The Metaphysics of Christian Education
From the Hosts
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This is the truth that sets the endeavor of Christian education apart from all other philosophies and disciplines: as Cornelius Van Til famously put it, "Two plus two is four and Jesus Christ is Lord." Through the preceding episodes of Halting Toward Zion, we've talked about the implications of God's character on sociology, politics, criminal justice, and many other topics--and today as we close out Book One of our podcast, we're applying all of those discussions, as well as the instructions God gave to His people in Deuteronomy 6, to education.
This Episode Features: Star Wars (The Real One); Weird Christian Schools And Weird Homeschool Co-ops; Esteemed Historian Spider-Man; Mini-Me; The Seven Parts Of Speech;
In this episode
Scripture References
Works
Times will appear once this episode's audio is aligned.
Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Today we’re wrapping up our series on Deuteronomy. We’re talking about the metaphysics of Christian education.
When we started this podcast 60 episodes ago, or however many it’s been, we started considering things from Genesis – who God is and how Christian ontology or metaphysics is different from every other world system. That is when we asked the question, “What’s real? How do we know? What’s the nature of that reality? How does it communicate to us?”
The Bible answer is unique. There’s no other religion that comes close, that kind of parallels. It’s a watered-down version because Christianity starts with, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Every other system starts with, “Stuff is, and stuff develops, and we’re left with stuff.”
Now, if you’re a materialist, the stuff may be atoms, particles, sub-atomic particles, quarks, or energy particles, if you want to fudge what materialism means. If you’re a pantheist, the stuff is spirit, divinity, something that is obviously not matter because we’re not calling it that, so it’s not. But the problem is, in both cases all there is is whatever it is. It’s all matter or it’s all spirit, and there really is nothing against which to compare it or judge it, because all is all.
It is theoretically possible to hold some kind of merger of the two. New Age mysticism tried this back a little ways. You can think of Star Wars here, the original, the only one, New Hope it’s slanderously called, where the Force is this energy field created by all living creatures, where God and the universe are interactive in one projecting the other, but it doesn’t last very long.
We can have hokey religions and good blasters, and yet somehow it may sell a lot of tickets in the movie theaters, but no one sustains it very long so we keep defaulting one direction or the other. The deity becomes simply energy, which becomes matter, or the matter becomes a manifestation – you’re stuck with some stuff.
Christianity is the one religion that says there’s God and then there’s the stuff he made, and there’s no mixture between the two. God does not blend into his creation. It does not blend into him. He is he, it is it. Man, therefore, does not become God, cannot become God, not by increasing his power, knowledge, intuition, spirituality, you name it. There’s nothing that man can do to climb the ladder of being into deity.
God became man exactly once in the person of Jesus Christ, and even there there is no confusion between that which is divine and that which is human, created, mortal. One altogether not by confusion of nature, but by union of person, the Athanasian Creed says. So if in Jesus Christ, who is God and who is man, even there if these lines are not blurred then we can say for all aspects of reality and all of our interactions with God, he’s God and we’re not. That has implications.
We’ve talked about sociology. We’ve talked about politics. We’re ending here sort of with a focus on education, but it wraps all of this all together. What does this understanding of who God is and who Jesus is, how does that feed into a Christian understanding of education. And let’s contrast that with, “If all stuff is stuff, then what do people do with that stuff when it comes to education? Why do they educate and what’s their goal and what’s the danger to all the rest of us?” so that’s kind of what we’re looking at.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children…
Moses, in explaining this, moves right into, “There’s one God. You’ve got to love him with all your being.” We can talk about why those two are necessary corollaries. “And loving him with all your being means you take his words and you teach them to your kids, with some goals in mind.”
The other question we have to ask is, “Well, if you’re not a Christian and you don’t believe any of that, what exactly are our schools doing, and do we really trust them?”
I stopped in in the middle of verse 7, but we could go on and say, “You’re going to talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. You’re going to bind them for a sign upon your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them upon the posts of your house and on your gates.”
This teaching of God’s words is not a haphazard affair. It’s not something you do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights or at devotions around the dinner table now and then. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, if you’ve got your kid there you’re supposed to be – there’s two things here: teaching them the very words of God, and then talking about what those words mean.
I think there’s something even before that. These are your children. You have children.
