This session is entitled Do Not Learn the Way of the Gentiles, What the Bible Says About Education. This is one of the most important subjects in all of life. We spend so much time in educational situations that we really should think about what we're doing. Wouldn't you think that if there's something that you spend such a massive amount of time in, that you would think through why you're doing it, what you're doing, and where you're doing it, and everything like that? Well, unfortunately, we just don't typically naturally think about that.

We really think about what we have been taught to do all of our lives. There are many explicit statements in Holy Scripture that tell us what is the heart of God on this matter. And as it is with every area of life, we should be saying, oh Lord, help me to be a living picture of this philosophy of education that you have cast before me. Oh Lord, help me to find every way that I can apply it. Help me to put it into practice in all the different categories with all the different issues that you've set before me.

This is a question that we must ask. What sayeth the Lord on this? And then we should respond after we learn with this, oh Lord, your law is precious to me. Your law makes me wiser than all those around me. Now, are any of my notions or traditions regarding education at war against the explicit commands of God?

That's a really important question. Here's another one. Are any of the traditions of my culture at war at the explicit commands of God regarding education. And then of course, how must I be saved from any ungodly practices that have wound their way into my thinking process. And so we're going to speak about a number of passages of Scripture that will help us form a biblical philosophy of education.

This is where we're headed here, just so you can get a picture of it. We're going to first talk about a biblical view of education. We're going to speak about the landscape of Education of today's church. We're gonna talk about how we got where we are today. We're gonna talk about the results, and then we're gonna talk about a remedy.

So let's first of all talk about a biblical view of education. The Bible does speak explicitly about education, and it would take quite a while for us to go through the passages of Scripture. I'm going to pound away at them as quickly as I can, just to give us a vision for them, to help us think this way. And honestly, I would just like to challenge all of us here in this room to develop a biblical theology of education. The Bible speaks a lot about education.

The first recorded conflict in the Bible was a conflict over education. Who would have authority? Whose words would be believed? Who would be trusted? The serpent was contending for who would rule over the marketplace of ideas.

And he came to Eve and said, has God indeed said you shall not eat every tree of the garden? And this was a battle for education. Who will rule the airwaves of education? And it's a very, very important question. What has God commanded in Scripture regarding education?

And we actually live in a in a culture where people do not think they have much responsibility for the education of their children. People do not even think, what sayeth the scriptures about this? Many people do not ever even look at their Bibles to help them think through the problems and the issues. Now, the first thing that we would say is that the goal of education is the glory of God as is everything. What I'd like to do is talk about what is a biblical view of education.

Now there are a number of passages we could use. I want to use Deuteronomy 6 as kind of a jump off point. Deuteronomy 6 seems to sum up lots of the things that we find throughout scripture on this subject. Deuteronomy 6 goes like this. Now this is the commandment and these are the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command you today, you your son and your grandson all the day of your life, that your days may be prolonged.

Therefore, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised, A land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your hearts and you shall teach them diligently to your children you shall talk of them when you sit in your house when you walk by the way when you lie down and when you rise up you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." This passage of Scripture gives you the who, what, where, when and why of education and it really does correlate and it's very consistent with with many passages of scripture regarding education. It speaks of the who.

Who is the kingpin in education, and that is the father. Fathers are given the primary responsibility for the teaching of children. Now you might ask, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense to me. And I would just like to throw out to you again the thing that Doug Phillips is famous for throwing out and that is Desert Island Challenge. If you're stuck on a desert island and all you had was the Bible, how would you live your life?

How would you conduct your education life, how would you conduct your family life, if all you had was this book. And of course, we're so advocating this kind of life, because if you don't live that way, you'll just live any old way. And so, who is the primary personality? It is the father. God is given the delivery of education primarily to parents, at least the education of children.

And he holds parents accountable, Not the school district, not the schoolmaster. He places this responsibility in the hands of parents, primarily. Psalm 78 says the same thing. He established a testimony in Jacob. He appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded the fathers that they should make them known to their children, that the generation to come might know them.

