SERMON: The Authority Of Education

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.

Well, if you remember last week, we looked at the foundation of all education.

Not just Christian education, but the foundation of all education by discovering the bedrock of what knowledge is.

Knowledge is not just data, facts, spreadsheets, books, but it is the fear of the

Lord. That means that the structure under every classroom and the footing under every conceivable scintilla of knowledge, the scaffolding of truth under every textbook is not raw data, but it's the fearing of Almighty God.

And we said that without that foundation, there is no education at all.

In fact, every attempt at knowledge, apart from the fear of Yahweh is just educated paganism.

It is mere details draped in the dress of academic drag. But as we pointed out last week, a foundation alone is not a house.

You cannot live, nor should you live in a mere foundation. In the same way that you cannot raise or educate your children in mere foundational understanding of the fear of God, but you must move on to the other things that are built up on top of it.

Even the devils fear God, and no one is arguing that you should send your children to devils.

But we would say that the foundation is essential. It's irreplaceable.

You can't have a steady building without a steady foundation, but you don't stay at the foundation. You build on top of it.

And the goal for us this morning is to build on top of the foundation that's already been laid. And that's what we're going to do today.

We're gonna grab the next stone, and we're gonna continue to build on top of the foundation that the fear of the

Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And the question that we're gonna be asking this week is, what is the pedagogical authority for education or said more simply, what is the authority underneath all education and all knowledge?

Who is the one who gives knowledge? If our foundation is the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, who's the one who gives it?

That's the question that we're gonna be asking today. Where does knowledge come from? And we're gonna be asking questions like, does it come from parents,

Caesars, or something else? So if you will, today, we're gonna look at five things.

The first thing we're gonna look at is that the world has always fought for your children and always will. We're gonna look at second, that no teacher can educate without confessing his own ignorance.

And we'll look at that in the Proverbs. We'll see that the son is the answer to every riddle when it comes to education.

We will see that the rival wisdoms cannot stand against the son. And we will finally look at, what does that mean for us and how do we approach education in a

Christ -centered way? So if you will, I'm gonna read several passages, we're gonna pray, and then we're gonna examine this topic together.

What is the authority of education? Proverbs 30, one through six.

Surely I am more stupid than any man, and I do not have the understanding of a man, neither have

I learned wisdom, nor do I have the knowledge of the Holy One. Who has ascended into heaven and descended?

Who has gathered the winds in his fist? Who has wrapped the waters in his garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth?

What is his name or his son's name? Surely you know. Every word of God is tested.

He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words or he will reprove you and you will be proved a liar.

Proverbs 30, verse 24 through 28. Four things are small on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise.

The ants are not strong people, but they prepare their food in summer. The Shephanim are not mighty people.

They make their houses in the rocks. The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks.

The lizard you may grasp with the hands, and yet it is in the king's palaces. Proverbs 21, 30.

There is no wisdom and understanding and counsel that can stand against the Lord. Proverbs 25, two.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but it's the glory of kings to search it out. So with that, let us pray.

Lord, we thank you that last week we were able to see that the foundation under all knowledge, under all wisdom, under all data that could ever be collected is the fear of the

Lord. There is no procurement of knowledge apart from fearing

God. And Lord, where we have built our lives on a false foundation,

Lord, would you reprove, correct us, and help us repent. But Lord, today now we move on from the foundation to build some of the structure to see that the authority of education actually has an author.

There is one who has all authority over all education, and Lord, I pray that we would submit our lives unto him.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. So the first thing I wanna talk about is the world has always fought for education.

Now, today's not gonna be a sermon on where you're supposed to send your children to school. That's not my point today. My point is who actually is qualified to teach?

And I don't, again, intend to get into the debate of public school versus private school, Christian school versus homeschool, unschool versus no school.

I'm not getting into that. That's not my aim today. But my aim is to answer the question, who is the authority of all education?

And I intend when we answer that question that the Lord will allow the chips to fall where they may. Because every classroom in the history of the world has had to answer this question of who is in charge.

