Word of Salvation – Vol.23 No.16 – January 1977

 

Parental Responsibility And The Christian Schools

 

Sermon by Rev. G. I. Williamson, B.D. on Deut.6:4-9

Readings: Deut. 6:1-15

Psalter Hymnal: 89: 237; 298; 193

 

I want to begin the message today by quoting a portion of one of our Confessions, Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith concerning the sufficiency of scripture.

“The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for man’s salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture.”

In other words there are some things that are stated directly in the Bible such as our duty to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  But there are also some things that are only indirectly stated in the Bible such as which day is the Sabbath of the Lord our God.  In order to arrive at the answer to a question like that we must engage in a process of thinking, we must put two and two together as it were and then we arrive at a clear and certain understanding of what the will of God is.  Now you might at first thought think that this is a disadvantage.  It is not.  It is a great advantage.  Because I tell you that if God spelled out in so many words everything we had to do, the Bible would be so big it would not be possible to put it in this room.  It might not be possible to get it into the Wellington Library.  So vast are the number of variations in the life situations of the people of God down through all the ages.

If you do not believe me, then consult the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church and you will see where you end up if you try to have precise directives for everything the people of God are supposed to do.  But God has seen fit to give us principles so that the man of God who is renewed after the image of God can think out those principles and arrive at a sure knowledge of the will of God.  And I say to you that this leads us directly, unmistakably and certainly to our responsibility as parents to educate our children in Christian schools.

I cannot take you to a text in the Bible that says that women should take the Lord’s Supper.  There is not one.  You can only arrive at that if you are willing to follow this method that our reforming fathers speak of in the Confession and I cannot take you to a text in the Bible which says, like the 11th commandment, “Thou shalt send thy children to the Christian school.”

But I can show you principles in the word of God which, to any right thinking mind will certainly lead to that conclusion and no other, and we have three of them right here in our text.

The first reason is theological: “Hear O Israel for the Lord our God is one lord” or as it is also translated “the Lord our God he is the only lord, he is the only Jehovah God, he is the only one there is.”  This was the creed you might say of the ancient church and it is still a fundamental article of our creed.  The Shorter Catechism says “there is but one only, the living and true God” and this has been the central issue in all of the history of God’s people down through the ages to this very moment.  All around the Israelites in the days in which Moses spoke these words to them were the nations that denied precisely this truth.

Now you know that they feared Jehovah.  Many of the nations surrounding Israel had a fear of Jehovah, especially when they saw his wonders and beheld his signs.  Some even were willing to go so far as to say that perhaps Jehovah was after all the greatest of all the gods.  But they were not willing to deny these other gods the very right of existence as is plainly witnessed by the fact that their daily lives and their devotion was filled with obedience to these other gods.  Take the Egyptian for example, with whom the children of Israel had lived for over four centuries at the time that these words were spoken.  Now we happen to know from the study of Egyptian remains and hieroglyphics and the like that they did have a vague idea at least of the supreme God who is the creator and ruler of heaven and earth.  He was there lurking in the background as it were, as a kind of ominous threat to life (which indeed he is to the sinner).  But in their conscious devotion the ancient Egyptians, as everyone knows, gave their obeisance and reverence to grotesque gods of the weirdest kind.  These strange looking concoctions of the ancient Egyptians blended together the various aspects of nature.  That is why you will see, for example, a god that has the legs and torso of a man and the head of a bird.  You have seen them.  And modern man looks at these hieroglyphics and these Egyptian memorials and these idol gods of the Egyptians and he shakes his head and he says, “Imagine that.  Imagine anyone worshipping a God like that.”  And 90% of the people who would say that turn around and do exactly that themselves.  They do not know it but that is exactly what they do.  Because you see we now know for certain that what these Egyptians were doing was representing as the highest conception of reality the forces of nature.  They were in effect deifying the forces of nature and they were worshipping the forces of nature in a composite way in these various man-made gods.  And like it or not, modern man is doing exactly the same thing in principle.  There is not one iota of difference in what modern man is doing in the theory of evolution because that is nothing more or less than the deification of the forces of nature.  Now you can dress it up in sophisticated dress, in modern terminology and you can have a brilliant professor on T.V.  talking about the ascent of man but that does not change the fact that in essence it is precisely the same thing that the ancient Egyptians were doing when they deified the forces of nature and worshipped them under the name of their various gods, and that happens to be what colours education today throughout the state system of this land.