There's a law in Israel that fathers should teach their children. That's a law of education, and it's the first law of education. The Bible casts a vision for parental instruction, and the responsibility for education of children is primarily a family responsibility. We could talk about the responsibilities of elders and teachers in the church to teach our children, but the commands for teaching of children specifically are given to parents. And that's the overwhelming testimony of scripture.

The emphasis is there, and we should say, oh Lord, since this emphasis is so clear, what must I do about that? How do I put this into practice? And so the key issue in the entire discussion is simply this, shall the parent or the state be the overseer of the child? Shall the parent or the Sunday school be the teacher of the children? The Bible places the responsibility in the hands of parents.

We could talk about the location of education. The location of education here in this passage is the home and everywhere else. The home is the hub of education in Scripture. It's the physical place of teaching, and it's identified by language all over Scripture. The teacher is important as well.

The character, the nature of the teacher is very important. In Deuteronomy 6, the teacher loves the Lord his God with all his heart and soul and strength. And these commands of God are in the heart. They're not just intellectual categories. They are passions delivered from God into the heart and then passed on to children.

And the heart of the teacher, the character of the teacher is critical. Patterning occurs with teachers. Jesus said that a student, when he's well taught, is like his teacher. The teacher is really important. I'm one of those people who reads this book and I just conclude it's a sin for Christian parents to send their children to be educated by pagans, to be educated by the wicked.

Christian parents are not allowed to send their children away to be taught to be pagans with pagan hearts. As we walk through some of these passages, you'll see how explicit and clear the commands of God for education really are. The heart of the character of the teacher is very critical. JC McCauley, 1879, wrote this. All who either give or receive a secular education are committing sin, not performing duty, because without faith it is impossible to please God and whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

God's plan for teaching children is not first to train them by secular, unbelieving teachers to be the sons of Belial and then by retentious teachers be sons of God. It is not his plan to first provide secular and then Christian teachers, but to provide Christian teachers only. Psalm 4-3, But to know the Lord has set apart him that is godly in himself. Christ himself has appointed all the teachers, Both of the present and the past dispensations. He said to his apostles, go and teach the nations.

None need to be taught more than the nations for all the gods are idols, dumb and blind. They walk not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind having their understanding darkened. But Christ never gave such power or authority to an ungodly or unbelieving state or any unbelieving secular teachers. That all the attainments ever can be made by unbelieving states and their unbelieving secular teachers is to make attainments in doing evil." And then he says, but these are carnally, carnal and worldly minded teachers that have nothing to recommend them, but their so-called morality, no fear of God or regard to no man of faith, and no repentance and no love, no obedience. They're not the salt of the earth and they're not the light of the world.

Well, that's my opinion as well. Personality and the character and the heart of the teacher is critical in the biblical scheme. Then there's the manner of teaching. You shall teach them diligently. The educational process should be vigorous.

It should be structured. It should be well thought out. It should have substance to it and stretching forth. We could talk about the content of the teaching. Now the content of the teaching is where the weight of Scripture is.

There are just dozens and dozens of passages that explicitly communicate what the content of the teaching of the sons and the daughters of Zion should be. It should be biblical content. Scripture teaches that the education of children should be thoroughly biblical and that everything should be interpreted through the lens of Scripture. And it is content that must be connected to godliness. In Deuteronomy 6, it's the commands and the statutes and the judgments of the Lord.

This is the primary content of education from a Christian perspective. The commands and the judgments of the Lord. And it's this godly content that is critical. We live in a world where godliness has been divorced from education. The focus of education from a biblical standpoint, though, is character, not geometry, not grades, not curves, not tests at all.

The scriptures cast a vision for education that really has its focus on character. The training, the pidea of the Lord is not academic in nature. God's definition for education has its focus on character, not just stuffing facts into the head. You just can't find that model of education that most of us grew up in in the Bible. It's just completely foreign to it.

