Last night’s study on The Holiness of God was interrupted by a warning that one manifestation of His awesome power might be on its way, a tornado. It was, as chapter 4, which we were to look at, begins, a dark and stormy night. But all is well, and we’ll be back next week, Deo volente.
Thesis 37- We must believe and teach our children to believe that God is the one who gives us our daily bread.
It is a common enough argument between those who believe in the sovereignty of God and those who do not. Those who do not, want to know, “If God has already determined all that will come to pass, why pray?” or the slightly less aggressive version, “Does prayer really change anything?” Those of us who believe in the sovereignty of God have good and sound answers to this objection. Often we break into a discourse on primary and secondary causality. We talk about how God ordains means as well as ends. It’s all true, though it may miss the heart of the matter. The truth is that prayer does change things. It doesn’t, of course, change our future. Instead it changes us. We do not, in other words, pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” because we will starve if we don’t so pray. We pray it instead to teach us that it is God Himself who provides our daily bread.
Our temptations are legion here. The serpent provides any number of different substitutes for God in our equation. We may believe that our skills, our diligence, our market savvy provide our daily bread. We may believe that it is our job that provides our daily bread. When our job is in jeopardy, we then tend to worry. We may believe it is the government that provides our daily bread. And so we expect it to ensure the stock market rises, to insure our risky home mortgage. Of course our gifts and our hard work are a part of the way God answers this prayer. Of course the company we work for is a part of the way God answers this prayer. Of course governments can either guard prosperity or destroy it, and so is a part of the way God answers this prayer. None of which changes the reality that it is God who provides our daily bread. When we sit down before a meal and return thanks, we ought, as we open our eyes, be as joyfully surprised as the children of Israel who awoke each morning to see the ground covered with manna.
Evangelicals, especially those of us who are Reformed in our thinking, are often practical deists. Just as deists believed that God wound up the great clock that is the universe and stepped back to watch it all play out, so we believe God wrote the story, His decrees, and then stepped back to watch it all play out. He has indeed decreed all that comes to pass. And He has decreed that He acts in space and time. He puts bread on our table. He meets our needs.
We are His children. We need to know this. Our children are His children. They need to know this. They need to know that as much as they are cared for by their earthly father, their heavenly Father is, in the end, the One who watches over them.
Don’t forget that today, at 7:00 eastern we continue our live study, working together through my father’s classic work, The Holiness of God. We will cover this week chapter 4. All are welcome to join us online. We’ll be on Facebook Live, at RC-Lisa Sproul. If, however, you are in the area, you are welcome to join us in our home. We serve a meal to our guests at 6:00. Do please let us know if you’d like to be here in person for the study or both the meal and the study. We hope to see you here.
My hope and prayer is that there are many Christian parents out there who, finding themselves if not forced to dive into the deep end at least forced to dip their toes into homeschooling last Spring because of COVID, discovered many of the deep blessings of homeschooling and are looking forward to continuing this fall. My suspicion is that there are many Christian parents who this fall are reluctantly beginning to wade into the waters, but are doing so with great fear that hungry sharks are just below the surface.
My principle bit of counsel is simple enough- relax. What you are doing may seem strange to you, to your neighbors, your parents. It is, however, the pattern of education that most people in history experienced. Homeschooling, believe it or not, is normal, and the schools that you and I attended are the young mavericks in town, still wet behind the ears. Which means, of course, that you can do it. Back in the day when there were homeschool conferences and I was invited to speak at them I used to give instructions to parents to test if they were qualified to homeschool. “Wait until late at night, somewhere between 10:00 and midnight” I would say. “Quietly walk through your house and peek into every room. Take note of any children you observe. Assess whether these children are your own. If they are, you are qualified to homeschool.”
One friend confessed that his wife was nervous about homeschooling. She didn’t feel like her own education had sufficiently equipped her. My friend, being deeply pastoral, responded with this question, “What are the three main forms of rock?” She, puzzled as to the meaning of the question, likewise puzzled over the answer before guessing, “Volcanic, metatarsal and ignatius?” “And yet,” he responded to her failed attempt, “you claim to be a godly woman.” She got the lesson. The things we tend to worry about are not the things that matter most. Relax in knowing that if there’s something your children will need to know, and you don’t know it, you will need to learn it. If you don’t need to know it, chances are they don’t need to either.
Relaxing will also make the experience more enjoyable for you and your children. If you feel pressure, they will feel pressure. If you feel fear of failure, they will too. The truth is, your children want to please you. They hunger for words of encouragement, and will work to receive them. You likely have the same hunger, so let me encourage you. You are doing a good thing. Such doesn’t mean, of course, that there won’t be hardships and challenges. Remember though to compare apples to apples. Don’t compare your worst day of homeschooling with the best day of being in school. You are doing a good thing, one which you can openly and unashamedly ask God to bless.
And that you must do. Bathe your homeschool in prayer. Bathe your students in prayer. Bathe your day in prayer. Bring your children to the Word of God each day, knowing that you and your children are His children, and that He is homeschooling you all. If you’d like some more outstanding counsel I commend to you the wisdom of my beloved wife, which you can read on her Purpose Driven Wife blog – here.
We are made in God’s image. The sheer fact that we could spend the rest of our lives contemplating what it means to be made in God’s image, without beginning to scratch the surface, reminds us that we are God’s image, not gods. We are, in some ways, to God as our mirror image is to us. There is a resemblance, a connection, but the difference is one of ontology, dimension. Thus, God creates, and we create. But when we look at creation more closely we find that He speaks things into reality, while we merely rearrange what He has already created. I’m stringing words together; He spoke language into being. Adam named the animals, but God formed them.