Now suppose the Lord Jesus Christ was right, just suppose that, if your imagination allows, that the Lord Jesus Christ was right and that he knew more than the most advanced scientist of today.  Allow for a moment in your mind that Christ knew what he was talking about when he said from the beginning it was not so and that the ‘forces of nature’ as we like to call them is really a misnomer for the hand of God.  So that it is the hand of God that brings that sparrow to the earth.  That is what Jesus said.  It is the hand of God that has numbered the hairs on your head, not just a genetic code and so on.  So it is the hand of God that is working in all these things that take place in nature and the world.  So that Paul could then go and say that God works all things for good to them that love God (Rom.8:28) and that the whole world is operated by him after the Counsel of his will or as the Shorter Catechism puts it.  “God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence” and the work of providence is “his most holy, wise and powerful preserving and governing of all creatures and their actions” so that everything that is happening is really an aspect of the mighty working of God.

Well, I ask you, if you really believe that, how can you possibly accept anything but Christian education for your children?  I have always liked that little poem that Tennyson wrote, one of the great English poets, because to me it expresses so very well the essence of the matter.  Let me read it to you:

Flower in the cranied
wall,
I pluck you out of the
cranies,
I hold you here root
and all,
In my hand little
flower,
But if I could understand
what you are,
Root and all and all
in all.
I should know what God
and man is.

Well that is the truth.  You cannot really study the little flower, not really, not in the true sense, unless you relate it to God because there is no such thing as truth except in relation to God.  Just as there is no such thing as right except in relation to God.  Destroy the concept of the true and living God and then there is no reference point by which you can say that one thing is true and another is not, or that one thing is right and another is wrong.  So if you believe that the Lord our God is the only Lord, I ask you, how can you possibly arrive at any other conclusion but that it is your responsibility as a Christian parent to give a Christian education to your children.  That is the first reason.

The second is like unto it, for you are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength”, and the law of God is all the time to be laying there on your heart.

Well, if you ever fall in love with anything or anyone that way, all out, or with all your heart, you will know that when love really possesses your whole being nothing can stand in the way.  Where there is a will, there is a way, my mother used to say – and believe me – when love is in control, well there is a way.  No matter how big the obstacles are, no matter how difficult the problem, love will never rest until those difficulties are surmounted – the way they were surmounted when many of your parents and grandparents built Christian schools.  They did not have any state assistance and they did not have welfare state cheques coming in for the children either, and they did not have guaranteed unemployment compensation and all the rest of it and they were not affluent either.  But they did have love enough for God that they said “it has got to be done.  If it means sacrifices, tremendous sacrifices, well so be it, but it has got to be done”.  And so out of that meagre pay cheque or whatever you wanted to call it, the first portion went into a little jar for the Church and the second went into another jar for the school and then mother began to work out her budget to buy her bread, and potatoes and flour and the rest and then if there was anything left over maybe some new item of furniture or something for the house.  And that is the way it works when you love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength.

I remember when I fell in love and I was quite able to do without material things to realise the object of my love.  Material things meant absolutely nothing as an obstacle in the way of that.  But today in our affluent situation it is very difficult, is it not?  We convince ourselves that we just cannot do this because we have to have things first.  We must have a house like we want first, maybe even a boat and a few other things and I say to you that it only illustrates the fact that where a man’s heart is there are his treasures also.

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ and I hope I speak to every heart here, just suppose you love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, just suppose that you love Jesus Christ enough that you would sacrifice anything that you have for him.  Anything!  How would it be then?  I don’t judge anyone in this congregation on this matter because I can remember my own struggle 20 years ago with the same problem as a young pastor on a very small salary with an opportunity to send my children to a Christian school.  I know the kind of struggle that goes on in the heart when that moment comes.  I thought in myself, how can I do it?  How can we possibly afford it?  But then by the grace of God in the end I came back to this: how can I possibly deny it?  How can I compromise the education of my children and turn them over 35 hours a week to the gods of the Egyptians?  No, I cannot do it and when I had the will I found the way.

Congregation you sometimes hear people say that we Reformed people ought to be witnesses for Christ.  Well let me tell you the way to witness for Christ today is to put your money where your mouth is.  There are plenty of evangelicals going around talking about Jesus but there are not enough people today willing to put their money where their mouth is and there is no better way today to witness for Jesus Christ than to say to the world in a tangible way, look our king says this territory belongs to him and we are not going to yield it.  We are not just going to talk about more prayer and more bible reading and more piety we are going to talk about the kingly rights of Jesus.  Now I tell you that there will be people who say, “You know maybe there is something to this Christian faith after all.  I have heard plenty of people talk about Jesus being Saviour and Lord but here are some people who seem to mean it.  Evidently they really mean that Jesus Christ is Lord of all.”  Yes if you want to witness today friends well here is just about number one on the agenda.  Because it says we really mean it.  Jesus Christ is the totalitarian authority who rules in all of our lives.  So I say there is a second reason.

If you love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, he is number one and that is such a big number one that nothing else is even a close rival.  Then tell me: how can you come to any other conclusion?  I am willing to listen to your explanation of the Bible.  You have heard mine already, you explain how you arrive at some other conclusion and if these two are not enough look at the third.