When you have education that's separated from character and education that's separated from life, you have a sinful practice and you have a nightmare. The Bible repudiates separation of facts from character. And it is, they are the commands and the statutes of the Lord. It's interesting how easily we separate theology from character, how easily we set religious studies or theological studies from application. Think of how, for so many people, seminary, their seminary experience was a very sterile experience.

It was sterile because it was divorced from application. It was divorced from real life. You sat in there like Cabbage has in a classroom and getting stuff poured into your head and you walked out not a different person at all. It was not applied. It was learned for tests.

Now, of course, everybody doesn't do that. The format really breeds that kind of sterility. You know, in most seminaries, the focus is not the character of the man or the application. It's the facts and the head of the man. How many seminary professors have the kind of relationship that Christ had with his disciples where he went to Peter and he said, do you love me?

You know, we've gotten so used to this fact-based education experience that we've really lost a lot of the heart of God regarding what education is all about. And it's about character, it's about the development of love. And of course the Lord Jesus knew that and that's the way He lived. It should be in sharp contrast to the way of the Gentiles. Jeremiah 10, one through three.

Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Israel. Do not learn the way of the Gentiles. Now, I don't know how you're going to apply that in your life. I know how I'm going to apply it in my life. But this verse should stun us regarding the things that we learn, the things that we pursue and seek, the things that we put into our heads.

Do not learn the way of the Gentiles. I don't know how to make it any more plain than that. It should reject ungodly content. In Psalm 1, 1-6, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord." And in his law, he meditates day and night, and he makes this contrast between the godly and the ungodly. Education should find its way away from the counsel of the ungodly.

We could go to 2 Corinthians 6, 14 through 19, where the apostle Paul is speaking, and he says, what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God, as God has said, I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God and they will be my people. Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean and I will receive you.

I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Almighty." The problem with us is that we actually desire to learn about Belial. We desire to see the things of darkness. And this is why Paul said in the same passage, he says, Oh Corinthians, you're not restrained by us. You're restrained by your own affections. That was their problem.

We could go to Corinthians 2, 5 and 6 and learn that education should be trafficking in spiritual wisdom, not the wisdom of men. Paul says that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. We could go to 2 Peter 1, where we learn that Christian education should traffic in knowledge surrounded by the practical applications of love. For this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge and knowledge self-control. Do you see this mixing?

There's knowledge and there's self-control. This is how the Bible has it. Knowledge and taking tests. No, no, no, that's not what it says at all. Knowledge, self-control.

Self-control, perseverance. Perseverance, godliness. This is a category of knowledge. What does the Bible say about knowledge? Well, knowledge doesn't stand alone.

It ought to be infused with moral categories. We could go to Colossians 2.8 and learn that our education should avoid deceitful and cheating philosophy. Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the basic principles of this world, and not according to Christ." He's talking about instruction, thoughts, that come not from Christ at all. They don't come from the head of the church. They come from somewhere else.

We could look at 2 Corinthians 10, how Christian education should cast down every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. We could speak about how important it is in education that we grow in maturity and remove foolishness. Proverbs 22, 15 says that parents have a duty before God to train and discipline their children through the consistent use of the rod and reproof. Yeah, the rod is actually an educational tool of God. It is designed to instruct and to drive foolishness that is bound up into the heart of a child.

We learn from the Bible that it should build hope in God. Psalm 78 makes that very clear that our education would bring about the result of hope in God. You know, what kind of results are we looking for in our education? God desires that his education would result in hope in God. You know, you can be a C student and have hope in God and leap tall buildings with a single bound.

And God's wisdom for us is so much greater than our own. It should flourish the proclamation of the truth in Deuteronomy 8. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." In other words, the law of God, the word of God, the things that we learned, this educational life should also turn us into communicators of it. We make visible displays of the beauty of the commands of God.

They're part of us. We don't put them away from us, we don't hide them. We're not Secret Service Christians, but we bind them as signs. It should involve lifelong teaching. In Deuteronomy 6, the teaching goes on all the days of your life.

