Seeing the World Satan's Way--or Not
Christian parents have a choice to make: they can either send their children to the local secular state school (largely free of charge), or they can arrange Christian schooling for their children (usually at considerable cost). What does God require of us? This is a key issue which must be faced and answered.
Some Christian parents may think that this question is simply a matter of personal choice—like whether I would prefer a grey or a green coloured car. In the end there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the colours grey or green, since colours are part of God's created order. In other words, what God has created, let not man despise. Maybe the issue of where we decide to send our child to school is like this. All potential choices are equally valid.
In this mistaken view, it is proposed that the issue of how your child will be educated is a matter of your personal taste, preference, and free-choice. Since secular state schools exist, they must have been ordained by God, and what God has ordained, let not man despise, right? Hold on. What would you think if a Christian said something like as follows: “whether I utilize the services of a brothel or not is a matter of personal choice, since clearly they exist as part of the natural order, and must therefore be ordained by God. What God has created, let not man despise.”
No, no, no—a thousand times no, would be our immediate response. Brothels clearly exist but they are intrinsically sinful institutions. Their very existence is for the purpose and intent of breaking God's law. So, because of man's sin and evil, some things exist in this world which ought not to be, and with which Christians must have nothing to do.
But are secular state schools like brothels? Are they intrinsically evil in the same way that a brothel is intrinsically wicked? Clearly schools themselves are not intrinsically evil. Imagine if our first parents had never disobeyed God and fallen into sin. In the perfect world as created by God millions upon millions of children would have be born to faithful, sinless parents. The children would have needed to be taught because bearing and raising children to maturity was an intrinsic part of the Creation order before the Fall. The emergence of schools would have been an inevitable and holy outcome. Moreover, all the education in homes, schools, and the wider community before the Fall would have been a constant indoctrination and instruction in the commandments and love of God. All of the created world would have been investigated and studied truthfully: that is, as it really is—created out of nothing, by the Word of God, and utterly subject to His commands and Holy Word. Every subject and discipline would have been taught this way.
But there are some God-ordained institutions that came into existence after the Fall that were made necessary because of human sinfulness. For example, police forces. Institutions to apprehend criminals and bring them to justice are clearly ordained by God after the Fall as part of the civil magistracy. Can we argue that modern secular state schools fall into this category: that is, whilst they would never have existed before the Fall, God has ordained their existence after the Fall and therefore it is entirely appropriate for Christians to use their services, in the same way that it is perfectly right to utilise the services of the police and to support them?
We believe that this is the strongest case that a Christian could make for using secular state schools to educate their children. But is this case defensible biblically?
In the first place, let's remember that our secular state schools are forbidden by law to acknowledge, honour, and proclaim the Living God and His Christ. Therefore, from the outset, secular state schools must either deny God's existence outright or, at least, must operate on the premise that God is irrelevant to the world. At best, secular state schools say nothing about God—either good or bad. At best secular state schools are agnostic--and every subject is taught according to the dictates and tenets of agnosticism. By the law of the land state schools must ignore Him and exclude Him from the creation.
But, by God's standard, to ignore God is not only untruthful, it is a false religion. It is the essence of sin and unbelief. Did not the Serpent in the Garden bring sin into the world and entice Adam to rebellion by getting firstly Eve, then Adam to think about possibilities outside of God and beyond God? ("Has God said . . .?") Secular state schools exist to propagate exactly this same premise—the premise that the original satanic view of the world is the right one.
Secondly, when Christian parents choose to send their children to such schools they are not just exposing their children to a world-view and religion that views the creation in a God-denying, false way. They are deciding to have their children instructed in that view. Now granted, particularly in the earliest years of schooling, this is unlikely to be in an overt, in-your-face kind of way, but its subtlety makes it more satanic, not less. It makes it more damaging.
Thirdly, and still more seriously, by sending their children to the secular state schools, Christian parents are requiring their children not only to be instructed in unbelief, but to subject themselves to such instruction. They are requiring of their children not only that they learn about such a false world-view, but that they actually submit to such teachers and such schooling. Is not this a huge stumbling block to their little ones? On Sunday the parents take their children to worship where they hear that the God whom they worship is the Almighty, the Maker of all things. Then for the next five days of the week these same parents send their children to a school where they are taught and instructed, via omission and ignoring Him, that the God Whom their parents worship is comprehensively irrelevant to the world. And the longer they spend at the secular state schools, the assertion that God is irrelevant to man and the world becomes more and more overt and less subtle. But, reasons the child, it must be all right, because my parents have ordained it for me and require me to be subject to it.
Is not the warning of our Lord—woe to those who cause these little ones to stumble—relevant to parents who would inflict such an inconsistent, schizophrenic situation upon their children? We can think of few things more destructive to our children's faith in God—not just that they are exposed to Unbelief and an Unbeliever's false view of the world, but that their parents require them to be instructed in it, and by it, and be subject to it, for the greater part of their young lives.
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