Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

desire that we have is expressed in that psalm. May we never forget his commandments. Today our sermon text is found in Deuteronomy 5 beginning at verse 31 through 6:9. Contextually this is the beginning of the Ten Commandments and so specifically this introduces commandment number one as we get into chapter 6, which is that great commandment that our Savior reminded us of. It’s the first and great commandment.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Deuteronomy 5:31 through chapter 6 verse 9.

But as for you, stand here by me and I will speak to you all the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments which you shall teach them that they may observe them in the land which I am giving them to possess. Therefore, you shall be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.

You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which you shall possess. Now, this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and 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, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged.

Therefore, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, 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 heart.

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’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you Lord God for this particular text. Thank you that your Holy Spirit has been granted to us because of the mercies of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the basis of his resurrection, he has poured forth his spirit upon us. May your spirit, Lord God, help us to understand this word and its relevance to our day today, both in terms of the large things, the political matters that lie before us as voters, but then very importantly the small matters of what happens in the context of our homes between parent and child.

Bless us Lord God with an understanding of this text that we might praise your holy name in voice and in song and praise today and then with all that we do and say this week in Christ’s name we ask and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated.

This is sort of the opposite of what we’ve been doing for the last six or seven sermons. I began a series which will probably be a long series on living in exile based on Jeremiah 29. And the text before us from Deuteronomy 6 is sort of about how you’re going to keep the land. And by implication, it also tells us why they got booted out of the land into exile. We’ll see as we go through this that there’s some very direct connections between this text in Deuteronomy, end of five and beginning of chapter 6, and Jeremiah 29, and the reasons given for their exile.

So this is what the church of God should have done to the state in the context of being the head and not the tail in this particular piece of real estate we call the United States of America. So we’re talking about how to seek the peace of the cities where God has planted us.

Now that comes after in Jeremiah 29 the responsibilities to go about the average, the daily things of life in a very self-conscious committed way, which our text talks about as well. Jeremiah 29 before it says to seek the peace, it says to go ahead and plant vineyards, build houses, have children, you know, give away sons and daughters in the context of Christian marriage, have children, multiply and don’t decrease. And all those things are kind of addressed in the text before us as well.

So we’re in this context of the political season though. So we’ve gone right into seeking the peace of the city. And after these sermons on the election are over, we’ll return then to the first part before this and we’ll talk about relationships in the context of the home, courtship, giving away of children in marriage, et cetera. And I’m anxious to do that. But we have before us the task of finishing these ballot measure sermons.

Two of the ballot measures this year on the Oregon state ballot, two initiatives, have to do with education. And you know, we’ve talked about crime and punishment, we’ve talked about property, and we’ve talked about the election process itself with a number of ballot measures that we’ve talked about. We’ve tried to sort of look at some basic biblical truths.

You know, property is really important in the Bible. And so what we do with our property is important. And so a ballot measure that gives us a little more freedom and pushes the state status control over our lives back a little bit in terms of property seems significant. And to try to roll back, you know, the excessive taxation that goes on seems significant.

We said that crime and punishment is an important part. It’s the central job of the civil magistrate according to First Peter and to Romans 12 and 13. And so, you know, those ballot measures are important for us in terms of how is the state to punish criminals.

And we’ve said that the process itself is important. The scriptures have something to say about the age of maturation. It’s 20, not 21, not 18, not any of these things. The Bible puts it at 20. And that seems like a good place to pick an age to begin to vote at. And the Bible warns us against party spirit in First Corinthians particularly. And so we see the party spirit. You know, one of the most horrific things about the party spirit as it’s maturing, developing and coming to an ugly head in the context of our country is that it’s very difficult to get information, just normal information for instance about the economy and what’s happening, without having it run through political filters.

And so it’s very difficult to make good decisions when all you’re getting is some of the facts spun through a rhetoric of partisanship.

And today we want to talk a little bit about education in terms of preparing us for a discussion of the two ballot measures that have to do with this. Now, we’ve said that in terms of property and what’s happening in our election cycle today, you know, the word socialism is actually being used, right?