You have children. Wow! Yes, you do. It kind of goes back to Genesis 1 – “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” As I’m fond of telling my students at school, “Have children, have children, have children.”
Yes, we know there are exceptions, sure, but we’re not talking about exceptions, we’re talking about the general plan. Humanity as a whole is supposed to replicate, covenantally reproduce, evangelistically reproduce, so that the earth is full of lots of godly people who together are loving God, and therefore loving one another and serving one another, and together are carrying out this great project of coming to know God better. In a nutshell, there’s Christian education.
God has given us this planet and said, “It’s cool. Make it cooler. This is a group project, and in order for it to work you have to love each other, because if you’re cheating and killing each other all the time you’re not going to get there very well or very fast. And you need to do it out of love for me. This is not just for what feels good or what’s in it for you. But it’s going to require lots and lots of people, and in order for this to happen you need to know my words.”
This is the owner’s manual. Then you talk about them because, although the words are sufficient the way they come for what God intended, God also intends that they be the means of communication, fellowship, instruction, help and aid to one another. You see something in them that I don’t see. I see something she doesn’t see. We keep passing back and forth.
The Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4 uses the image of the body, which having been taught by pastors, teachers, apostles, and prophets, then takes this truth in love and keeps passing it back from one cell to another, one joint to another, so that the whole body grows together. And in the process of growing, it’s doing stuff. A body that just sits on a table and grows by itself is kind of a creepy thing. It needs to be out there doing what it was told to do, but doing it in harmony, unison, reciprocity, building itself up as we glorify God and all this wonderful world that he’s given us. For this to happen, we each have our own kids and we’re supposed to teach them, first of all and primarily ourselves.
Now, there’s a danger. “It’s my kid so you can’t tell them anything.” I have seen that mentality. That’s a mistake. We all belong to the body of Christ and we need to be very open, I believe, to having other Christians feed into their lives. This is part of the philosophy of having Christian schools. I’m all for homeschooling, but just as there can be weird Christian schools, there can be weird homeschools.
It used to be. Back when I was a homeschooler it was a pre-requisite. Lots of normal kids homeschool now.
It is important, since we’re all members of the body of Christ, and that includes our kids, covenant children, that we let other Christians speak into their lives, whether you do that at Sunday School, in open discussion and fellowship after church or before church, in the church session, at home, on weekends, in homeschool co-ops. But the attitude of, “No, I’m going to reproduce myself in them exactly” is frightening, because I know as a sinner that I don’t want me reproduced exactly in my kids. That’s frightening. I need others to balance out the weaknesses and the sins in my own Christian life in my children. So although I am, first of all, accountable to God for my own children, there is a general accountability.
I don’t know how they do it in your churches. In ours we actually in the baptismal vows take a vow that we will aid in the spiritual nourishment of these children.
The whole congregation. So having said this, I think I just summed up what Christian education is without really intending it. I think it becomes clearer when we now turn and look at those other philosophies that maintain a philosophy of continuity of being – all is one, all stuff is stuff, it’s all the same stuff – which means there’s nothing above it to criticize or to which we might appeal for absolutes, for direction. Matter is matter is matter. Then matter does what matter does.
Then we start looking at what matter does, and any degree of honesty – although there’s nothing in the nature of matter that requires honesty or even recommends it – would show us that people are selfish. People like to accumulate to themselves wealth and fame and power and pleasure. And even those who set about doing good often define that good in terms of what makes them happy, what they see as the best for everyone.
They tend to want to reshape other people in their own image, whether it’s something as small as, “You need to eat like I eat” or “You need to live where I live” or “You need to dress like I dress” or “You need to read the books I’m reading” or something as extreme as, “And every thought that you have should be an echo of mine, because I will henceforth be the source of truth.”
Whether it’s materialism or whether it’s mysticism that says that, it doesn’t matter. You’re recreating the future, children, children’s children’s children. You’re recreating the future in your image. You can say, “There’s nothing that requires that.” No, but there’s nothing that prevents it, and again observation suggests that we are selfish beings and we do that.
As Christians we know exactly why we do that. We all want to play God. But there’s nothing within those systems – whether it be pantheism or materialism – that can stand up and say, “But wait. This desire to play God and to recreate the world in your image is wrong,” because what is wrong?