Who is the author and the authority behind education? Is it the wise men? Is it the intelligentsia?

Is it the proletariat? Is it the state or is it God? In the long history of man, as far as the education goes, there have been two fundamental answers to the question of education's authority.

Some cultures have entrusted the authority of education to the state, the empire, the ruling class, the wisdom of autonomous men, or other cultures, framed by biblical understanding, have entrusted that education is properly authoritative by God and what

God says. And these two views have played out all throughout history. For instance, the Greeks largely tied education to the state as the formation of citizens for the polis, or the local population.

It was the Spartans who said you don't own your children, the state owns your children. So that view is actually quite early in the history of man.

The Romans largely tied education to the state as a method of preserving the Roman order. They wanted to make

Roman citizens. That's why Bodhi Balcombe famously said, if you send your children to Caesar, you shouldn't be surprised when they come back as Romans.

That was essentially the Roman education model played out. But there were other cultures, like Israel, who rooted their education in God and his word.

And they grounded their education not only in the fear of the Lord, but also that God is the only authority over our education.

And in many ways, America actually was founded to try to model that Jewish way of thinking.

In the early days of America, the public education system was actually invented in the state of Massachusetts, and it was handed over to the state by the

Puritans, who had great intentions for it. They actually, it came to be known as the

Old Deluder Satan Act, which is a real bill that was passed in the state of Massachusetts because Satan is the old deluder of your souls, and he will delude you, he will fool you if you don't know how to read and write.

So they established a system of education to teach the people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and in the

Commonwealth how to read and write so that they could read their Bible. That was the goal, and that was the point.

And while a Christian state presiding over a Christianized education would be vastly better than what we have today, the fact that the

Massachusetts Bay Colony handed the education from the parents to the state, from the authority of God, it is not surprising that downstream of that, we come to where we're at today.

The question of education, if you hand it to the state, is what kind of a state do you have? If you have a godless state, you'll have a godless education system.

If you have a godly state, well, maybe you'll have one that's rooted in the foundation of God, but it is, so goes the state, so goes the education.

If you subsidize it unto them. And this is the reason why we live in a state today that values the things that it values and hands out, literally, pornography to children in the supposed teaching of education.

After the Puritan era waned, the dawn of the Enlightenment came. The colleges were perverted. The teachers were then taught a different way.

The nation began its long trench down into the roots of secularization, and there became a concerted effort by the state to create a godless education system that goes all the way back to a man named

John Dewey, from whence we get the Dewey Decimal System, if you remember that in elementary school.

That's the only time I ever used it. Dewey was known as the father of modern education.

It was Dewey who was reported as saying this. Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness, and that this is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

Now, what kind of reconstruction was Dewey aimed at? What kind of reconstruction did he want education to be the tool by which that was accomplished?

He said later, there is no God, there is no soul, hence there is no need for the props of traditional religion.

Dewey believed that education was to accomplish that worldview in the lives of our children.

As Doug Wilson often says, if there is no God above the state, your state will be God. And that is what was happening, even as early as Dewey.

But it's not just Dewey, it's Horace Mann. Read the writings of Horace Mann, and there's a concerted effort to teach our children life apart from God.

In a book called Humanism, A New Religion, Charles Francis Potter says, education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism.

And every American public school in the world is a school of humanism. What can the theistic

Sunday schools meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of a five -day program of humanistic teaching?

They're saying the quiet part out loud. Similarly, Chester M. Pierce, a professor of education in psychiatry at the

Harvard University in 1972, went further and said this. This is absolutely insane.

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane. It's what he says. Because he comes to school with certain allegiances towards our founding fathers, towards his parents, towards a belief in a supernatural being, and it's up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.

I could go on and on. They're not hiding their agenda. If the state does not submit to God, the state will claim to be

God and it will teach your children that there is no God. That's the point. The same state,

Massachusetts, which created Christian education is also a state that has become thoroughly pagan in its education.