So I don’t know if you’ve been reading the papers this last week or not, but lo and behold, it turns out that in the supposed bailout bill by which the government could buy up these bad debts and then resell them (how they’re going to locate them, I don’t know, because the bank doesn’t seem to be able to locate them, the banking system), but anyway, lo and behold, in that hundreds of pages of legislation, they also gave the Treasury Secretary the ability in what’s called a stock injection plan to purchase stocks of banks on the part of the United States government.

So essentially what they’ve done is they paved the way that should the Treasury Secretary decide, he can in essence buy ownership in banks and really move toward a quasi-nationalization of the entire banking industry. And you know the dog that doesn’t bark this last week is people saying, “What, you’re going to nationalize the banking industry? Isn’t that pretty overtly a move towards socialism?” You’re starting to hear it in some quarters from conservatives the word socialism.

But it seems rather obvious that’s what we’re headed toward. In the debate, of course, one of the two candidates said that healthcare is a right. It’s not a responsibility or privilege or whatever. It’s a right. It’s a basic right. And so if he gets elected, that’s what’s going to happen. The same candidate has told us that in terms of education that college education also should be a right. The same thing that the state has done through the K through 12 system, which nobody in this room is particularly happy with, that same thing, you know, is going to take on, is going to more self-consciously happen in the university and college levels as well. This is now going to be seen as a right. Every kid should be able to go to college. Taxes will have to increase to pay for that. All that stuff.

So, socialism. But you know, really socialism, from one perspective, its beginning point in this country was the public school system, right?

I have a handout on the back of your outlines today. I’m sorry if you didn’t get one, but you know, first of all, the picture: a pyramid is a picture of the Egyptian view of the world. The pharaoh is God. He’s the mediator between heaven and earth at the top of the pyramid. And you as people are just little blocks. You have no existence, no meaning apart from the pyramid, apart from the state. And increasingly, it seems like that’s what we’re headed toward in the context of creeping socialism, or at least walking, or maybe galloping socialism, in the context of the economic problems.

We were privileged to have Dr. Atwood in Sunday school this morning and he mentioned pragmatism is one of the great gods of our age and it is and that’s what you’re hearing from these candidates. “Well, what’s important is what will work.” By party spirit we don’t mean ideology or philosophy being a bad thing. You should have a governing philosophy over who you are and what you, how you make decisions. But we don’t have that much anymore. What we have is a running toward pragmatism: “What will work?”

This handout on your second page is a set of seven propositions from a book called “Poison Drops in the Federal Senate: The School Question from a Parental and Non-Sectarian Standpoint.” That’s the actual title. The book was published in 1886, the original writings of Zachariah Montgomery. He was nominated to be assistant attorney general. His nomination was quashed because of his views on education and the warnings he put out about the then-growing compulsory public education system in America. And the book is interesting from several levels.

By the way, it was republished and reprinted by St. Thomas Press. I mentioned several weeks ago T. Robert Ingram, publisher of “The Just Tax,” that little thing. Other books by T. Robert Ingram: “The World Under God’s Law,” “Schools Weighed in the Balance.” Ingram was an important force to help our church understand some issues in its development. And he’s been kind of one of those men that have been forgotten over the last 15 years in this church. And here’s another book that Ingram and his publishing house, St. Thomas Press, published.

Montgomery, what he did was at this point in 1886, we had certain states where compulsory education was going on. It had begun in Massachusetts in 1647 with the passage of the Old Deluder Act. And you have to know that the origin of the modern public school system came in from Massachusetts. And no, it wasn’t because they’re as liberal as they are now. It was because they were self-conscious Christians who said that unless children know their Bibles, can read and write, can read well enough to know their Bibles, that the old deluder—the deceiver, Satan—will deceive them. And so we need to teach kids how to read. And so they provided for a common system of public education, the public schools in Massachusetts. Their explicit purpose and vision was to teach children to read their Bibles. We’re left with the shell of what that was without the center of it.

By the way, another great factor in producing the modern public school system was Martin Luther, who we’re going to celebrate in two and a half weeks as a great Protestant Reformation reformer. And he was and is. And Luther really, he gave a sermon on the obligation of parents to send their children to school. That was the name of the sermon. And he had a whole set of educational proposals that provided for compulsory education enforced by the magistrates. Much as I can tell, I think that it wasn’t funded through taxation originally, his idea. It was funded, I think, by the church actually, and it was explicitly Christian, of course. But the point is that the idea of kids coming together in a school and getting compulsory education, you know, at the force of compulsion by the civil state, this came from the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther. And we could talk about the implications of this for the Renaissance and through the knowledge of the world that came as a result of all this. I mean there were many good things to come out of it.