Charles Manson, the mass murderer, said, “If God is one, what is wrong?” He understood. If everything is one, if there is nothing transcendent, nothing above and outside of our reality to which we can appeal, then we have no appeal. We have no help. We have nothing to stand against the “I want,” the collective Id, other than our own “I want.” “You want that? I want this.”
Great, now we’ve got war. Now we have Hegelian synthesis. We have fighting within the unity, but ultimately there can be no line of demarcation except the momentary surging of the current. Sooner or later, this process of change and development is going to take us in the same direction, because there’s nothing else to appeal to.
To what degree are we using the words discipleship and education interchangeably? And how far are those equal things? Someone could say, “Well yeah, I want to disciple my children, but I send them to school for reading, writing, and arithmetic.” How do we apply this properly and with wisdom to the task of a school in education as we think of it, as this localized thing?
I think the answer lies in what we’ve already spoken of. We have a word from God, who is Triune, the Father from eternity speaking the divine Word, begetting his only begotten Son, the Father and Son breathing forth to each other. God is self-communicating. God is self-revealing, and God has created man in such a way that God can reveal himself using words.
Since God spoke the Word, and the Word is with God and is God, it gives words tremendous significance within Christian thought and life. God has given us this Word called the Bible that contains many words connected by normal grammar and syntax, with normal literary devices, whereby he tells us what our task is, how we shall then live, what we should do, what we should value, what’s important and, in a broader sense, to what sphere of life, to what covenant institution certain things belong.
Parents, as we said earlier, are responsible for the kids. They may get together and create a school, or someone may offer the services of a school and they can say, “Yeah, we’re going to send our kids to school,” but the parents don’t give up being parents, nor do they give up the covenant obligations before God to oversee the education and training of their children.
So when the school, whether it be run by church or State or some cultic leader, says, “And we’re going to be programming your children to think in such-and-such a way,” we don’t have the right to say, “Oh, you are the educators. You know more than we do. Please take our children.” We have the obligation to say, “No. I answer before God. You’re not going to teach my kid those things.”
“Yah, sure am.” But – and here’s the thing – I’m standing on a reference point that exists outside of creation.
Yeah. “You’re talking about the good of society. I’m talking about the God who made the universe, who stands outside the universe and speaks into the universe, and he has said in his Word these things, and you’re contradicting these things. I get to say no, and one day, whether you take my no or not, whether you kill me for it or try to put me in a labor camp or whatever, you will stand before God who will hold you accountable, and I will be justified and declared right, because I’m doing what he said. There’s an absolute standard that goes way beyond any manipulation words you want to use.”
I think it’s important in this era in American history and world history to realize to what degree the other side is borrowing Christian language and Christian assumptions, thinly veiled. “We’re supposed to love one another. We’re supposed to accept one another. We’re supposed to be interested in the good of humanity, the future, the good of the planet and all of these things.” The pagan world never suggested any of these things.
Bryan, your favorite author, Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, which I’m only halfway through but it’s absolutely wonderful, spends a lot of time showing that the pagan world never came up with any of this stuff. In fact, Julian the Apostate – I just got through his section – was amazed because he said, “I’m here at this great temple to the pagan goddess and you priests are not taking care of the poor, and you’re not looking after the oppressed.”
That’s exactly what the priests said. Julian walks away and the priests are saying, “What are you talking about?”
He’s claiming, “This is what the Iliad and the Odyssey were all about,” and the priests are saying, “What? No.”
Julian was very disappointed because pagans weren’t living like Christians, but he didn’t understand that that’s what he was saying. He had picked up enough of the Christian worldview to say, “These are good things.” He just didn’t want the God of the universe telling him these things. He didn’t want Jesus of Nazareth saying, “You do this and you do it through my blood.” He thought we were all good and we should all be doing these things. “It’s obvious we should do these things, right?” Isn’t it obvious?
We’re at a point in our history where people are still using the broad phrases of love and compassion and acceptance and tolerance, drained of all Christian meaning, with their own ideas put in to move along their own particular agenda, which is basically world control.
You should watch it. It acknowledges the power of the words of scripture in a very interesting way.
Indeed. And it’s probably no surprise to you – although spoiler tag for Dominion – towards the end of the book he actually explicitly draws that line to things like the modern liberalism movement, and how they’ve basically yoinked a whole bunch of Christian ideas. I don’t think he puts it in this way, but they’ve gutted them of their spiritual import and are just trying to take these external things that they’ve recognized, oddly enough, are good, and trying to do that.
