The Knowledge of God
When we make excuses as to why we can’t study theology, we starve ourselves of the knowledge of God. Today, R.C. Sproul describes the consequences of neglecting theology, the queen of the sciences.
God is saying to His people that the people are perishing here, not because they’re starved for wheat and meat to feed their bodies, but because their people have no knowledge of the things of God—that’s what’s killing them. And He says the whole land mourns and languishes. You have an ecological crisis taking place in Israel because the fundamental principles of government, the fundamental principles of economics that are revealed from the wisdom of God, are hidden and obscured by ignorance.
The queen has been beheaded. Theology was supposed to be the queen of the sciences that gave and informed principles to every other academic discipline, but now, in some places in the world, the queen is dead. In other places, she’s in exile; she’s banished to some obscure department that has no relevance to the rest of our education.
If you don’t know who God is, your knowledge that you do have is empty. If you don’t understand the principles of God, your knowledge is foolishness. Because apart from a primary understanding of the nature of God, there can be no wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It’s the first principle of wisdom. To know God is the foundation of all truth, and without the knowledge of God, every other knowledge bit, every data bit, is understood in distortion. People perish for a lack of knowledge, and because you have rejected knowledge.
Now notice that the reason why they’re perishing and the reason why there’s a lack of knowledge is not because there’s a lack of a source of knowledge. It’s not like God can be blamed for hiding. But the sin here is what? A rejection of knowledge.
Virtually every home, almost every home in America, has a Bible on the shelf. And when a Bible is sitting on the shelf and we never pick it up, and we never read it, and we never seek to be informed of the content of it, then we are willfully, sinfully rejecting the knowledge of God. Why do we do that? You’ve heard all the excuses: “I don’t understand it, it’s too hard, it bores me, and so on—that’s why. I mean, oh, I’ve tried. I’ve started in Genesis and I’ve gotten as far as Exodus, but when I got into Leviticus and Numbers, all that stuff was so foreign to me, I gave up. I couldn’t see the relevance of it.” We have a thousand excuses, but we have willfully rejected the knowledge of God.