So but originally this idea of schools, particularly compulsory schools, in Massachusetts provided for by public funds, Massachusetts provided for by church funds, Germany and Luther—these are Christian ideas. So we have to be careful how we think of these things. We’re left with this rotting husk of zero godliness at all left in the system. But understand where it came from.

Now Zachariah Montgomery in 1886 could compare states like Massachusetts where compulsory education for all kids was going on and states like Virginia where there was very little public schools—we would call them. There was a wide variety of different educational methods being used by parents. And so he could compare these and what he showed in 1886 in these tables in this book was that suicide rates were much higher in states with public schools. Crime was 100 times more likely in states with public schools. Insanity rates higher. So he just showed through pragmatic evidence that this is a bad deal. We shouldn’t do this increasing nationalization of the public education system that was happening in 1886. And he saw it as a bad thing. He predicted everything that would come to pass. And he saw one of the big issues as being the idea of the breakdown of parental authority and being supplanted by the state. And so he thought that was why these statistics said what they said.

Now I said Martin Luther was involved in all this as well and it’s true he in his sermon on the duty of sending children to school in 1530, he does set up this system, but he also said this in his educational writings: “Where holy scriptures do not reign, there I emphatically advise no one to place his child. Everything that does not employ the word of God increasingly must become corrupt.”

The point of exodus for Christians from the public school system probably should have happened back in the 1800s when they were being developed. But for sure when prayers in the public schools were outlawed—Christian prayers—that was the death knell. That was the point at which the public schools are now the Babylonian schools. That’s what they are. And we’ll talk about whether we can engage in those things or not.

But Zachariah Montgomery wrote these series of propositions. And this is a talking point. This is a talking point in the context of the Mars Hill of our day of electoral politics and education and all this stuff. Listen to this first sentence: “Parents are bound by the law of nature, each according to his ability to properly feed, clothe, and educate their own children.” Parents are obligated to feed, clothe, and educate their own children. We would say the children that God has entrusted to them. That seems like a pretty rational statement that most people, almost all people, when he wrote it would agree with.

And when we started talking about this 20 years ago at Reformation Covenant Church, we were saying, “Well, you wouldn’t want the state providing for, you know, universal meals for children or universal clothes for children, would you?” But now the problem is 25 years later, they do provide for universal meals for children. And the churches of Oregon City assisted. Now the state says, “Well, yeah, we have a school lunch program and it’s not limited by high income. All children need a good lunch. And so they all need to have a good lunch to learn correctly. So we do have to give them lunch. And so even in the summer, well, they’re used to having state-provided lunches. And so let’s continue to do that.” And so that’s what they do this last summer.

They have distribution points here in Oregon City, but they’re not graded by income whether you could get the lunch or not. You could send your children down to get the state lunches this last summer at a couple of places here in Oregon City and some of the churches in Oregon City. Good men, good churches participated in that program. But if we go back to some of these basic truths, I think most people still would see the acceptability of that statement: “Parents have an obligation to feed, clothe, and educate their own children.” At least they’d go with the feeding and clothing. And then you could show them, “Well, look what’s happened. Why would I, making 25, 30,000 a year, pay property taxes to pay for the education of someone whose child is in the public schools who makes a lot more money than that? What is that all about?”

So Montgomery attacked this basic idea. Now he went on to say that it’s the public duty to assist at public expense in furnishing the necessary means wherewith to properly feed, clothe and educate children whose parents are unable to do so. So he called for mandatory benevolence programs. We would probably say we would think that benevolence belongs in the hands of the church and families. But Montgomery had a lot of interesting things to say in this book and these seven principles are very interesting.

He says under principle number four: “All such parents as are neither mentally nor morally unfit to have the custody of children are entitled and in duty bound to select for the education of their own children schools wherein they believe that neither the teachers, the associations nor the kind of instruction given will seriously endanger either their health, their lives or their morals, but will best promote their temporal and eternal welfare.”