They have a very – I think he calls it Puritanical, which is a loaded phrase beyond all recognition – but the Puritanical in common understanding motivation to try to purify society and make everyone align with your worldview and values.
Thank you, that’s excellent. I think there are two things going on here. One is they can’t escape their Christian roots any more than Julian the Apostate could. They’ve been programmed to use these connotation words, even when they hate them. They keep falling back on love, acceptance, tolerance, and such.
The other thing is they have learned that everyone else falls back on them too, and therefore they are very useful. Francis Schaeffer spoke of these connotation words, where you’d speak of the gospel and salvation and the resurrection power of Christ, and they have no theological content, but people still respond to the idea of new life, of resurrection.
You can see that in Jungian psychology as well. They use all those same kinds of connotation words, but the Logos shows up a whole lot in what Jordan Peterson says. He’s a Jungian through and through. He doesn’t mean what we mean by it.
“These words do not mean what you think they mean.” I thought it was Chesterton or Lewis, but now apparently I’m finding it’s Henry David Thoreau who said, “If I knew that someone was deliberately coming to do me good, I would run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.”
Why is that? Because what’s really happening is that somebody thinks that they know what’s best for you, and that they are going to control you in order to remake you in their image, but you can’t say that. “I want to control you and make you a little Mini Me, a projection of myself.” You can’t say that, so what you have to say is, “But I love you and I want what’s best for you.”
Reagan had the phrase, “The 10 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m here from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Exactly, so that’s what we’re seeing. What are we left with when all stuff is stuff, and there’s no appeal beyond the stuff? We’re left with that mentality, because Christianity is true. We keep thinking that way. We think in terms of sin and redemption. We think in terms of Creator and creation. We think in terms of sanctification and change. We think in terms of resurrection life, but we so gut it because we’ve got nothing to appeal to beyond the stuff, so we use these connotation words.
We use these ideas and these motifs, and yet ultimately what it comes down to is that the people in charge simply have their own preferences for whatever reason, wherever they came from, and they want to conform the rest of us to those preferences.
More often than not it has a lot to do – George Orwell would say – with the lust for power, the lust to control, to hurt, to destroy, because what else is there? Others might be a little less pessimistic than Orwell, but it doesn’t matter.
Lewis addresses this in The Abolition of Man. What happens when we have so transcended nature that nothing is natural, even our impulses, even our motivations? He says, “You think the manipulators, the controllers, the educators will be such bad people?” No, they won’t be people at all in our sense of the word, because they’ll now be beyond good and evil. They will do what they do, not because of any absolute, but simply because they want to.
You know when everything else has fallen, “you ought to” goes away with Christianity. “I want to” remains, and what they want is what they want, and there is no appeal beyond that. That’s what Lewis warned us. That’s what Orwell and Huxley warned us of, and Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.
What happens when the controllers have nothing left to restrain them, not even a conscience? We talk about the Inquisition. The inquisitor at least believes there’s a God out there, and he’s doing God’s service. The drunken feudal lord may at least pass out and leave you alone for a little to go fight his war, but these people want to control everything. They want to do us good, and they are from the government or from the local school system or the local social worker, and they want to help us. What response do we have?
As Christians we have a lot to say because we can appeal to a God and to a risen Lord who exists outside of that, because our risen Lord is also God, and yet exists within it because he’s also human. So it’s not an other-worldly mysticism where we abandon this world. He came into our world. Lewis says in one place, “He took to himself a body of dust and made it glorious forever.” So the truth of the incarnation and resurrection establishes that the world is important. It’s just not God.
Lewis has that other quote. I can never remember which book of his it’s in, but it’s about a society of tyrannical absolute moral busybodies. It’s like what you said. The robber baron may get tired, and the thief may be glutted by his spoils, but the person who thinks he’s really doing this, he’s punishing you for your own good, will not rest because he has the unfailing support of his own conscience on his side.
Yeah, I was kind of paraphrasing that, although I couldn’t remember where it came from at the time. It’s his commentary either on psychology or sociology. I actually do quote it somewhere.
