How much does Jesus Christ know?
“In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” – Colossians 2:3
This verse has boggled my mind for years! I think it is amazing that Christ is the source of all the immense, limitless treasures of knowledge… everything that can be known, Christ already knows.
Now, the fact that all wisdom is found in Christ makes more sense to us in some ways. We tend to think of wisdom and knowledge as different. Wisdom seems to be part and parcel with religion. To live wisely is to love God and serve him. Or, to put it in its opposite sense, nothing is more foolish than to not love God and not serve him… to make him your enemy. What could be wiser than having the God of the universe as your loving Father rather than your wrathful enemy? For this reason, 2 Timothy 3:15 says the scriptures are able to make you “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” And conversely, Psalm 14:1 tells us “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
But knowledge? That seems separate from religion. Like part of science or academics or higher education. Sheer information. And the more you are educated, the more you realize just how much there is to know. I remember walking through the basement of the humanities library when I was a student at MIT. There were all these discarded books in stacks that reached to a high ceiling, and the basement was huge! I selected one of the obsolete books and looked at the binding. It was a 500-page tome on some subject I knew literally nothing about. I leafed through it and realized the depths of my ignorance. That feeling is always deepened when I walk through the hallways of the various buildings at MIT. On the walls of the physics department are all kinds of fascinating (to me!) displays of this or that detail of modern physics. The same is displayed on the walls of the chemistry department, the civil engineering department, the oceanographic department, the materials department, the aerospace department, etc. If you walk 45 minutes up Massachusetts Avenue, you get to Harvard University, and there you can have your liberal arts knowledge expanded—ancient Greek literature, African-American studies, musicology, economics, medicine, on and on and on. There is a staggering amount of knowledge that the human race has accumulated over the centuries in a wide array of fields. Gifted people study for years to become experts in some detailed aspect of a certain field; they publish articles and books in that field and advance what is called “state of the art” in that specialty during their career. Then they retire and die, and their work becomes superseded by the next generation. That is all called “knowledge.”
Here’s my point. Christ knows all of these fields completely. He knew it before every expert ever discovered it. There is absolutely no separation in Christ’s mind between sacred (wisdom) and secular (knowledge). It is all part of the universe he created and governs. Remember that John 1:3 says, “Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.” All things! So that means Christ knows more than the leading nano-scientist about his field. He knows more about medieval poetry than the leading expert in that field. He knows more about polymers than the greatest polymer chemist alive today. He certainly knows more about healing the human body than the greatest surgeon alive. But he also knows more about rocket propulsion than the most brilliant rocket scientist working for NASA.
I remember when I was a missionary in Japan, and I was learning to speak the complex Japanese language. I came to realize how fiercely proud the Japanese people were of their language and culture, and how separate they felt their race to be from the rest of the world. Many of them felt no non-Japanese could ever learn their language as well as a highly skilled Japanese language expert. I said to a proud Japanese Christian, “Jesus Christ knows the Japanese language better than any Japanese person alive today.” I could tell from the shocked look on his face how challenging that concept was for him to accept.
“So, everything that can be known about everything that exists, ever has existed, or ever will exist, Jesus Christ already knows.”
So, everything that can be known about everything that exists, ever has existed, or ever will exist, Jesus Christ already knows. Ponder that! And it will be his pleasure to teach us those things for all eternity!