He’s saying what the scriptures say in Deuteronomy 6. You’ve got an obligation to raise your child up and you’ve got an obligation, you’re duty bound to raise them up in a way that wouldn’t be dangerous to their morals. That would seem to say that turning, you know, Johnny over at six or seven years of age to a government school system that says that at best God is irrelevant to public education and at worst we’re going to start teaching him early about homosexuality and get him to help to think through who he is in terms of sexual orientation and then would actually prohibit Christian perspectives on sexuality from being discussed in the classroom—that’s the sort of place we have now and that’s the option you have. And I think that Zachariah Montgomery is right. You really can’t do that.

Interesting also in proposal number six, he says: “Tuition when at public expense should embrace a good common English and business education.” I like that: English and business education. We went down and spent a week with Rushdoony many years ago and he said, “What should we do about elder training? We need some elders. How should we train them?” Well, he says, “The first thing you got to do is teach them economics, because pastors with abstract studies tend to get abstracted out from what the real-life world is all about. And pastors have to be managers of churches.” Now, they have eventually deacons if they get large enough to handle finances. But economics, how to live within a budget, what is the basic idea of how does economics work? How does business work? Everybody in life has to know that, but nobody knows that anymore. I mean, people know it somewhat, but they don’t know it much anymore. And as a result, the whole financial system has come off the rails. Business education should be absolutely critical, I think, because it grounds what would otherwise become sort of an abstract conceptual thing that’s detached from reality. It grounds it right to reality.

You know, economics comes from two words: oikos, nomos. Oikos is household. Nomos is law. It’s the law of the household. Every household engages in economics. And it’s a little broader than just dollars and cents. So that’s what I just wanted to make a point of that.

Here’s one other thing, and we’ll return to this when we talk about the ballot measures, but continuing on in proposition number seven. In the middle of this proposition, he says (where does the sentence start?), well, he’s talking about compensation for these teachers that’ll be provided for poor people. “Which compensation should be proportionate to the progress made by the pupil during such period of tuition in the legally appointed secular branches, said progress to be ascertained by examiners duly elected or appointed in such a manner as may be provided by law.”

So, how are we going to pay these teachers who are going to teach the kids whose parents don’t have either the mental fitness or the financial means to provide for an education? We’re going to pay them based upon how well the kids do. We’re going to base their pay on performance, Montgomery said in 1886. And somehow that remains a controversial issue down to our very day. One of the two ballot measures—that’s all it says—pay for performance. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

So, education. One other thing before we move on, I want to make sure I mention that you should go to the literature rack today. Lots of stuff in the literature rack. Dr. Atwood brought four different handouts from the NSA. They’re in the rack. Our Life 2009 trip brochure is in the literature distribution rack right out that door. The head of household notes from our last head of household meeting and the proposals, the CRC proposals that we talked about, are in the literature rack. The newly revised strategy map of Reformation Covenant Church is in the literature rack.

I mentioned last week James B. Jordan’s coming newsletter. It came out this week. It’s called “Evil Empire.” In it, he combats the idea that the United States is probably an empire at all in the traditional sense. And if it is an empire, it’s not evil. And he really attacks this idea of moral equivalency between the United States and the Soviet Union as being absolutely absurd. Now, excellent publication. He also goes through a brief overview of scriptures relative to the Roman Empire and he attacks the notion that the Roman Empire is the great foil or bad guy boogeyman in the New Testament. It isn’t. And if you read the book of Revelation in a way that says it is, you get the whole thing all mixed up.

And then finally, he attacks the notion that violence is always, you know, not a good thing. He says God is perpetually violent against people in hell. So don’t somehow get mixed up with kind of an incarnational paracoretic view of the way God is that then tells you things opposite from the scriptures: that civil magistrates are supposed to be ministers of vengeance. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Our voter guide is there: biblical ballot measure voters guide. In addition, the Oregon Family Council voters guide is there, both candidate and measures. I’m a little disappointed I didn’t read all the measures ones, but every scripture text I inserted, I do the rough draft for it. All stripped. I don’t think there’s a single scripture reference left. And this isn’t a publication that tells you at the opening page, “It is a Christian voters’s guide founded on Christian principles.”