Because here is what you might call spelling it out in detail.  “You shall teach them diligently to your sons.  Talk to them when you sit in your house, when you talk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, bind them as a sign to your hand, keep them as frontals on your forehead so you cannot see anything else, write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deut.6:7-9).  Now that is a Hebrew way of saying: look, everything, absolutely everything at all times is to be conditioned by this glorious and living God.  You might say that God is here commanding us to brainwash our children with his truth.  Now you might say “How horrible!  I hate that word brainwash”.  Well hate it or not, your children are being brainwashed right now.  If you don’t think they are then that just shows how naive you are.  If you don’t determine the input that washes their brain, somebody else does.  They are living 24 hours a day and they are alert and they are learning and they are asking questions, so then if you don’t wash their brain, I guarantee you that somebody else will, and if it is not with the Christian faith that their brain is being washed it will be some other faith because all men live by some faith.  So does the public school, so does the teacher in it and the worst possible thing to have their brain washed with is this bland philosophy of life in which God is not even mentioned, where he doesn’t count, and is not even significant.  No wonder Jesus once said that the children of this age are wiser in relation to their interests than the children of light, because that is a fact, they are.  They are relentless, they are not willing to give up any terrain to us.  If you don’t believe me just study the history of schools in New Zealand, for example.

You may not know that virtually all the schools in New Zealand were originally Christian schools and down in the South Island especially there was a time in which in the public schools the Shorter Catechism was the basis of the curriculum.  Yes when they were private and God’s people took their responsibility seriously, they taught all subjects under the headship of Christ.  But then when the State took control the relentless onslaught of humanism began.  The humanists said at first, “Well we cannot have anything sectarian”.  That did not sound so bad, but when you discovered the fact that the Christian faith itself is to the humanist, sectarian, then you see why little by little it has been whittled away until there is absolutely nothing left and by law there is nothing left because the school is to be entirely secular.  Even the (Nelson) system of Christian education only means this, that by law the school is officially closed then some pastor or Sunday School teacher can give a 1⁄2 hour of instruction to those who want it but in the school it is excluded.  You see the children of this world are wise.  They know what they want.  They want to exclude at all costs the totalitarian Jesus.  You see you cannot really compromise.  If Christ claims everything then the only way to do business with him if you are a humanist is to claim everything against him and exclude him and that is exactly what has happened.  One thing we are learning now in the attitude of these humanists toward private schools is this: they are not satisfied to have the public system, they want the private system too, and again the same danger is evident.  They talk about integration and it may sound good and it is attractive because it would mean that the State would pay for private schools.  But they would also demand certain things too.  The claims of Christ are too great.  Well that is how the Christian schools were destroyed once before.  They talk in legislative proposals about allowing these schools to preserve their special character but if you study the fine print you will realise one thing to start with, they already have a view that 90% of the curriculum has nothing to do with God anyway.  It is just the religious part and our view as Reformed Christians is that every bird that sings, sings its song in terms of the living God and that there is no subject, absolutely no subject that is neutral because it belongs under the kingship of our divine Saviour.  If you really understood the signs of the times… if you really understood the day in which you are living… and you really wanted to fight for the glory and honour of Christ, I tell you this, you would be in this fight with all your might.  It might go by default in some places.  Thank God it is not going by default in Canada.  They have been fighting there and now there is at least one province in Canada that has officially recognised the full rights of Christ to claim his own with regard to his people.  It may go by default in some places, but it is not going to go by default everywhere because God has His people who will honour his claim, who will strive to saturate the whole of life with authority of His word and law.

Is it not about time that we saw too that the old evangelical answer is just not enough.  If you think that a little more prayer and bible reading and witnessing just by words is going to be enough today, well you are badly mistaken.  The hour has come when we must act and there is no sphere in which action is more urgently needed than in the realm of Christian schools.  If there is only one true God then tell me how can we educate our children by other gods?  If he tells us that we are to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, tell me this, how can that result in our turning them over to alien philosophies?  And if he tells us to condition their very existence from morning till night, then you tell me how that can lead to ignoring and bypassing an opportunity like this one for your children?  Hear O Reformed Christians, the Lord our God is the only God there is and we love him don’t we?  At least we want to, don’t we, with all our heart and soul and strength, and we want our children brainwashed with his truth don’t we?  Well the simple minded should be able to see from this that we must let nothing stand in the way of Christian education for our children.  For as we read in Psalm 78:

He willed that each succeeding race
his deeds might learn and know.
That children’s children to their sons
might all these wonders show.
Let children learn God’s righteous ways
and on him stay their heart
that they may not forget his works
nor from his ways depart.  (Psalter Hymnal, 1934, p.179)