Because what unites both of these schools together, as disparate as they are, Puritans to the perverted, is a trust that education of our children belongs to the governmental org chart and not the home.

But the question we need to answer today is, is that thought biblical? And maybe a better question would be this.

Who does the Bible say actually has the authority over education? Is it the state or is it God? And what we're gonna see in the book of Proverbs is that it explicitly roots the authority of all knowledge squarely at the feet of the

Almighty. And it does so in four ways. So the second thing that I wanna show us is that all teaching, all knowledge, all procurement of data begins with a posture.

And that posture is as Agur says in Proverbs 31 through six, surely

I am more stupid than any man. This is a verse that we've covered before.

It's a verse that my children chuckle at. But it's somewhat a shocking passage and it strikes against the ears of the modern man.

Because what you're gonna notice about Agur, who was a employee of Solomon's empire, one of the wisest men in the nation, what he does not do is credential himself.

He does not use fancy letters like P, H, and D in sequence. He doesn't tout his religious degree or his degree from Jerusalem, Carthage, or Athens.

Agur opens up with a confession. One of the smartest men in all of the Judean empire, he opens up with a confession that is staggering.

He is seemingly boasting in his own stupidity in comparison to God. And you may ask, why would he do that?

And the answer is because he, and often not we, have rightly understood himself in comparison to an infinite

God. The Hebrew word translated for stupid here is baar, and it actually is sharper than the

English language. Sometimes in English we soften things that are quite frank in Hebrew. The word stupid actually doesn't capture baar.

Baar is the word of a brute beast or an animal without reason. The same root that is in other places describing cattle and sheep and oxen in the herds of a field,

Agur is saying, that's me, compared to the surpassing wealth of knowledge that the

Almighty has. He says, I'm not even properly considered a man in comparison to this great

God. He's saying that I am nothing more than a brutish, beastly, unreasoning animal who grazes in the fields of his own incompetence, gnawing away at the cut of his own insufficiency.

It's a mouthful. And this is an important confession for many reasons, not least because Agur is saying he has no ability to know anything apart from God.

Apart from God, he cannot know anything. And that even includes those who do not profess

God because God in his grace has allowed them to know things not apart from him. Without God, we are, as Agur would say, no wittier than a pot -bellied pig and no more learned than a hound dog.

And let me just say it this way. Agur, who is the teacher of wisdom, who made it a profession communicating truth, is not being cheeky, unduly self -deprecating, or unreasonably modest.

He is importing to us the most basic of all qualifications of all education that all teachers ought to recognize, that all people who communicate truth to any other person ought to see and rejoice in is that man made in the image of God cannot know anything without being in relationship with this holy

God. On our own, apart from God, we cannot give anything of value or anything good.

The entire collection of man's wisdom apart from God exists as a dunghill for animals to roll in.

That's what Agur is saying compared to the pearls of great price that our master gives.

Moses understood this personally when he said, who am I that I should go up to Pharaoh? Isaiah knew it when he said, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.

Job knew it from the whirlwind when he said, I've heard of you by hearing of the ear, but now my eyes have seen you, and therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

What a holy hatred of himself, even recognizing his lowness in relationship to this

God. Paul knew it from prison when he said, who is sufficient for these things? I want you to notice the pattern of the scriptural witness here.

Every faithful teacher or sub -teacher in the scriptures begins by confessing their own inadequacy before their maker.

And that's the most fundamental answer to the question that we're asking this morning. Who is in charge of education?

Who has the authority? And we must resoundingly say, not we. Secular states do nothing more than pull a collective group of wisdom together in resources, and they say, we know what's best in education.

And yet, Agur, Moses, Isaiah, Paul, the Holy Spirit, the triune God would all proclaim the opposite.

They would say that your collective wisdom belongs still to much infinitely lower proportions than what is being given by an infinitely high and glorious God.

With that, the only faithful posture when it comes to the question of authority over education is for all of us to begin on our faces with our lips touching the substance from which we were made, trembling before the only one who owns all things.

