If 100 years from now, the Church can reflect upon the first quarter of the 21st century, it will only be because faithful Christian schools and homeschools were able to raise up a generation of Christian soldiers to hold back God’s judgment of man’s obliteration of Christian culture. The kingdom of darkness, made manifest in secular humanism, is dying and digging its own grave and the church must let the dead bury their own dead (Matthew 8:22). It would be a shame if the church turns a blind eye to the humanists who are, in their death throes, using their last bit of energy to snatch the living and drag them down to the grave with them.
If this weren’t bad enough, too many Christians and their educational establishments keep going back to humanism’s graveyard to collect the left-over relics and valuables that belong to that dead kingdom. It doesn’t matter if there are chapel and bible classes. Those things don’t erase the marks of death from the cadavers. Some of these “Christian” schools do not look to Christ as the foundation of their curriculum. They don’t see Jesus as King over their government, their economy, the sciences and the arts, or over any part of culture outside the walls of the church.
Instead of seeking true valuables from the Word of Life, they are building bigger barns to store more relics of the dead kingdom of secularism. With ornaments of humanist methods and text-books, they find their students haunted by the ghosts of death and nihilism. That kind of school can never produce a war-ready Christian soldier. Their students cannot rescue human culture from God’s covenantal judgment.
The cheap knick-knacks of humanism will never be able to give life. Only Christ does that for He came to save the world (John 3:16). We need our children and grandchildren to believe and live out this doctrine; the doctrine of coming of the Son of God into the world in order to save it. We need the Christian school. We need the Christian school so our children after us will believe this truth and defend it thoroughly. It is only then that we will be able to repair the ruins as we have been commanded.
Some object, “It’s the church’s business to declare the saving grace of God, not the school’s. The school’s responsibility is to teach kids how to read, write, solve math problems, learn the scientific method, and teach them history, art, and philosophy. The school can handle things outside the church’s domain. Time shouldn’t be wasted with it. Jesus has nothing to do with this culture anyway. The public school can handle the teaching about the past, the present, and the future of humanity, except for religion and we’ll take care of that in the church and the home.”
But the Apostle Paul says this in response, “Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself. That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10). Paul is saying that Jesus is the Savior and transformer of not only the church and the family, but of all of culture, all things in heaven and on earth. Sure, the family and the church can teach this about Christ, but they cannot adequately teach Christ as the transformer of culture with the length and breadth needed for the Christian to follow all of Christ in all of life. That’s where the Christian school comes in.
Too many Christians keep Christ’s Lordship inside the church and throw history, science, art, math, and the rest of culture into the grave. This is offensive to Christ who reigns over every word, thought, and deed of mankind. The war between Jesus and Satan rages everywhere. It rages in the battlefield of reading and writing. It rages in the field of mathematics; in the natural sciences and history. The fight is all-comprehensive, so the Christian school must be all-comprehensive in its submission to God’s Word. No subject can be left in the grave to decompose. We must reclaim and rebuild.