There’s a reason why we called ours a biblical ballot measure voters’s guide. It is a sad thing, but true, that the word Christian now becomes kind of watered down. We want to base our Christian beliefs on what the scriptures teach. And that’s what I tried to do in my version of the voters’s guide. So all that stuff’s there, that’ll help you sort through these ballot measures we’re talking about, including the educational one.

One other thing I wanted to mention about Zachariah Montgomery: he also talks about how education becomes political, and I’ve been saying this for years. Whenever education is controlled by the state, it’ll become political. And that’s what’s happened. And this happens right in the context of the curriculum itself. You know, people say, “Well, I sent my kid down the public school cuz he’s got a Christian school teacher.”

And while it’s true that Jesus said that servants will become like their masters, what really is the master, I think, in the public school systems is the curriculum that are state-mandated. That’s what Johnny and Susie are learning to read, to understand principles, is their curriculum. One of the theologians, I’m not sure I’m saying his name right, but he says this: one of the big problems with Christians in public schools. They say, “Well, we got some Christian people there.” And he’s saying, you know, it’s not those Christian teachers who are discipling your kids. It’s that curriculum that’s providing the content for what they’re learning. And that’s what the curriculum, the teachers have to teach. That’s discipling your kids.

Well, Montgomery, he mentions Webster’s dictionary and how he says the Webster’s dictionary as published in 1859 defines constitution in this way: “In free states, the constitution is paramount to the statutes or laws enacted by the legislature. It’s paramount to the statutes and laws limiting and controlling its power. And in the United States, the legislature is created and its powers designated by the constitution.”

Pretty clear. We’d say, “Yeah, yeah, I understand that.” And then he cites the new version of Webster’s dictionary that now is being used in 1886 in the public schools and children are learning this definition of constitution: “The principle or fundamental laws which govern a state or other organized body of man and are embodied in written documents or implied in the institutions or usages of the country or society.”

So now the constitution becomes the total corpus of the laws that are produced and it’s the usages of the society that comprise the constitution. That’s the change in definition. And so what Montgomery saw coming was just what we ended up with. The constitution clearly doesn’t give us the authority to do what the legislators just passed in terms of nationalizing the banks. But nobody cares because for a hundred years they’ve been taught that the constitution isn’t paramount, doesn’t control what the legislature can do. So we’ve got difficulties.

Let’s step back now and look at one of the central texts in the scriptures on education, Deuteronomy 6. So let’s look carefully and slowly at Deuteronomy 6 and try to think through some things that are said and not said in this context.

Now, as I said, first of all, you have to understand this is not some isolated text. It’s not, you know, all on its own. This is the beginning of a whole set of sermon. This is the beginning of a sermon on the Ten Commandments. And this is the first and great commandment given to us in Deuteronomy 6.

So first of all, before we talk about it, you have to understand its context. What it’s going to be talking about here are all the statutes, judgments, and commandments. What God is saying is the Ten Words. And I’m going to give you specific stuff to talk about in terms of those Ten Words and that really is the content that’s being described in Deuteronomy 5:31-6:9.

So the context is the first commandment section of Deuteronomy 6. Secondly, what we have in this is a call to Moses to teach. It’s sort of interesting how education is immediately right in the context of it. Verse 31 is God talking to Moses. “As for you, stand here by me. God says, ‘I will speak to you all the commandments, the statutes and the judgments which you shall teach them that they may observe them in the land which I am giving them to possess.’” So it’s an educational process the way the text is laid out here.

So it’s a, you know, you know, this is Moses in terms of worship. God just said, “Do this, do this, do this,” in terms of the Ten Commandments. God gives Moses a whole interesting set of analogies and descriptions which Moses is then to teach to the children of Israel. It’s didactic from the get-go. It’s educational from the get-go. Here he sets Moses up as a teacher, not a mere scribe to exactly say what God says, but as a teacher to Israel of these commandments.

So when we read about fathers and kids, the father—the heavenly father—is giving a child, Moses, the word. And Moses, the father of the nation, is giving the sons, the children of Israel, right? Corporate designation. He’s giving them instruction in what God has told them to do.