The very worst thing that we could do is actually reenact the Tower of Babel and pull our collective stupidity together and think that because we have power over the state or the state is on our side, then we can even come close to the venture that is called education.

I would even venture to say it like this, if we really caught a vision of who God is and his total awesome splendor, we would not dare to speak a word of instruction to anyone lest it be rooted in the fear and trembling of Yahweh.

Because we would finally understand our frame that we are but dust and the only thing of value that we can ever give is from him.

That's the proper posture, which is the exact opposite posture of what modernity has produced.

Walk in any teacher's conference in America and the only time that you will hear that we are beast is in a

Darwinian evolution class or a DEI lecture about furries. Wild.

What you will not hear them say is that we are too stupid to be considered persons, we must repent before a holy

God. You will not hear them quote Ager. Instead, you will hear the haughty proclamations of men in their stupidity who think they know something apart from God because they have a

PhD, who understand pedagogical theory, emotional intelligence, rubrics, trauma -informed classrooms.

And they have a union card, that's the thing.

I didn't grow up with unions. You and I would be safer allowing our children to be completely uneducated and entirely uncivilized, as my granddaddy used to say, dumber than a box of rocks, than to allow a secular state with its knobby fingers to educate your children in the doctrines of Satan.

At the Department of Education that is currently instituted, the goal is to infiltrate and indoctrinate the minds of our children with something that is absolutely opposed to Almighty God.

And the result is a generation of teachers who stand before our children with three -letter millstones wrapped around their neck and zero fear of God, who will hurl them one day into the sea for leading astray these little ones.

I know I'm being very pointed. And I'm sure that there's some very wonderful people who are in the public school system.

That's not my argument. I'm sure that there are wonderful godly people who send their children to the public schools.

I'm not arguing that. In the same way that there were good and decent people who lived and served in Nazi Germany and got their education at the

University of Berlin in the 1940s. I'm not arguing that point. I'm not saying that every teacher is evil, and I'm not binding your conscience to say that there is no situation that would not require you to send your children to a public school.

I'm not saying that. But I am saying that public education in the way that it is currently being instituted today has hitched their wagons to a philosophy of education that hates

God and elevates the genius of man. And Ager would call it that they are behaving like cows standing knee deep and gleefully in their own dung.

When I was in Kansas, I was at a ranch. I stopped there because why not?

You're in Kansas. I thought it would be a really Kansas thing to do to stop and look at cows. But what else is there to do?

The state is so flat. You can't even see the curvature of the earth. I think it's concave on purpose just so you can, it looks like a pancake.

So I stopped and looked, and the cows were so happy to stand in their own feces. They were having the best time of their life.

That's what Ager is saying that we act like when we act apart from the foundation that God is the authority over all education.

That's the first qualification that I would give you is that education must be understood theologically and God is at the heart of all of it.

So what I would prefer is a homeschool mother who would pray Ager's prayer at her kitchen table before she opens up the math book and she says,

Lord, I need you today because I'm not qualified to teach these children. I would love to see fathers at their bedside uttering, who am

I? I'm not even a man. I'm not even worthy to be giving my children the knowledge of the Holy One unless you,

God, show up. Unless you, God, help me. Unless you, God, fill me with your knowledge. That man is a more skilled catechist than the greatest chemist at Cambridge.

Every faithful teacher and every educator begins on his knees, acknowledging that God is the only source of knowledge.

Everything else is but the putrescence of a secular modernity destined to be trodden under the feet of irrational beast.

That's the first thing we should know. Second thing we should know is that Ager, amazingly, says that it's not just God who is the authority over all education, but it's

God's Son. 900 years before the New Testament, he makes one of the most unmistakable proclamations of the deity of Christ.

We see him here narrowing the focus from God in general to even more specifically to the Son. Look at what he says.

Who has ascended into heaven and who has descended? Who has gathered the wind into his fist and who has wrapped the waters in his garment?

Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name or his Son's name? Surely you know.

