation, then we are beginning to answer that question. Knowledge must be used for God’s purposes so that creation can flourish as he designed it.
If we want to understand God’s purposes, we must become God-fearers who think like God thinks, desire what God desires, and seek to do God’s will. This is not something that we can do on our own, and knowledge alone cannot make us those kinds of people. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, it is the Spirit of God who is at work in his people to transform them “into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord…” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Pursuing wisdom requires a community of friends and mentors who are also joined to Christ. The Lord has provided that first and foremost in his church, but also in other communities of fellowship that are connected to the church. These are the places where the Spirit will begin to transform your mind, heart, and will so that you can think, feel, and behave according to the wisdom of Christ. And it is where you can begin to see how all the knowledge you’re learning holds together.
Christ’s life and the wisdom imparted in God’s Word provide the framework through which you can sort what is useful from what is not. As you begin to understand God’s project more deeply, you’ll be able to use the tools of knowledge in a fitting way, for the good of the world and not just yourself.
In Christ, knowledge leads to life and not despair. Don’t settle for knowledge alone. Instead, do something countercultural. Fear the Lord, and seek the wisdom of Jesus.
Dr. Scott Jones is professor of biblical studies at Covenant College and co-founder of Slow Train Guitars.
Read the other articles in our Following Christ in College series here:
Why College Students Need The Local Church
Learning From Failure While Pursuing Success
Enjoying College and the Pursuit of Pleasure