Third, in verse 32, Moses exhorts Israel to very close attention and obedience to the Ten Words. Verse 32: “Therefore, you shall be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.”

Now, Moses is telling the people and he’s saying, before he starts telling what they have to do, he says, “You’ve got to be careful.” Now, when we looked at Jeremiah 29, why are they in exile? God tells him why as the chapter unfolds. The basic charge he says: you weren’t careful, listening attentively to my words. He said, “This is how we get into the land and if we don’t do this, we get kicked out of the land. We live in exile because the church as a whole has not listened carefully to what God says in these Ten Commandments.”

I’ll give you an example of how sloppy we are. There’s a verse in Deuteronomy: “Don’t muzzle the ox when he’s, you know, treading out the grain.” And we read that. “Well, what the heck does that mean?” If people make fun of it, you know, “Don’t sow a field of two seeds. Well, what’s the problem with that? You know, who would do it? Number one, what does it mean?”

And then we read in the New Testament where Paul says, “Does God care about oxes?” No, this wasn’t about oxes. And he says, “Now, God does care for animals. He wants us to be tender toward our beast. But in terms of relative, he says you got it all wrong if you think God is telling you how to plow. That wasn’t the point. He said this verse was written altogether for our sake. And by our, he means the apostolic teachers were to be supported by the tithe.” He says the point of the thing originally was tithing—to provide for ministers. And we say, “Boy, he’s deep. He has inspired knowledge or something.”

The problem is that he says it in such a way as to make us feel like idiots if we didn’t get it. Why is that? It’s because we are idiots. It’s because we haven’t listened carefully to what God wrote in this book. Paul knew it. Paul knew that Deuteronomy was the deal.

If you want to know what the Ten Commandments are, ask yourself if you know the Ten Commandments in order. When you go home today, see if you can write them out in summary form at least. If you don’t, get working. Get cracking on it. And the Ten Commandments are explained, as I said before, in the case laws, Exodus 20-23 and Leviticus 19. But particularly here, we got a whole book that’s a sermon on the Ten Commandments. Is this a good place to teach your kids, digging? Yeah.

And what Paul knew was he knew he was really familiar with this cuz he listened carefully in school, right? And to his teachers and masters. What he knew was that the tenth commandment section began with this strange saying about muzzling an ox. And he knew that the tenth commandment section of Deuteronomy ended with an emphasis on tithing. The key to a lack of covetousness is tithing, giving to God the proper tithe and using it according to his desires.

Paul knew all that. Paul knew that several times in Deuteronomy, God uses strange laws—”don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk”—as a picture, a little proverb about something got nothing to do with cooking and animal husbandry. It’s got to do with other truths, using what’s supposed to help a child to hurt a child, proper attitude toward the Sabbath. And in the case of, he knew muzzling the ox meant “pay the pastor, give the Levites the tithe and if you don’t you’re going to be covetous.” So that’s an example of how people regularly say, “Gosh, Paul really is deep. He could figure this stuff out.” No. Uh-uh. He just did the first part here at the beginning of the sermon on the Ten Commandments. He understood: “Oh, got to listen carefully. Got to look at the structure. Got to recognize that God is using little, you know, pictures at times to drive home a concept that he then explains in detail.”

The concept is tithing. And the picture is “don’t muzzle an ox.” So tithing means “pay your Levitical ministers.” This is what we need to do. Luther, when he began the schools—the compulsory schools—the most important thing he said to teach them is the Bible. Have Bible everywhere. Have a purpose. The curriculum. Get them to know this stuff. Get them to know the structure of the scriptures. Get them to know what a sermon looks like. Get them to know how God communicates. Get them to know that God uses little illustrations about, you know, oxes being muzzled while they’re treading out the grain for other purposes. And if we knew our Bibles, if we’d listened carefully to the Ten Commandments, we wouldn’t have slipped into the exile situation.

We can’t even keep… I mean, ask you: Are we in exile or are we not? What percentage of Christians keep the Sabbath, the fourth commandment? Oh, well, 2%, maybe. I don’t know. We don’t know it and we certainly don’t pay attention to it diligently and carefully.

So God says that in this educational process the student is to listen very carefully to what the instructor is telling him.