Ager is saying something 900 years before Jesus ever is born that the foundation of all knowledge is bound up in the one who has ascended and descended and who is the

Son of God. Now, it's astounding claim. And the Jews treated this as a riddle.

This actually, this was looked at a riddle to them that they had no idea how to solve. And the reason they had no idea how to solve it is because they had no paradigm for how to answer it.

You and I stand in a privileged position 2 ,000 years later where we can look back and say, aha, I understand, they did not.

The only time that the word ascended had ever been used and it happened twice. This is the very first UAP, by the way,

Unidentified Ascension Phenomenons. It's really happening right now.

The first example of this is before the flood when Enoch was taken up to be with God, it's

Genesis 5 .24. The other one is when right before the downfall of the northern tribes in Israel when

Elijah rode the chariots of fire to heaven. That's the only two times that anyone in the

Old Testament had ever ascended and none of them had ever descended, none of them. All of them were taken up by God, but none of them came down with God's name as the

Son of God. And it's that important thing that Jesus himself actually helps us with because the

Jews had no answer. They had no answer in the Pentateuch for what this riddle from Agur meant. They had no answer in the historical books for what it meant.

They had no clear answer in the prophets. They had no understanding of Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22.

They had no understanding in the wisdom corpus of what this passage meant. So for the Jew, it remained an unanswerable riddle.

What does he mean by the Son of God? What Jesus himself actually gives us the answer when he's talking to Nicodemus.

Jesus tells Nicodemus in John chapter three, by quoting this parable, no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the

Son of Man. Jesus is saying, I am the one who Agur was talking about.

I am the one who has ascended and descended. I am the answer to the riddle. I am the fountainhead of all knowledge.

When Agur says that I am more stupid than an animal, not even worthy to be called a man, but all knowledge is bound up by the one who has ascended and descended, the one who grabs the wind with his fist.

Jesus is saying that's me. What an astounding claim. Did you know that Jesus did that in John three when he was talking to Nicodemus?

We read past that verse. Oh, the one who ascended and descended. Okay, got it. And we don't know he's quoting something there.

He's saying, I am something there. The riddle that befuddled the Jews for hundreds of years. He's saying, I am he.

What an astounding thing to say to a Jewish scholar who would have absolutely spent countless hours navel gazing and speaking voluminously about what does this riddle mean.

Nicodemus would have been of the people who stood around in corners and dusty shelves saying, I wonder what

Agur meant. And Jesus very helpfully said, it's me. But God in his abundant mercy has not only given it to us through the lips of Jesus, even though if that's all that he had given us, it would be enough.

It would absolutely be enough. But he also teaches us in Ephesians four through the apostle Paul, he who descended is himself also he who ascended far above the heavens so that he might fill all things.

And when Paul says fill all things, he also means our heads full of truth because he is the only one who pours it.

He's the only one who can fill it. Paul is giving us high wisdom Christology saying that the one personified in Proverbs one who is wisdom calling out in the streets, the one who is personified in Proverbs eight, who is beside the father in the beginning of creation, the one who is talked about in Proverbs 830, who says

I was beside him like a master worker, that's Jesus. And he's the only one who gives knowledge.

There is no knowledge apart from the word of God. And that word is Christ, the divine word.

That is why the apostle John could say, in arche in halagas, which means in the beginning was the word.

And then he goes on to say, and the word was with God and the word was God and all things were made through him and without him, nothing was made.

Without Jesus, nothing that is what is. You have to bend the rules of grammar sometimes to make your point.

Paul tells us again in 1 Corinthians 124, that Christ is the power and the wisdom of almighty

God. He writes in Colossians 116, by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

All things, which means education was created by him to serve him. So when we combine what

Acker says, that he is in relation to the sun, a stupid beast in comparison, in the same way that a candle compared to a supernova is a small thing.

And when we compare that the one who knows all things, the Christ, the word by which he is the author of all things and he is the one who gives and ascribes purpose to all things and that purpose is that all things would praise him.

