Text: Nehemiah 8:1-8

Education is leading our children and young people into Thoughtful Acceptance of God’s Calling in Their Lives.

Israel’s 7 feasts were God’s way of educating Israel –  adults and children.

            Those 7 feasts which began with the Feast of Passover and ended with Feast of Tabernacles (Nehemiah) were God’s educational system.  They were the schools which God established in order to lead, train and educate his people, both children and adults into GOD’S CALLING.

EVERY SCHOOL IN THE WORLD SHOULD RESEMBLE THOSE FEASTS! Continue reading →

Introducing the WONDERS of God

 Driving by a public school one day with my 6 year old daughter, she asked me what the difference was between that school and her own.  I tried to make it a brief and simple answer, mentioning that public schools do not teach anything about God. Her response surprised me.

“What DO they teach, then, Daddy?” she asked, implying by the way she asked the question that they must have little or nothing to teach.  I have to confess that I agreed heartily with her tone of voice and the force of her question.  Because God is the Creator and Sustainer of all things, to leave Him out of education is to leave out the most meaningful part of reality.  It is to leave out the WONDER factor.  God has imparted something of the WONDER of his own being to everything He has created, to everything He is sustaining.  As an artist may sign his name in the corner of a picture he has painted, so

God has signed his name on every part of his creation.   That is what David was saying in Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

This is one of the major reasons why it is so much fun to raise children and grandchildren.  It is your high and holy privilege to introduce them to reality, to show them all the amazing things in their world – flowers that bloom in Spring, frogs that hop on the grass, sunsets that glow in the West, waterfalls that roar over precipices.  Then there is mathematics, chemistry, biology and astrophysics.  You open the page for them to gaze upon these remarkable realities.  And each of these subjects are all filled with WONDER.  They are all the work of God and by their very nature MUST display the AWESOME WONDERS intrinsic to GOD Himself.

Allow me to refer to a noted Chrisitian educator from Holland, Abraham Kuyper.  He saw Evolutionism as a rival educational philosophy which taught that “life could be derived from non-life, that mere mechanisms could produce organic life”.  He scorned such ideas as not only a theological outrage but as a philosophical impossibility, a mere figment of the Humanistic imagination, something that had never happened and never could happen.  (Here I am summing up many pages (284-289) from James D. Bratt’s biography of ABRAHAM KUYPER, 2014).

Meanwhile, scripture towers over imaginative Humanistic evolutionary theory, like Mt. Everest towers over a bump in the road.  Scriptural teaching on the creation of man and all things is an unanswerable WONDER in itself.  The splendor of its simple teaching on the creation of man soars over all contrary speculation in the plain logic of its statement.  Then it is fully and finally confirmed in the bodily Resurrection of Christ which is nothing less than an unanswerable confirmation of the entire Bible including truth of creation.  National Geographic magazine may be beautifully colorful in its portrayal of evolutionary theory, but it is just wrong.

So, join me in encouraging parents, grandparents and churches to take great delight in educating their children.  Educators have the grand privilege and great joy of introducing children and young people to the WONDERS of God, WONDERS reflected in every particle of reality we ever see or experience in any way.  It is the consciousness of these wonders that fill us and our children with a powerful reverence for God and his world and make us want to follow the Creating, Redeeming Christ with all our hearts.

MY NEXT BLOG, NUMBER 24, IS SIMPLY NOTES FROM A LENGTHY LECTURE ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.   I HOPE TO MAKE THIS LECTURE AVAILABLE IN AUDIO FORM VERY SOON. 

Every Fact in Education Has the Aura of God Upon It

 Hearing my 3 and 4 year old granddaughters squeal with glee was a sheer delight.  I had just fed a handful of grass to a horse and watching him chomp it down was what set them off.  Of course feeding that horse was my “educational duty”, leading those two little dollies into the discovery of horses and their eating habits.

Later on those same girls will be introduced to the marvels of DNA and the human genome project.  The biological data in that remarkable discovery is truly mind-boggling, a reality that should bring us to our knees in acknowledgement of God as Creator.  But when you stop to think about it, isn’t a horse chomping on grass just as amazing?  Isn’t a chomping horse just another link in this awesome net-work of realities that had to be created by God?  I am fully convinced that this has to be true.

So, how does this impact education?  Have we truly educated our children and youth when we give them all the so-called “scientific data” about the realities around us?  If the rising generation learns the chemical composition, the physical weight, and the electromagnetic impulses making up the persons, animals and rocks in our universe, have they learned all they need to know?  Have they learned what is most significant and important to know?

We should be profoundly grateful to modern science for the way it has discovered this kind of physical data about us and our world. We should be profoundly grateful to modern science because it continues to discover more of this same kind of data and is laying it out before us in most illuminating and helpful ways.  But we should also insist that these amazing discoveries are incomplete without another element.

In one of his pictures of creation, C.S. Lewis is wrapped in a great darkness when he suddenly hears a voice singing softly.  As the voice sings (Magician’s Nephew) a light begins to dawn revealing Aslan the Lion as the singer.   This wonderful Lion, a figure of Christ, sings the entire world into existence, leaving his mark on every part of it.  I believe Lewis is right here and that this means that both chomping horses and DNA are part of a vast network of realities chock full of pure WONDER.  It is this element of wonder that gives truly beautiful and lasting significance to all of our ongoing scientific discoveries.

Now, I want to give you my own definition of Christian Education. I see this definition as fully harmonious with all the scientific discoveries that mankind has already made and all the scientific discoveries that we ever will make.  This definition recognizes all the factual data we are discovering and it includes in it the element of WONDER, that sometimes invisible but always grand element that Christ put into it when he “sang” it into existence.  Here is my definition:

 CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IS THE JOYFUL AND REVERENT DISCOVERY OF THE DATA AND THE WONDER OF EVERYTHING IN THE LIGHT OF GOD’S CREATION AND CHRIST’S RESURRECTION.

 In this definition the creating power of God is evident in two Creations:

(1) The Original Creation described first in Genesis and then celebrated in the Psalms and many other passages in both the Old and New Testaments.

(2) The New Creation which began with the bodily RESURRECTION of Jesus, His making all thing new in this age, and then perfecting all things in his 2^nd Coming.