(Excerpts from: Education: Why are we doing what we are doing?)
Education: Why Are We Doing What We’re Doing? – Deut. 6
Introduction – When we think of the time, money, and the multitude of sacrifices we are making to bring up our children in the “training and admonition of the Lord,” it behooves us to regularly remind ourselves why we are doing this.
Education and Deuteronomy 6 – As a people were brought out of slavery and set in a land flowing with milk and honey, Yahweh warned and instructed these free people, that they must pass it on faithfully to the next generations. He was not instructing about Sunday worship only, or what you believe in your own private heart; He was instructing them to observe all His commands in the land all the days of their lives (vv1-3).
Deuteronomy 6.1: Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: 2: That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. 3: Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey.
The Greatest Commandment (6:4-7a) – In this chapter we find what Jesus called the greatest commandment which, with the second, summed up all the law and prophets. Central to the giving of that commandment was the command to “teach them (all these words) diligently to you children.”
Deuteronomy 6.4: Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 5: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6: And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
Paul picks up on this in Eph 6:4 where the responsibility for the (raising) of children falls squarely upon the shoulders of fathers.
Ephesians 6.4: And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
And neither passage has a truncated Sunday school curriculum in mind.
And These Words (6:6-9) – Education is the most religious thing we do with our children; education can never be religiously neutral.
What Yahweh teaches is to affect our home life, our work life, from the beginning to the end of our day (v7). It is to deeply affect the way we see and understand everything we perceive and consider, and it is to come out in the way we handle all we control (v8). This education is to train our children in familial and civil governance as well (v9). What we can see is that a biblical worldview is to inculcate every area of study.
Hard Work – To teachers, parents, and to students, it is important to make clear that this is a vocation, a calling, to a people, and to individuals in their different stations of life; it comes directly from our Triune God. Hearing this does not make it easier; this is hard work – but it does remind you that it is worth it.