Education doesn't end at age 18. Education doesn't end when you get your master's degree. In the Bible, there's no end to education. The grave is the end to education in Scripture. But we have this strange system where we're graduating people and we're saying, you've arrived, you've arrived, you've arrived.

Is that really an accurate reflection? No, we never arrive, and we never should stop. We should constantly be filling up our minds with the knowledge of his will all the days of our lives. You know, education should be continuing education. Paul says to Timothy, but you must continue in the things that you have learned, that's an educational term, learned, and have been assured of knowing from whom you have learned them and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures.

This is a passage about education. If you want to develop a biblical theology of education, just punch into your computer, learning, knowledge, taught, things like that. You'll see a rich testimony of what God says. Then there's the role of discipline in education. And He who spares the rod hates his son.

There is the relationships involved in education. Ephesians 6, four, and you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord. All parents are tempted to wrath in the educational process. What do they do? Well, they have to mark that sin.

Who hasn't sinned in this? But the educational process presents challenges to us. So these are just some passages of Scripture. I just want to challenge you. Develop a biblical theology of education.

Go from Genesis to Revelation and be able to explain from Scripture what the Bible says about it explicitly. And then take those explicit statements and say, oh Lord, help me to be a beautiful picture of all these things that have been said here. Okay, so that's the biblical view of education. Let's talk briefly about the landscape of education in today's church. The landscape of education in today's church is like this.

The parents are removed from the process. There is age segregation. Things are totally foreign to the Bible. Knowledge is generally not character-based. Definitely in the government school system, they want to suck character out of it in some ways.

It's state-controlled. There is an exaltation of information and a devastation of the fear of the Lord, at least in our public state systems. There's instruction in worldly philosophy. And unfortunately, this is the dominant philosophy that undergirds what we do in the church. Of course, the church is not state controlled, but it's definitely not parent driven and it doesn't happen much in the home.

Children in most churches are almost comprehensively separated from their parents in the church. And so, as we were just speaking about in the last session, there are these age-graded, parental, absent educational systems that are running our churches. This is just a dominant philosophy that we've all been subjected to in the age that we live in. These ruling philosophies have come from specific roots that are very easy to discern. You can learn this by googling the subject.

Honestly, it doesn't take an educational scientist to figure out the roots of our modern education system. It's at least Greco-Roman, where there was age segregation, state controlled, education that featured the removal of parents. The goal of the Greek system was to remove children from their parents from infancy and give them over to experts. So how did we get where we are today? Let's talk about that a little bit.

There are three factors that I'm going to outline that have led us to the modern age graded educational system in the church. These forces came to fruition at kind of nearly the same time and they wedded their secular discipleship methodologies to church practices, and it's been about 150 year-long marriage. And the results we're going to say have been worsening and worsening as the years pass. So here they are. Unscriptural philosophies that undergird the public education system have been incorporated into church life.

Number two, the rise of the Sunday school movement that morphed and transformed into the child training tool inside the church has gained its grip. And then we've had changing views of maturity and capability in time that have crept into our thinking about the education of our children. These three have worked in harmony in the modern expressions of our view of education, particularly in our modern Sunday school system. Now let's just talk for a moment about where did we get where we are today. I would just like to talk about the history of the public education system for a moment here.

This age segregated theory of education is like my friend Doug Phillips likes to say, is from the pit of hell. We're not saying that Sunday schools are from the pit of hell. We're not saying that Sunday school teachers are from the pit of hell. We're not saying that the motivations of we who have operated Sunday school systems are from the pit of hell. That's not what we're saying.

We're saying that the structure and the philosophy is from the pit of hell. That's what we're saying. And we've adopted it. The personalities of our modern system are ancient Greek through Plato. They're postmodern French with Rousseau, they're Darwinian evolutionism with Dewey.