Oh, I know what it was. It was in his discussion of punishment versus rehabilitation. He says, “Do we really want to surrender our life to people whose job it is to rehabilitate us? What does that look like and when are they done?” If I serve jail time, when my time is up I’m free and it’s done. I’m gone. But if I’m sick, then I’m not done until I’m well. Who decides? And by what standard? And what if I never agree to that standard?
Remember, of course, from a human standpoint, the secular standpoint, the other thing that makes your suffering justified versus your suffering magically – even though you’re undergoing the same things with the same motivations – the only thing that changes it from being unjust to just is whether or not the majority of human beings hold to one side or the other.
“We know better, and eventually everyone will come to see it from our point of view, because our descendants will write the history books.”
Yeah. “Well, by the time we’ve brainwashed everybody, everyone will be our children.”
My thought patterns go rather dark, not because I believe it will happen but because I believe that if God didn’t restrain us that’s exactly where we would go. That’s where self-consistency leads. But God doesn’t let us be self-consistent because he’s got a better story to tell.
Let’s dig a little bit more into the extended Shema. What are all of these things that it’s talking about – “Bind these things as frontlets between your eyes” etc?
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord,” or “The Lord our God is one Jehovah,” or “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The idea is the unity of the Godhead. First, there is only one God, and second, this God is one. The theologians speak of his simplicity. That is, he does not come in bits and pieces, pieces and parts.
This is an important concept in our age because we tend to think, “Well, God is mostly love, but maybe he has a little justice in there. Why can’t God forbear on that whole justice thing? He’s God. Can he just ditch the justice and just show love?”
Exactly. He’s identical with his attributes. He is truth. He is love. He is justice. He is humor. He is creativity. He is holiness. He is purity.
So as we come to consider God, we consider not some part of God and let that dominate our thinking. We consider God as God in all that he reveals himself. Thus, first of all then, the necessity that we love God with all our heart. We’re not to chase different gods. “My mind will follow Reformed Calvinistic Christianity, my heart will go with mystical Hinduism, and my will will go with some kind of reform movement born out of the 1840s.”
Our heart needs to be united on the one being who is God, who is himself not divided. We don’t have to pick and choose among God’s attributes to make up some kind of designer form of Christianity, or some smorgasbord approach as to who God is and what therefore should be important to me. I need to love the one God, who is one, with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and strength.
The New Testament juggles the words around a bit to achieve emphasis, but ‘might’ means physical energies, energies of my body. This is not just an intellectual thing, not just emotional, not just spiritual in some platonic sense, but it’s me as a person. I have to love God with all that I am, because there’s only one God, and I need to love him with my heart.
Again, that’s not just the emotions. That’s the religious center of my being, the place where my values are written, where I stand before absolutes and bow, where I say, “This is what’s true and right, and I will not be moved from it,” that part. The I that says me. With that I am to love God, and nothing else is to intrude there. I can’t serve two masters or worship two or three different gods.
That said, “And these words, which I command thee this day” – God speaks to us in words. He does not say, “This word which I command you,” although that would be true enough, but he says words. He’s talking grammatically. There are specific nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, interjections, and conjunctions that God weaves together through the normal syntax and grammar that is Hebrew, and later on Greek, to communicate to us what Schaeffer would call “true truth” – that is, God means something and he effectively communicates it through words, the way we do to one another, except that he gets it right. He doesn’t screw it up.
Because of his overseeing providence, he doesn’t lose anything literally in translation, let alone in just transmission or transition from one person to another, so we know what he says and the words mean true things. It’s not God-talk or nonsense words. It’s not Jabberwock. It’s not connotation words, as we were talking about earlier. These words actually mean something, so we are to put the words together the way he gave them to us, and compare the words, compare the sentences, the prepositions.
He says, “These words which I command you this day.” These words were given at a particular time in Earth’s history under particular historical conditions, and they speak to us now in particular historical conditions, and so with all of scripture.
We need to say, “Who is writing this? When did they live? On what continent? In what country? Under what ruler? What’s he talking about? Who’s his audience?” When he says this thing was a cubit long, do we know what a cubit is? Well, that’s how long it was. When he says six days, he means six days. He’s writing in terms of a historical framework and he expects us to understand that.
“These words which I command you this day shall be in thine heart” – we talked about that – “and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.” Again it’s not haphazard, like we communicate this somehow along the way by accident.