God also, we remember, named Adam. Naming, whether from God or man, is the exercise of dominion. It is rule and authority. Naming has the capacity to shape not the thing in itself, but our perception of the thing. This is why we find the conjugation of adjectives so amusing- I am thrifty; you are cheap, and he is miserly. Each adjective lives in the same neighborhood, and could, in some sense be used to describe the same behavior. But the choice of the name impacts the perception of the reality.
This is the game that the devil plays with us. He, because he is merely a creature, hasn’t the power to create. Instead, he has only the power of naming, without the authority. We are seduced by him when we think his thoughts after him, when our perceptions are his perceptions. His very first assault was undermining the very words of God, “Hath God indeed said…” That’s his game.
We are told, for instance, that we live in a “secular” society. To be sure there are a few religious holdouts, most of them living in what is derisively named (there it is again) “fly-over” country. But the “real” world, the world that counts, exists on two coasts. On the east coast, in what we have named the “power’ corridor of Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York, we have titans of industry and governance. On the west coast we have the professional namers, the visual mavens who form our culture through entertainment. Where it counts we are supposed to be secular, that is, beyond worship. This, supposedly, is where culture is formed, and thus we have a secular culture.
This too, however, is but the devil’s slight of hand. Renaming isn’t the same as remaking. And one thing man will never be is secular. When someone claims, “I’m not a very religious person” one ought translate it to the more accurate, “I’m not a very truthful person.” We are all religious people. That we name our worship something else doesn’t change its true nature. We are still worshipping. The trouble is that the things we don’t call gods, but treat as gods, are merely his image bearers. We worship the creation rather than the Creator, and none more frequently than that two dimensional copy of God, man.
Here I am not referring to philosophical humanism, though such would fit. My point isn’t that those who will not have God in their thinking will instead worship man in the abstract. Rather, we worship men in the flesh. What is Beverly Hills, but our own Mount Olympus? We stand and gawk while they walk sundry red carpets. We build shrines to them on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
We even have established religion in this country. Local and state politicians live or die by whether or not they are willing to gather the funding to build temples to the gods of this age. Yankee Stadium is less a copy of the Roman Coliseum than it is the Athenium. It is where we gather together for worship, where we hoot and holler for the home team, as if our souls depended on it. These gods never fade away; instead they simply retire to their respective halls of fame.
If that isn’t compelling enough, simply remember back to when the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Those who were actually in the studio recall that the screaming not only didn’t let up during the entire performance, but that those in the studio couldn’t hear even a note of the music, the hysteria was so great. That it is Dionysian worship doesn’t mean it wasn’t worship.
To note that we treat our celebrities like gods isn’t merely saying that we treat them better than we ought. Rather it gets to the heart of the issue, the heart that Calvin rightly called a fabricum idolarum, an idol factory. Calling it cheering, calling it appreciation for the art of filmmaking, doesn’t change what it is, worship.
The bad news of the world out there is that these gods cannot save. They are deaf and mute. The bad news for we in the church is that we too are idolaters. We gleefully blend together our worship of these gods, with the worship of the living God and praise ourselves for our cultural relevance. There is, however, only one thing relevant to nationwide idolatry, the call to put away these gods, to repent and believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. We worry that God might judge us because of our national failure to keep the second table of the law. With abortion we murder over a million babies a year. With tax and spend policies we live by stealing. With our eyes we commit adultery, even as we worship the gods of Hollywood. And we fuel it all with the envy of consumption. But we are fools if we think the first amendment trumps the first commandment. Our only hope is that we would worship the living and true God, and bring no other gods before Him.
Not long ago I tweeted this:
Things you cannot say without getting into a lot of trouble-
“Bomb” in the security line at the airport
“Fire!” in a crowded, fire-less theater.
“He’s a he” about a man in a dress.
We live in a world that seems to have gone mad. If we would, however, be as shrewd as serpents we would remember that there is a method to their madness. The seething, screeching screeds of melting snowflakes have a specific purpose- to get us to censor ourselves. Like a baby that knows it can get the candy it craves at the grocery store by having a meltdown, so Gramsci’s warrior children know that their ideological opponents, us, don’t care for drama, being hated on, scenes, and will do just about anything to steer clear of them. Including censor ourselves.
If I’m in a room full of conservatives I know that if I raise the slightest question about some proposed military action all reason and decorum will flee the room instantly. So I censor myself. If I’ve wandered into a meeting of egalitarian Christian ladies I know I won’t get out alive if I opine that John Piper’s writing has blessed me. So I censor myself.
Neither war hawks nor theology hens, however, can hold a candle to left wings when it comes to raising a ruckus. Just ask JK Rowling. She was kind enough to the left in 2007 to put Dumbledore into the closet so she could let him out. This wasn’t enough to protect her from Cancel Culture’s guillotine when she recently had the temerity to suggest that only women menstruate. The vitriol against her was off the charts.
The goal, here, however, isn’t to stop JK Rowling. The goal is to stop you and me. Just as totalitarian regimes put on show trials to frighten the innocent, so the left uses its capacity and willingness to spew bile in the name of safe spaces to keep sanity silent. They don’t care what Rowling says. They do care that the rest of us learn to never say it.
We, as we are wont to do, rationalize our sin. We call our cowardice compassion. We remember that we are to be humble, to not give undue offense, to have our language seasoned with salt, to walk the extra mile and turn it all into an excuse to stay safe from the maddening crowds. We refuse, in our sin, to call sin sin, and therefore have no reason to call anyone to repent and believe. We censor ourselves.
Our Lord went silent to His slaughter. That slaughter came to Him, however, because He faithfully preached the message His Father gave Him. We, on the other hand, use our silence to escape slaughter and preach not at all. He has warned us that He will not confess us if we will not confess Him. Lord, open our lips, that our mouths might proclaim Your praise, and that we might receive the blessing of suffering for and with You.