And he's the only one who can't be accused of arrogance because if he is infinitely glorious, there's nothing else that could ever be fit for us to give our glory and our praise and our honor.

He is not being selfish. He is not being narcissistic when he says for us to give him all praise, all honor and all glory because he is the only one who deserves it.

So he's telling us the truth. He's saying the most loving thing to us, give it all to me because I made it.

Every atom in your body was crafted with the ink pen of Christ for the purpose of declaring the beauty and the glory of Christ.

And that's the second thing that would have us look at here as that when we say anything, anything at all, any truth claim, two plus two equals four, we are talking about a fact that was made by the divine

Logos Christ. Not random happenstance by atoms colliding in motion.

He is the one who holds everything together by his own power and every teacher and every institution and every secular state who teaches anything apart from Jesus will one day answer to Jesus, the one who will put all of his enemies underneath his royal feet.

So we learn it for good reason that Christ is Lord over all, education. The second or the third thing that we learn is that no rival wisdom can stand against him, that Jesus actually is not a patient, that Jesus himself is not pluralistic, that Jesus himself will not allow any rival truth claim to exist in the lens of eternity.

He will put everything that opposes him underneath him and he will raise to life and glory everything that he himself has claimed.

That is his master plan for the universe. So in that way, no rival education can stand against him.

Agur roots all authority in the son of God. He says, no wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the

Lord. That's Solomon actually agreeing with Agur in Proverbs 21, 30, which means that there's no wisdom apart from Christ, no wisdom that can avail upon Christ or over Christ.

The Hebrew here in this passage gives us a triple denial. Ein chokmah, ein tevunah and ein etzah, which means no wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail or compare to or overthrow or overrule

Christ. Not a syllable of pagan philosophy, not a footnote of secular scholarship, not a sentence from any rival pedagogy can stand against our

Lord Jesus and his beloved son. I want you to pay attention to what Solomon is doing. He's not saying that there is some wisdom in the world that's good and right apart from God.

He is not saying that every broken clock is right twice a day. He's not saying that. He's saying that any wisdom that can be claimed by anyone, pagan or Christian, that can be said to be true, good and beautiful, already belongs to him, that it's on rent from him.

Any so -called wisdom that says anything true at all belongs to him. And any wisdom whatsoever that sets itself against him is not wisdom at all.

It is counterfeit, it is forgery, and it is wax fruit on a real tree. So when you sink your teeth in it, you break your teeth upon it.

This is why Solomon refuses to grant any rival pedagogies the dignity of the title of education.

He will not call them wisdom, he will not call them counsel, he will not call them understanding, he will not call them education, because they are clowns dressed up as pretenders.

They are alley cats wearing the skin of lions. They are puddles disguised as oceans. They are scarecrows trying to persuade us they are men.

And Augustine knew this. Augustine in his confessions famously said, all truth is

God's truth. Every bit of it. He also wrote that secular sciences that pursue the truth without the maker are actually fornicating with creation.

What an astounding thing to say, but how true it is, that we're cheating on the creator with his creation when we make a truth claim apart from him.

Cornelius Van Til, who was a wicked smart guy, and no fool himself, said that there is no such thing as autonomous reason.

There is no reason that exists within us autonomously. That every fact submits itself under the authority of the triune

God, so that every fact in itself is triune in its submission. Abraham Kuyper famously said, in the

Netherlands in the 1880s, declaring at the foundation of the Free University of Amsterdam, there is not one square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which

Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, mine. And yet how tragic it is that so many believers included entrust our children to rival pedagogies that hate

God and hate truth. Now, again, I'm not saying that you cannot send your children to public schools.

It's not what I'm saying. It's not what I'm arguing. I am saying that if you do, you are working against a system that is engineered to pervert your children away from God, and you are working against a five -day -a -week, eight -hour -a -day curriculum that is designed to change your children over time, and you, my friend, have a lot of work to do because they do not care for you or your

God and ultimately for your children. They teach biology without an understanding of the one who knit the cell together in the nucleus.

