Knowledge is a wonderful thing and greatly to be desired. The tens of thousands of schools and the billions of dollars spent to operate them are evidence of the value we place upon education, the effort to plant knowledge in the minds of our youth. We admire those who store up great amounts of knowledge in their minds, and honor them with awards of many kinds. When an activity or situation promises a degree of acquiring knowledge to those who participate in it, we are usually willing to sanction it on that grounds if no other. There is a possibility, however, that benefits do not always result from knowledge. In the novel The Long Ships by Gunnar Bengtsson there is the story of a renegade priest named Willibald. For many years he sacrificed his comfort and risked his life to try to convert the heathen Vikings of Scandinavia to Christ. Then he came upon a copy of Ovid's The Art of Love, which he read with the most intense interest. What he learned reshaped his mind and changed the course of his life. The knowledge he derived from that book, so scandalous that Caesar banished Ovid for publishing it, put the priest to thinking about things he had never thought of before. His appearance as a priest became no more than a guise for preying upon innocent women who put their trust in him as a man of God.
This world is a mosaic of good and evil. We are challenged day by day to seek out the good and try to incorporate it into our lives. At the same time we must try to avoid the evil and exclude its influence from our lives. There is great reward in gaining knowledge of what is good, and there is often much misery that comes with the knowledge of what is evil. Jesus said in Jno. 8:32, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Although He probably spoke mainly of the truth revealed by God that leads one to salvation and liberation from the bondage of sin, Jesus' statement also applies to the knowledge of truth in the general sense. The knowledge of what is true and good is a powerful force to motivate us to live by truth and fashion our lives by goodness. In Rom. 16:19 the inspired apostle expresses his desire that those who read his words will make it their goal to become knowledgeable of what is good and then develop that knowledge into wisdom that will guide their lives in the proper course. We should want to know no more about evil than what is necessary to identify it, realize its disastrous ends, and be able to avoid it.
In the second part of the exhortation the apostle holds forth the hope that his readers will be "innocent in what is evil." In some versions this phrase is translated "simple concerning evil." The word "simple," however, does not convey the meaning of "easy" or "uncomplicated" (and hence "uninformed") that we now attach to it. The word in the original Greek is akeraios, which means "untainted." It was the term used of metal to denote that it was unmixed with an alloy, and of wine and milk to certify they had not been diluted with water. It therefore signifies something that is absolutely uncontaminated and pure. The knowledge of evil which goes beyond what is necessary to resist and defeat it will, in time, corrupt the soul that acquires it. Thus we are advised in I Ths. 5:22 to "abstain from every form of evil." It seems we all have a natural curiosity about things that are evil. They have a strong, enticing, seducing force to them. (For example, if a movie is banned because of unsavory content, people feel a great urge to see it as soon as it is available somewhere.) It is far better to deny yourself the inclination to learn every alluring detail of evil and spare yourself the devastating power of its deception and consequent corruption.