They feature the separation of parents from their children. Now this philosophy was popularized by French postmodernists and American educational theorists, and it was based on the idea that parents should be absent from the educational process. And it was based on the idea that parents were not qualified to teach their children, and that they should be removed, and the knowledge of the past should be wiped out and the new superior understanding should be brought in. And that's the these are just the philosophical roots of from where we have come. Educational revolutionaries of the 18th and the 19th and the 20th centuries brought in unscriptural philosophies and practices.

Perhaps we should just go to Rousseau and speak about him for a moment. Rousseau lived from 1712 to 1778, and he's known as the father of modern education. He became the father of the modern education movement through a book that he wrote called Emil. Emil was about how to educate a child, how to draw, the importance of drawing a child away from her parents and setting them free morally and letting them discover on their own their moral boundaries and then giving that job to the state. Twenty years before Rousseau wrote Emile, his live-in girlfriend gave birth and they immediately took that child and dumped it off in the footsteps of an orphanage.

He did this with his five children. Rousseau was a God-hater. Rousseau was a monster. And from his theories of child education we have progressed. He threw off the authority of God in every area of life and became a role model for the fathers of the modern educational philosophy.

This is the man who conceived of the system that took over the Western world. We just need to understand that Rousseau did this for epistemological reasons. He did this because of his theory of knowledge and truth. He was a God-hater. He was a reprobate in every way.

He hated children. He hated fatherhood. And he conceived of this system. Horace Mann picked up his philosophies and began to be a strong advocate of the same ideas, combining the exaltation of child removal, state mandated system, taking John Locke's view of children, that they're a blank slate, you just start with them and put anything in them you want. These were the philosophies that ended up destroying a biblical philosophy of education in Western civilization.

This marked the beginning of government enforced schooling in America. And the result was the revolutionizing of the school system of Massachusetts, which spread to every school system in America. Then we had G. Stanley Hall, 1844 to 1924. Hall was a psychologist and educationalist.

He pioneered the American psychology movement, and he adopted and promoted the Darwinian recapitulation theory, applied it to education. He was influenced by Charles Darwin, who was an evolutionist, and he took on Ernst Haeckel's famous notion that Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And he stated that education should follow the evolutionary process, that we go from one stage to the next. But you have to isolate each stage. This is how we got our age segregated system.

We got it from the idea that a four-year-old is in a certain stage. Keep them there with other four-year-olds. And then there are these other stages that work on, and it was based on false drawings of human development and all kinds of things like that. Just some really interesting things that happened. John D.

Rockefeller financed this educational philosophy, spent more money on John Dewey than did the American government in their entire educational program. And so this thing spread like wildfire throughout the educational systems. Dewey's beliefs? There is no God, there is no supernatural. The only reality is scientific data.

The only good is love of society. Dewey was one of the 34 signers of the Humanist Manifesto. Man is the center of the universe. Heaven and hell are imaginary. Absolute values are abolished.

Right and wrong is situational. And they promoted the myth of neutrality that runs everything, that there is somehow this neutral, objective, fact-based system that is helpful for human beings. It's not helpful for human beings at all. It destroys the lives of human beings. When you take morality, when you take the law of God out of education, you have stripped it of all of its value.

So then, what happened? These revolutionaries had in common that they were profoundly influenced by a whole cadre of God haters. By the 50s, we began to see the development of adolescent subculture. We saw the rise of peer ministries, we saw the rise of peer music, peer literature, peer styles of dress, peer language. The movement developed into special courses for special ages.

And learn this and no more. Norms are established. If you fall behind, it's a calamity. You must have something wrong with you. Differences are put into the background and age is put into the foreground.

Generational influences are removed. The modern Evangelical Church just followed man and hall and Dewey right off the edge of the cliff. And now we have this massive educational system that is producing 50 or 60 percent literacy in America. You know when Thomas Jefferson in 1800 conducted the first comprehensive literacy study in America he sent out a Frenchman to go do the study. And this Frenchman came back, DuPont de Nemours, he came back and he reported that the literacy rate in America in 1800 was like 98.9% or something like that.