Yeah, using words as we go. “How about these pictures? Won’t this..?” No, because we’re talking about words. Now, if your kid has never seen a sheep, fine, draw a sheep, but better yet go find one and say, “Sheep.”
“Teach them diligently to your children,” first of all, “and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up.” The point is, at all times – when you get up, when you go to bed at night, when you’re walking along the way to the store or to the pasture or wherever you’re going with your kids. It’s not just in some specialized religious setting where you do this, or even some special educational setting. This is going to be an ongoing all-the-time kind of thing.
My wife was great with this when our girls were little. She would just take them outside and they’d come upon a rose and she’d say, “Oh, look at this beautiful rose that God made for us.” Some people might think, “Well, no, that’s over the top.”
Yeah, “You’re so contrived.” No, God actually did make it and he actually did put it there, and one of the primary reasons he put it there was for us . . . So we’re part of the audience and there’s nothing contrived about it. You’re getting your kids to understand. This is our Father’s world, and that’s one of the implications of this. You’re not having to get religious. “Child, be still and wonder at the power of our Sovereign God in making this rose for us here and now. Bless the rose, my child.” No, you just say, “Oh, what a pretty rose that God made for us.”
One of the real things that’s really bad about Christian schoolteachers and Sunday School teachers and pastors and sometimes parents is that “holy voice” you take on when you start talking about the things of the Lord. You sound sort of like Vincent Price from a horror movie. Just use ordinary language. You should be able to shift in and out of talking about God with talking about anything – plumbing, or your cat needing to be neutered, or the papaya pills I see on my desk, or old friendships or old memories.
He made it all, and it’s all part of what he has for us to do here, from dominion over the lesser creatures, to taking care of our health with papaya, to one another-ing each other, as Paul tells us. All of those things have direct roots back to scripture almost immediately, and our kids need to understand this.
When Christianity is something that only happens at church, even if you multiply church hours so that you’re in church every night for three hours, they still get the idea that church or Christianity is one thing and ordinary life is something else, and that’s exactly what this is not saying. The Word of God oversees and informs everything. We can always talk about it, without stretching, without having to reach for it.
“And thou shall bind them for a sign upon thine hand. They shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.” The Pharisees took this literally. They designed the little phylacteries, little leather pouches they hung across their foreheads and upon their hands, with little specific pieces of scripture in it.
Jesus talked about the phylacteries. He didn’t say there was anything wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with putting Bible verses up all over the place or even plastering them on your car if you feel like it, I guess, but that in itself does not make you holier, although it may give you more chances to see the Word of God and be reminded of it, but that’s superficial.
What Jesus complained about was when they made their phylacteries super large, to practically bonk people as you bounce around with them, but that’s not what he’s talking about. He used the same language earlier with regard to Passover. You don’t wear a feast on your head or on your hand. He’s talking about what’s before your eyes and in your head.
What’s in the front of your mind, and what your hands are doing. When we get to the book of Revelation, chapter 13, we see that the Beast marks his followers with a mark on their hand. He wants to control the doings. It’s Satan’s version of this.
I’m glad you brought that up because I was sitting on that like, “I don’t know who I heard that from, but there’s a connection.”
It’s super fun if you ever have an hour that you don’t know what to do with, to get Strong’s Concordance and look up all the instances of foreheads in the Bible, the word ‘forehead,’ and you will learn so much about the nature of allegiance and loyalty. It’s a pretty neat random thing to do.
On the priest’s forehead was the plaque that says, “Holiness to the Lord.” On Adam’s forehead was sweat, a sign of the curse. On Jesus’ forehead was blood from the crown. Yes, many things that mark our foreheads, that mark the front of our thinking, as you said.
The Shema ends with, “Thou shall write them upon the posts of thy house and on thy gates.” That comes later. It comes at the end and it’s easy to forget it. It’s not where the emphasis falls. But the posts of your house means it marks all of family life.
I say this someplace, that covenantal Christianity or having a Christian home doesn’t just mean you have a home where Christians live, where they live out their own private devotional live, just me and God, thank you very much. But it is a community where we sharpen one another, help one another, bless one another, encourage one another, love one another. It is again a community project, and the house should have some kind of focus, and every house should have its own because we’re all different. The ultimate goal is the glory of God.
