Faithful and Flourishing Christian Education That is Shaped by the First Commandment
If a faithful and flourishing education is one that begins and ends with the Word of God, let’s return to the basics this week. What does education look like that is shaped and informed by the First Commandment?
"You shall have no other gods before me." What does this mean? We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things."
Even the most well-meaning of schools, apart from the light shed by God's Word, risk driving us further into the deception that:
1. we are gods of our destiny and creators of our ultimate meaning,
2. belief in ourselves is the key to greatness or grandeur, and
3. truth and reality bend to and serve our will and deepest desires.
Such deceptions redirect us from the reality of God, our sinful condition and need for a Savior, the life-giving news of God's love in Christ, and that which Jesus describes in John 10:10, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly."
An education that compartmentalizes learning from such Truth is not neutral. It offers a vain vision for life and learning without consideration of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. It beckons us to a treasure-less quest described in many ways over the years.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis portrayed it this way:
"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
In his Confessions, Augustine summarizes this human search for rest in the wrong places when he writes, "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you."
In Pascal's Pensées, he illustrates it as a God-shaped hole in our hearts:
"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."
In Creation and Fall Temptation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer recounts this human search for meaning apart from God in this way:
"The deceit, the lie of the devil consists of this, that he wishes to make man believe that he can live without God's Word. Thus he dangles before man's fantasy a kingdom of faith, of power, and of peace, into which only he can enter who consents to the temptations; and conceals from men that he, as the devil, is the most unfortunate and unhappy of beings, since he is finally and eternally rejected by God."
In "The Rock," T.S. Eliot proclaims the profit-less pursuit with these words:
"All our knowledge brings us near to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust."
When done well, a Christian education offers a palliative to such pointless pursuits, directing our attention instead to "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" and that which is "a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." It invites us to speak with Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." It introduces us to the deep, persistent, timeless significance and relevance of Jesus Christ upon modern life, thought, trends, and events. As God works through His Word, He cultivates in us a living confidence in the goodness of God and a recognition of the wisdom of God. Rather than something segregated from the rest of life, a Christian education sees God's wisdom as a seasoning for all of life and learning.
This is an education that heeds the wisdom of the First Commandment.