Why was it so high? It was so high, they found out, because fathers were opening up their Bibles and teaching their children to read by their Bibles. Now, while the evolutionary theorists were learning how to tell us that we should teach our children how to read with Dick and Jane books. See Dick run. Run, Jane, run.

And has worked for nothing but the stupidity of the American public. And that's why so few people can read. They can watch cool graphics, but they can't understand words, they can't understand concepts, they can't write. We're developing a populace that really doesn't understand categories, can't make arguments, can't even read, really. It's astounding.

The devil has done his duty quite nicely. Let's talk about the history of the Sunday School Movement. The history of the Sunday School Movement is really a very exciting, interesting study. Robert Rakeys is the father of the Sunday School movement. Sunday School programs were patterned after the stage development principles.

They carry the same philosophy. Give something that's on their level. Don't take the Bible and teach everybody to come up to this level. Give them something on their own level. Now, honestly, the Sunday School movement was an absolutely astounding development.

Robert Rakeys, while visiting the slum section in London, was distressed with the corruption of the children. He said, I must do something about it. And he created a program to educate children from the slums. This was the greatest lay movement since Pentecost, most people say. It just grew like wildfire.

After about 30 years, there were 1.2 million children, 25% of the population of England that were in the Sunday School movement. It's absolutely astounding what happened. And crime rates dropped in the slums. All kinds of really wonderful things happened as a result of this movement. The schedule was 10 to 5 on Sunday.

The children would come in at 10 in the morning and stay until 12 and then they would go home and return at 1 and they would have more lessons after 1. The teachers were paid. It was very difficult to hire and so they turned to intelligent and respectable women to do the teaching in the schools. General education was the cornerstone of the program. It just continued to grow.

They studied the Bible. The Sunday school was evangelistic. The criticisms, though, were pretty fierce. There were many in the church who said that it was a desecration of the Sabbath. There were many who rose up and said Christians should not be employed in the Sabbath to do this work.

So there were the Sabbatarian disputes in the 1790s and it led many Sunday schools to shut down. Robert Rakey's greatest opposition came straight from the church. Some called it an evil institution. Well what began as a social program morphed into a discipleship staple in the church. It was taken right over and we adopted the same principles and this is where we all went wrong with it.

We adopted something that was meant for one thing and turned it into something that it was never meant for in terms of the discipleship commands and principles in Scripture. We could talk about the results. We are losing the next generation. Worldly thinking has infiltrated the church. We have set aside the commands of God regarding education.

These systems that we've adopted are not biblical and they're also not helpful. There are just so many effects of this movement upon us today. The remedy, what's the remedy? The remedy is just a simple return to the biblical order in church and home. We should no longer mix Rousseau and Christ.

We should stop joining Christ and Dewey and Christ and Marx. We're asking if we can mix Christ and corporate management principles and educational philosophies that came from pagans and all kinds of other things that are contrary to scripture. And we're also asking to consider the explicit commands of God regarding education. Those explicit commands have to do with the content, the location, and the personalities who conduct that education for children. And Deuteronomy 6 does sum it up so clearly.

And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Let this evening be at least an appeal to think Christianly about education. Stop thinking worldly about education.

Visualize yourself on that desert island. What does God say? Who are the teachers? What do they teach? When do they teach?

Where do they teach it? And what are the rules and regulations of that instruction? Now, in order to find that we have to know our Bibles. We have to read this book. Look at what is there and say to Almighty God, Oh Lord, help me not to take these things lightly, but help me to take them heavily.

Help me Almighty God to keep myself from setting aside the commandment of God for the sake of my tradition. Would you pray with me? And now Lord you who have communicated to us with words and phrases through Holy Scripture, You who have made so many things very clear, full of explicit and beautiful statements, we realize how short we fall in all of your commandments. We plead for your mercy through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And Lord, as faithful and trustful creatures of yours, we pray that you would give us strength to trust you completely in everything that you have said that it may be well with us and that we may multiply greatly in the land which the Lord our God has promised.

Amen.