Classrooms that teach history without understanding the one who wrote it. Classrooms that teach ethics without knowing the one who formed the conscience.

Oh, it's a herd instinct. We're just cattle. On that, they agree with Ager.

Classrooms that teach grammar without knowing the word. How do you do that? We cannot expect to undo decades of systematic and intentional indoctrination with one hour a week of church, or if you go to the

Shepherd's Church, two hour a week of church. Again, my point is not you can't send your children to public schools.

That's not my point today. My point today is to ask you to evaluate who is the authority of the educating, the one doing the educating.

Is it God or is it man? And if it's man, it's dung. And as for me and my family, we're willing to take the risk that God is the one who's the foundation of all knowledge, and he's the one who has the authority of all knowledge, and we're willing to take the risk in a very expensive part of the country in a job that doesn't compete for awards when it comes to earnings reports to make sure that our children know that God is the foundation of all knowledge, that God is the author of all knowledge and has the authority over all knowledge.

We're willing to take that risk because as you've seen, there is no knowledge apart from the fear of the Lord. There is no authority over education apart from God.

More specifically, there is no authority over education apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. So that's the third thing that we would see.

The fourth thing that we would see is that knowing this, we actually have something that we must do about it.

Because if we know that the foundation of all knowledge is the fear of the Lord and that the authority of all knowledge belongs to God in general and Christ in particular, then we have a response that we ought to make.

And my fourth and final point here is that all knowledge that we give to our children or we give to our parents or we give to our friends or we give to anyone, any dispensing of knowledge should be us reading creation

Christologically. And I will explain what I mean by that. We are to read the creation in light of the creator.

We are to give them the connection that no one else will give them. That the atom that you're looking at under the microscope belongs to the designer.

That the skies above us belong to the greatest artist. We are to make the connection for them because all authority belongs to him and he demands that we tell them.

This is why Solomon writes, it's the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search it out.

I love that. The Hebrew is actually quite beautiful. Kavod, Elohim hastar davar. The glory of God is to hide a thing.

Kavod, malachim kavar davar is the glory of king to search it out. Notice that there's two glories here.

God's glory and he gets great glory in hiding wisdom and the king or the royal has great glory in pursuing it.

So both glories are real and both glories are reciprocal. God hides his treasures in creation.

He hides his wisdom in creation. He hides who he is in fabrics and molecules and pools and soundings.

God hides his treasures in creation, not because he's playing hide and go seek, not because he is trying to deceive us, not because he is trying to make sure that we don't know him for those who belong to him.

He has hidden those things in creation so that we would seek him and for those who do not belong to him, he has hidden those things in plain sight so that it would convict them.

So that if you are a Christian, you must have a royal approach to education as the king who delights to find the glories of God.

And how do you do that? You bend over your world and you labor to find

Jesus's fingerprint on every cell and on every sounding and on every stream.

Solomon is saying that Christ is Lord over all creation and as Lord, he has made creation a treasure chest that points to Christ, so that his people may plunder it and his enemies may be drowned in it.

Agur shows us four examples of this, which I think are astounding. Proverbs 30, 24 through 28, he says, the ant, a people not strong and yet they prepared their food and summer.

I love how Agur says, I'm a beast, I'm not even man. But look at the ant, they're men. I think it's astounding the humility and how true it is.

A people not yet strong and yet they prepare their food and summer. He's saying ants are small creatures, they're weak creatures, they crack beneath your sandals and yet they're governed, their entire life is governed by the divine foresight of almighty

God. He has programmed them to know when to gather for the harvest and they don't even reason.

Agur is telling us that if we study the ant, knowing that she was created by Christ for the glory of Christ, then we may know more of Christ through the study of the ant.

That we will find our king hidden in the thorax of ants. That we will find a sermon on prudence in the colonization of the ants.

We will find a sermon on the providence of God and the instinctual innateness of the ant.

We will find a sermon upon labor and harvest through the ant. The ant does not preach with its mouth, it preaches with her back and if we observe it rightly, we will understand that it points to the son of God in all things.

