The Christian Perspective on Education

“His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.”

(2 Peter 1:3)

Because I am in a stage of life right now that education is at the forefront of my life I have decided to focus on education and knowledge in my meditations for a while. What follows is the first in this series:

Education is God’s business. Reading involves grasping facts, analysing their truth and using them to good in your life. God has constructed facts and truth. Writing involves preserving what you have learnt and communicating it to others. God has written the book of nature and communicated to us. Arithmetic is the exercise of patterns and logic for living wisely. God has made the rules of logic and patterns. He has made the standards of the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, true and false. To be educated without Him is to be profoundly uneducated. Thus in all your education God is involved.

What a perspective this is! You go to school, college, university, or whatever, for God! And why not? After all, the chief end of man is God Himself (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

What is interesting is that 2 Peter 1:3 says God’s divine power that has given us all things godly, and all things pertaining to life through the knowledge of God!!! In other words, all power available from God to live and be godly comes through knowledge. What an amazing treasure education is! It gives us life and godliness! But be warned: ignorance therefore guarantees ungodliness. If knowledge of God leads to godliness then ignorance of God leads to ungodliness. Hosea 4:6:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Because you have rejected knowledge,
I also will reject you from being priest for Me;
Because you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.

Value your education! And look on it as an expansion of knowledge of God Himself.

This education of God can be said to be boring, impractical, irrelevant and inapplicable to some Christians. A layperson of today can certainly get on without it, they say! However it is the most pleasant, practicable, relevant and applicable project for someone to engage in!

Knowing and learning about God is crucially important, in fact the most important thing for our life. We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God who rules, governs and created it. There is so much evidence to suggest that the world becomes a strange, mad, painful place and life becomes disappointing, pointless, and unpleasant without the knowledge of God. Ignorance of God leads to ungodliness and ungodliness in turn leads to an unpleasant life and a much more unpleasant life after death.

Knowledge of God, however, leads to godliness, and godliness leads to a pleasant life, and a gloriously pleasant life in the life to come.