Then lastly “upon the gates” – the gates of the city. We get there last. Some Christians are in a hurry to get there first. “Let’s make all kinds of good biblical laws.” There’s nothing wrong with good biblical laws as such, but that’s never the emphasis of scripture. We start by reaching the hearts of people.
Yes, if some of them are kings and legislators that’s wonderful, or Supreme Court justices or presidents of the United States. But from the bottom to the top, from the inside to the outside, that’s the biblical model. We start with our own hearts, and then to our kids and to our homes and to our cities and communities, our neighborhood, because that’s within our reach.
Most of us don’t have the ability to go to Washington and help hold a Bible study or evangelism service for 50 senators or a couple hundred representatives or half a dozen Supreme Court judges, let alone can we reach into their hearts and write God’s law there. The Holy Spirit has to do that. And yet the law of God and the whole revelation of God in Christ does have social and civil and political and judicial application.
To call upon Jordan Peterson again, he always says, “Don’t underestimate yourself as the center of a network.” Center frame of reference we can talk about, but you know 1,000 people almost certainly. Those 1,000 people each know 1,000 people, so if the Spirit of God is working in you, he can absolutely work through you in 1,000 people.
Which is kind of the philosophy behind this podcast. We’re thankful for anyone that God lets us reach, but at least one of my hopes is that they’ll tell a friend, and they’ll tell a friend, and then they’ll tell a friend.
They don’t even have to point back to the podcast, but as people make the Word of God the center of their life, and we help a little bit along the way, then we hope that the seed we sow here will have profound effects eventually. It may be echoes of echoes of echoes, and no one may ever trace it back to us but God himself, but if we were allowed to be used then we thank God.
To also point it back to Jordan Peterson, in Christian circles – let’s blame it on the Second Great Awakening, because why not – everyone thinks, “Let’s go out and do something big, and that will change the world.” Maybe subconsciously there’s a little “and God will be happy with me because I did that for him.” But even with that, there’s the idea that you need to go out and do something big, because that’s the only way that there’s any hope.
First, you’re not that important. Second of all, he always says people want to go out and they want to change the world. They want to do something big. They want to change society or institute communism, and presumably in their own minds they want to be in charge of that. They want to have some kind of role, but they haven’t even cleaned their own room.
You need to start where you’re at and have an effect on where you’re at, before you can even move to your immediate location and your connections.
Right. “And these words which I command you this day shall be in thine heart.” It starts with each of us, and that’s uncomfortable.
And when something of the heart and the breath in the lungs is a gift from God, everything that flows out – we would be so incredibly arrogant to say, “Oh yeah, that was me.”
“But we did miracles and cast out demons in your name. We did cool stuff for you.”
“Rejoice not in this, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven,” which is sovereign grace.
We should wrap up there. We’re not doing recommendations today. Say it with me, “Awwww.” Instead we have some housekeeping details to let our listeners know about.
We are taking a little bit of a break in the next few months, but we’ll be back soon and we’re not going to leave you hanging. We’re going to release biweekly episodes, instead of every single week, until July and then we’ll be back. We just finished the series on Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy just finished the series on the Torah. We will be back with the former prophets. Is that what we’re calling the next book?
Right, so that will be in July, and we’ll be back to every single week at that point, Lord willing.
So since we’re taking a break between Deuteronomy and Joshua, this is a great time to send us emails with questions. We’re going to have a few special episodes. We’re not going to leave you with nothing, so this is a great time to send us emails with any questions you have.
I’ll put a post up on our Facebook page as well, so if you’re not listening to this in real-time, if you’re catching up on old episodes, you can still know that this is a great time to send us questions about those old episodes. You can have questions about anything we’ve said, or things we’ve left unsaid, or things you think we should say. Just send us a lot of emails. We’ll have a mailbag episode or two.
I think I have persuaded David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, to actually host one of the special episodes, which will be exciting.
Yeah, invite your friends to listen. Another way to share our podcast is on Facebook. You can Like our Facebook page. Leave us a review. We currently have zero reviews on Facebook. We’ve got several 5-star reviews on podcast catchers, which is great, keep that up. We appreciate that, but you can also leave us a review on Facebook. That would be fun.
I didn’t tell you where to send the emails. I’m sorry. I’m droning on forever and ever, but I have to tell you where to send the emails. That’s [email protected].