Morning Devotional

March 24, 2004

"Knowledge is Power" 

by Don Emmitte

Home

My child, listen to me and treasure my instructions. Tune your ears to wisdom, and concentrate on understanding. Cry out for insight and understanding. Search for them as you would for lost money or hidden treasure. Then you will understand what it means to fear the LORD, and you will gain knowledge of God. For the LORD grants wisdom! From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He grants a treasure of good sense to the godly. He is their shield, protecting those who walk with integrity. He guards the paths of justice and protects those who are faithful to him. (Proverbs 2:1-8 NLT).

“Knowledge is power.” Stunning in its simplicity, not to mention eminently quotable, British philosopher Francis Bacon’s aphorism also is one of those rare insights that grows more rather than less profound with the passage of time. Certainly, that statement has more truth within it today than when it was written in 1597, not yet 150 years removed from Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press. Then, Bacon might just as easily have said "information is power," because information, the raw material out of which knowledge is shaped and synthesized, was every bit as precious as the finished product. Then, to possess one essentially was to have the other. If you had information, you almost always had knowledge. That is not necessarily the case in today’s world of information overload.

An article I read recently on the Internet said, “While knowledge has lost none of its value, information has undergone a process of inflation that has made it a much less rare coin. It is no exaggeration to say that information, so omnipresent and pervasive — so available — has been reduced to the level of white noise, a persistent buzz always in the background of modern life. That we are awash if not drowning in information was made clear by a 2000 study by the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management & Systems, which determined that during the previous year the world’s citizens had produced between one and two exabytes of unique information. To lend a bit of perspective, all the words ever spoken by human beings up to that point would have amounted to about five exabytes. Put in per capita terms, which might be easier to get one’s mind around, the 1999 output amounts to 250 gigabytes of unique information for every man, woman and child on the planet.”

I needed a translation of that image. So I did a little research as to how much a gigabyte of information really is. If I were to fill the bed of my truck with printed pages, that would be a gigabyte of data. And remember, that was 250 truckloads for each of us. We write it, photograph it, record it, film it and then send it or save it. Finally, like the man trying to drain the swamp, up to his knees in mud and surrounded by alligators, we wonder what to do with it all!

Incredibly, with this glut of information there are still many people who have so little knowledge of God. It becomes very easy to fill our minds with things about God and never really fill our hearts with His presence. Commit yourself to learning about Him though a deeply devotional relationship with Him through His Holy Spirit. You may be surprised at how little you need to really know!