Here's today's question. Dear Pastor John, I am a female student at a secular university. I am normally pretty joyful in my relationship with God and in day-to-day living. However, the wickedness of my surroundings continues to grieve me. Today in the lecture, I could barely keep from crying as we discussed a novel so full of depravity I decided to just read the spark notes of the book instead of read the book itself.

But even the summary is hard to read. My heart is so weighed down and broken. I feel that I am the only one who even senses the evil around me. And I mourn that I am in a setting that is forcing me into a knowledge that seems premature. I don't understand their pragmatic justifications.

Every poem, short story, and novel we have covered is filled with sex, rape, grotesque, and graphic depictions of murder, infant side, slavery, and cursing. It makes me so weary. And they call those things morally ambiguous. What can I do? What should I do? Pastor John, what would you say to this female college student?

Wow, there's so many different angles that we could come at this. I mean, I could camp on that word morally ambiguous and say, "Are you kidding me? Just have one of their children raped and see if they call it morally ambiguous." That's a lot of baloney. But I'm not going to come at it that way.

This may be a good occasion to give a few thoughts about my understanding of the way Christians should seek to be educated. That's the direction I'm going to go. And just apologize ahead of time if that's not what she needs most. But it just felt like I should do this.

So when I say, "How should a Christian be educated?" I mean, how should our character be formed from the time we're little to the time we're 80? How should our character be formed? How should our worldview be shaped? Who should shape it? How should it be shaped? The way we view everything?

And third, how should our skill, how should we be equipped with the necessary skills for the particular calling that we have? Those three things are what I mean by education. So we start with the conviction. I start with the conviction that human beings don't come into the world like birds and squirrels with incredible instincts built into their DNA that enable them to fly and hunt and jump.

I watch the squirrel outside my window jump from limb to limb. I say, "That's just absolutely incredible that he can do that and know exactly where to land, even though the limb that he's jumping from is going to give way under his feet and he has to know how hard to push off." Calculating the give way and the...

You can see I'm just amazed every day. So human beings come into the world with virtually zero education, except maybe the sucking reflex, right? Amazing, absolutely amazing. But we poor human beings have to learn almost everything through what others show us or by trial and error. So almost everything we need to know we get by learning, by education.

It's educated into us by someone or some experience that we have. The Bible charges parents first and foremost with this job of educating little bitty human beings who don't know anything and would perish if you left them alone. And these words, this is Deuteronomy 6, "These words that I command you today shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children." That's one of the most important instructions in the Bible.

Or Ephesians 6, "Fathers, bring up your children in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord." Don't leave them to find things out by themselves. This is just lunatic to treat children as though they shouldn't be instructed in the way of the Lord. Then, besides parents, the Bible says that there are sages or wise men, wise women from whom we can gain much wisdom and knowledge.

It's another dimension of education. The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, Proverbs 13. The lips of the wise spread knowledge, Proverbs 15, 7. And then the New Testament says that God has ordained that there be teachers in the church and they help us grow in knowledge and understanding.

Hebrews 5, "By this time you ought to be teachers." Or 1 Corinthians 12, "God has appointed in the church teachers." So from the time we are children, we're to keep on learning, keep on growing in the knowledge and understanding of the Lord, 2 Peter 3.18. And education, therefore, is not just a phase of life like, "Oh, I have to go to school for 12 years or 16 years or whatever." It's part of life to the very end.

Now, till now, all I've said is that the Bible points towards the shaping of our character and the learning of our worldview and the gaining of our skills from fellow believers, parents and wise people and teachers. And that is the main point. Unbelievers will not be able to teach us the most important things we need to know about God and about His ways in the world.

Nevertheless, that's not all that the Bible has to say about education. It tells us that we should have our eyes open and become serious observers of the world. Go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise, Proverbs 6. Consider the lilies, consider the birds, Matthew 6. Study the weather, Matthew 16.

Learn to read, Ephesians 4. Use your reason. Come now, let us reason together, Isaiah 1.18. Be children in your thinking, in your thinking be mature, 1 Corinthians 14.20. So in general, we could say that there are two kinds of knowledge Christians gain in school and in lifelong education. One is knowledge of God and His ways and His world that is distinctively Christian.

And the other is knowledge that overlaps with what unbelievers know. Two plus two is four. Grammatical rules, chemical processes, laws of physics, human anatomy, a thousand aspects of common experience of the world that we share, we overlap with unbelievers. And to the degree that a body of knowledge can be known by an unbeliever—now here I'm starting to get to her situation a little bit.

You wonder, where is he going with this? To the degree that a body of knowledge can be known by an unbeliever, to that degree can we be educated by an unbeliever? Keeping in mind, of course, that this body of knowledge will only be fully understood in its relation to God's, His hand in creation, His hand in providence, His hand in leading it to its ultimate purposes.

But there's an overlap between knowledge that unbelievers have and knowledge that we need so that we can be educated in some dimension to the degree that that knowledge is shared. Now here's the flip side of that point. To the degree that a body of knowledge—it sounds like she's in a class of literature maybe, say modern American literature or modern English literature—to the degree that a body of knowledge is misunderstood and wrongly evaluated by an unbeliever, to that degree should we avoid being educated by an unbeliever?

In other words, it's a matter of degree here. To the degree that they're giving bad information and bad evaluation, they're going to be less useful for the believer, or really for anybody for that matter. So what this means in the university generally is that in the hard sciences, the overlap of knowledge between believer and unbeliever is greater.

And in the humanities and social sciences, the overlap is smaller and becomes increasingly problematical. In other words, these disciplines reveal almost immediately that value judgments form the warp and woof of the subject matter. Value judgments about what is beautiful and ugly in this literature, what's right and wrong, good and bad, helpful and harmful, just and unjust, loving and unloving.

And to the degree that a teacher sees the subject matter in a way that is contrary to the Scriptures and contrary to a biblical worldview, to that degree it will be difficult to get the kind of education in that class that the Lord wants us to get. So all of that to say to our friend who is so distressed in her university class that glory is in shame, try to discern ahead of time which teachers and which classes will distort the body of knowledge that you want to get and distort the value judgments that you want to form and avoid those classes and teachers by and large.

This might mean changing schools. It might simply mean being more selective in the courses and teachers you choose. I'll close by saying I personally am jealous for young people, especially Christian young people, I am jealous for young people to be exposed to great Christian thinking. Most students in secular schools don't even get exposed to great Christian thinking, and to me that's a tragedy.

So I would encourage college-bound young people to make that a priority. Find a school where you can be exposed to the greatest, the greatest Christian thinking about the subjects you love. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the really helpful question. Keep those coming in to us. To ask Pastor John a question of your own or for more details on this podcast, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

Well, Friday we return with a question from Hebrews 1-4 where it says that Jesus became superior to angels. Wait, what? Hasn't Jesus always been superior to angels? What does the author of Hebrews mean? I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Monday. Have a great weekend.

1. Does Jesus always become superior to angels? (Hebrews 1-4) 2. Is Jesus always superior to angels? (Hebrews 1-5)