I got mad. Who are they to tell me that I don't know enough to take the course, I thought. And even if I don't, I reasoned, I can do extra studying on the side to stay up to pace. "This is a just a money-making scheme by the University," I told all my friends. I got a few sympathetic nods, but every conversation ended with the conclusion that you can't fight city hall, and they were right.
Now I'm a teacher myself and I see the wisdom in prerequisites. Some courses are based on an assumed body of knowledge that is either too difficult or too specific for even the smartest of students to catch up on the fly (like I thought I could do). Still, I think there are going to be a lot of offended smart people out there when I say that they have no access to knowledge without a prerequisite.
What is the prerequisite for knowledge, you ask? It's not brains, that is, the ability to reason or solve problems. In fact, it has more to do with the heart than it does the mind. Let's take a look at what God says:
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7, ESV).
So, the prerequisite of knowledge is fearing the Lord. Now to understand what this verse is saying, we need to clearly describe two terms: "knowledge" and "fear." First, what does the verse mean by "knowledge"? It means more than just possessing facts or the ability to perform a few impressive mental gymnastics. The average university professor, a godless man or woman, can do that with one lobe tied behind his or her cerebral cortex. No, the verse is talking about something more. The term for "knowledge," da'at, refers to experiential knowledge, not just cognition. It is used in parallel with other terms: "discipline" and "moral skill." It involves the idea of sifting and sorting thoughts within a meaningful paradigm that allows the possessor of the knowledge to fit facts together into a mosaic that correctly depicts the nature of reality. The Bible refers to this kind of "paradigm" in Romans 12:2, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." The verse implies that true knowledge, the kind that transforms lives, involves choosing wise actions based on what you know.
Sound hard? It's not at all, and the best part is that you don't have to have half the alphabet after your name to get it right. In fact, sometimes those advanced degrees can do more to impede your quest for true knowledge than they can to help you attain it. They can trick you into thinking that you know more than you really do. Two men who possessed true knowledge were Peter and John. In Acts 4, they heal a lame man and preach about Jesus only to be dragged in front of the rulers, elders, and, scribes. The "wise" men, thinking that all of their degrees would intimidate two fisherman from the coast, told Peter and John to stop proclaiming the gospel. But Peter, filled with God's knowledge, preached a sermon to those who commanded his silence. When he finished, they were shocked to see such confidence from such an "untrained" and "common" man. Clearly, the sages lacked the prerequisite, but Peter possessed it in abundance. Why? Because he feared the Lord.
So, what does it mean to "the fear of the Lord"? It means both to feel dread or terror and to stand in awe. We see both of these elements when God met his people on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 20:18-21 in which God descended on the mountain in smoke, fire, lighting and earthquakes. He then gave His people a covenant, provision, and the promise of a new homeland. The people responded in both fear by shrinking away from Him in terror, asking Moses to speak for them, and awe by desiring to draw near to this God who had recently saved them from their past and had just given them the hope of a bright future.
So, if we want our lives to be filled with all the good stuff: love, joy, peace, hope, etc., then we have to have true knowledge - the paradigm in which to sift and sort what we know into a meaningful whole, which leads to godly choices. We get this knowledge through its prerequisite: a belief in both God's absolute power and His limitless goodness. Unfortunately, this does not describe a lot of the "smart" people out there, leaving us to wonder how smart they really are.
Can you hear their response to that? Who are those Christians, anyway, to tell the rest of us that God created the world in six days? Not with skeletons that are millions of years old! And who are they to say that people go to hell when they die if they don't repent of their wrongdoings and believe in the Christian god? The nerve of some people!
Oh, they say that and more, don't they? And they get mad! But they fail to realize that Christians are not the ones making this stuff up. God has revealed it in His inspired, infallible Word, the Bible. And the Bible isn't making it up, either, because it is merely describing a reality that exists beyond all created things, a reality that God Himself set up. So I say to all the angry smarties out there, don't shoot the messengers. Read the Bible for yourself, and then (hopefully) bend your knee before the holy and omnipotent God who is also loving and desires to forgive your sins and give you eternal life. More than that, He desires to give you a meaningful life right here and now.
To those of us who already have that meaningful life, the prerequisite to knowledge does one more important thing: it introduces us to the possibility that all of us, no matter what our intelligence score is, can become spiritual Einsteins if we will humble and draw near to our awesome Lord, learn from Him, and follow His ways. And this is what God desires both from and for all of us.