All children are born believing in the one true Living God. This is what Paul tells us in Romans 1: 18—20:
“For even though they (all men) knew God, they did not honour Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools”.God has made it plain to all men, and especially to children, that He exists—and the evidence and testimony to this is found in what has been made. In other words, the creation itself clearly displays the attributes, power, and glory of God. Children appear to see this far more clearly than adults.
But as children ordinarily grow and mature in an Unbelieving environment, they lose this clarity of understanding. As the Bible says, progressively their “foolish hearts” become darkened. How does this happen? Children lose their clear belief in God's power and glory through conditioning. They are gradually taught not to believe. Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind “claims that his research shows that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.
He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God.”
Where and how are children taught not-to-believe in God? One of the most powerful agents is the state secular school system. Its entire existence is devoted to the proposition that there is a “natural” explanation for everything. Its fundamental presupposition is that the God Who has revealed Himself in the Bible does not exist, and that other explanations for reality must be found.
Children of Christian parents are taught the truth about God at home—that He is the Creator of all things and that He is to be loved, feared, and worshiped. This teaching co-incides with the natural dispositions and instinctive beliefs with which our children are born. Unfortunately, if those same Christian parents send their children to the local state secular school, they are placing their children in grave spiritual danger. Every moment in the classroom their children will be taught by commission and subtle omission that there is another, alternative “explanation” for the world.
Of course the naturalist explanation and account for the world is false. It is the satanic version of reality. And Satan has been a liar from the beginning. Our Lord called him the Father of Lies. But this view of the world, taught in the state secular school from morning until night, is reinforced by the mass media, by television, by DVD's, by video games, by the Internet, by sports stars, by celebrities, by politicians and public leaders. They all line up as a comprehensive chorus to say to our children that what they learn in school is the right view, and that what their parents believe is silly, really—a quaint vestige of an ignorant former age.
In other words, our modern society has pervasively organised itself to be a propagandist for Unbelief. The Bible tells us that by a multitude of witnesses every fact shall be confirmed. When two or three agree, their case becomes more psychologically powerful. We live in a world where Unbelief has witnesses on every hand—a vast multitude of them—all agreeing that God is false, a silly idea, and that Man can determine these things for himself. The sheer pervasiveness of the propaganda makes it spiritually and intellectually powerful and compelling. It has many witnesses indeed.
But, sadly, when Christian parents send their children to state secular schools they themselves risk becoming a most powerful witness for Unbelief in the minds of their children. By sending their children to be taught by Unbelief, according to its tenets, they are giving credence and respectability to it. Because their children love and respect their parents, and because their children know they must honour their father and mother, they enter the state secular school knowing they must respect and fear and honour what they are taught and how they are taught. Children know that the school stands in loco parentis—in the place of their parents. Because their parents have blessed the state secular school it must likewise be accepted and respected by the children. Inadvertently, parents have become the strongest witness for Unbelief in the hearts of their children—something which they never intended.
The warning of our Lord is clear: “whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it is better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matthew 18: 6).
Our children are born believing in God. He has graciously ordained that our beloved children are born into Christian families, where they are in covenant with the Lord. He commands that every day, and in every way, their natural belief in Him is to be strengthened, reinforced, ratified, nurtured, and encouraged—for that is the greatest privilege of being born in a Christian home. Our children are to be constantly under the means of this grace.
Why, then, would we Christian parents send our children to sit under the cold showers of Unbelief, made all the more powerful by our implicit endorsement of it to our children?
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