And if we teach our covenant children right, we will not just be teaching them entomology, we will be teaching them economics through the colonies of ants.

We will be teaching them glory of God through the colonies of ants. Example two,

I read it in the NASB, it's Shafanim. Most scholars believe that this is rock badgers, which

I didn't know were a thing. Ager says, a people not mighty, the rock badgers. They're people too,

I'm not, they are. And they make their homes in the cliffs. According to Ager, the rock badger is a small and a trembling creature, a creature without claws, without fangs that has no business surviving in a world full of predators and yet she does survive because she's learned the one lesson that every saint must learn and she's done it without reasoning skills, without a

PhD education from Harvard, have it, she's learned where to hide. The rock badger doesn't flee to the open field, that would be foolish.

The rock badger flees not to the low grasses, that would be foolish as well, she flees unto the rock. Now what a sermon that is, that we find safety by fleeing unto the rock.

Doesn't Paul call Christ the rock into which we flee? If we understand the world rightly, we understand that it rightly is proclaiming the glory of Christ.

And in every single fact, there's a sermon of his majesty. Number three example, the locust.

They have no king, yet all of them march and rank. Think about that. A creature with no chain of command, a creature with no general, a creature with no system of laws based off of our

Western civilization. And yet they march more orderly in line and in unity than we do.

He's saying when the locust move, they move as one body, they march in formation. When you see that and you look at that and you tell your children about that, that they move as one body, what does that remind you of?

That in Christ, we've been given a kind of unity we don't deserve, been made into one body so that as little locust, we gather and scatter to the ends of the earth, colonizing for his glory.

See how you can turn that back to Jesus because Jesus made it and he made it for himself.

So all I'm doing is saying, remind our children of that. That which is not most obvious, there's the glory of kings to uncover these things and to do it for our children.

So what, that they would grow up and be kings and queens and not the paupers that our society is trying to create.

Example four, the lizards. You can take it in your hands and yet it is in the king's palaces this is not a big lizard, by the way, and this is a small thumb sized lizard that he's talking about.

It's the weakest creature on the list and yet you can't catch it with, and you can catch it with your bare hand and you can hold it in the palm of your hand and yet where do you find her?

You find her not in the gutter, not in the alleyway, not in the trash heap of forgotten lore, you find her in the palace of kings.

And notice again, the wisdom of almighty God that the lowest things are brought and made high and they dwell with kings.

Notice that us, lower than lizards, have been brought and made high and we get to in a moment dine at the table of a great king.

All I'm saying is that this isn't made up. Every animal, every creature, every cell, every molecule bears his fingerprint and if he has all authority over it then it is our responsibility to connect it to him because it's his glory to hide it, it's our glory to find it and submit up underneath it.

So parents, I don't want you just teaching biology, I want you teaching the author of the cell.

I don't want you just reading ecology, I want you reading it theologically as being connected to him.

I want you to show your children wherever you send them to be primarily educated that you be the primary educator of them and show them that every cell bears his name.

And when you do that, you honor the one who has all authority over all of education, amen? That's our goal, that's our work.

We do it because Christ Jesus raised from the grave. We do it because he's alive and he's not dead. We do it because everything points to him.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, the authority over all education belongs to you.

So Lord, I pray, I pray for me as a man, I pray for our men as men, as men who are preparing for marriage, as men who are married, as men who are preparing for fatherhood, as men who are fathers, for my wife, for all wives in this room, for women in general, for wives and mothers,

Lord, I pray for all of us that we would remember that every single quark and subatomic particle belongs to you and to you alone.

And every distant galaxy sings your praise. From the largest things to the smallest things, they all bear your name.

And Lord, let us be a people who don't just show up on Sunday at church and act religious.

Let us be a people who worship Monday through Saturday in your creation, connecting everything to you.

And Lord, I believe that you delight when we do it because you say that it's the glory of kings. Lord, let us be kings and queens in our homes, connecting everything to the glory of Christ.