Fourth, the key to avoiding exile is walking in Yahweh’s ways. Verse 33: “You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you that you may live and that it may be well with you and that you may prolong your days in the land which you shall possess.”

Listen carefully, walk in his ways, and you’ll live long there. And Jeremiah says, “You’re out of there because you’re not going to live long there for a while because you didn’t listen carefully. You didn’t walk in my ways.”

Now, this tells us something a little broader. It tells us that instruction is not just an intellectual exercise or not even primarily an intellectual exercise. It’s an exercise that intends to lead to a walk, right? This is a sermon. He’s going to teach this stuff, but the end goal of the teaching is not so the kid can memorize the Ten Commandments. He’s to memorize the Ten Commandments so they’ll walk in the way of Yahweh. It’s the walk. It’s the Torah.

So if we think we can satisfy Yahweh by just keeping the Ten Commandments and making sure every day we done those, no, he wants a comprehensive walk. Everything that you do is already being hinted at here. Your walk, your conversation in life is to be pleasing to Yahweh. In fact, to walk in his own ways. You’re supposed to walk like he will walk, like Jesus would walk when he came.

Fifth, fearing God by intergenerational careful observance. So now we get to intergenerational chapter 6 verse one. “Now this is the commandment. These are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you. So he’s getting now, okay, there’s getting into the meat, starting first commandment stuff that you may observe them in the land. He’s teaching you that you may observe them.”

So again it’s application. It’s credenda and agenda. There’s no credenda if you don’t get to agenda. If you’re not observing you haven’t learned. Learning is not an intellectual exercise. It involves that. It involves obedience in the land 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, so first of all let’s stop there. You can fear God to keep, probably “by keeping” would be a better translation here: fear God by keeping.

Fear of God always messes us up. What does it mean to fear God? You fear God by keeping his commandments. Okay, so we’ll talk more about that in a couple of minutes. “Fear God by keeping all his commandments which I command you and your sons and your grandsons all the days of your life that your days may be prolonged. Therefore, hear, O Israel, be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Now, we have an intergenerational instruction that’s supposed to go on that involves obedience, walking in the way, fearing by keeping his these commandments that you instruct them in. And it’s and you’re supposed to multiply and increase.

Now, that’s the same language Jeremiah brings in Jeremiah 29. “Have kids, multiply and increase, right? And be careful to listen to the word of God.” In other words, words.

So here, while we’re living in exile, if that’s a good analogy—and it is an analogy—but if it is a good analogy for us, this becomes very important to us because in Jeremiah’s day at least, the exile was multigenerational. So what do we do as we’re having these kids and going about ordinary life? Well, he tells us here what to do. We’re to transmit the faith by transmitting the context of the Ten Commandments that God has given us. Here as Christians, we’re supposed to walk in Yahweh’s ways. We’ve been saved to live. Remember, the purpose of the Christian faith is not to save you from hell. The purpose of Christ’s work was to recall you to your dominion task in the proper changing and transforming of the world. That’s the overarching deal here.

So your children are saved to the end that they might transform the world and exercise dominion. And the way to do that, as Paul says in Romans, is to use the law as a proper tool for this exercise, not to be ruled by the law as a tutor, but now we use the law to exercise dominion. So we’ve got to know this law so that we can exercise dominion. And this is what we’re supposed to pass on to our kids. This is the content of the basic educational requirements of parenting: to transmit to our children a knowledge of God’s ways, and in transmitting that knowledge in a way that would cause them to walk in the ways of Yahweh.

And if we do this, then we’re going to live long. Then we’ll multiply greatly. Then we’ll get out of this problem over time.

Now, verse six is the great Shema. This is the one thing that’s said every day in an Orthodox Jewish family. The great Shema, of course, said in Hebrew, not English. Verse three, I’m sorry, rather, I’m sorry, we’re not there yet.

So the basic idea is to bring up our children in a fear and a knowledge of Yahweh. This is the same thing it’s told us in Ephesians 6:4. “You fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Now, in our covenant statement, we said fear. That’s Flynn A. earlier. Fear. Nurture and admonition. Because fear is really connected to all this by these texts in Deuteronomy. Fear has this idea of reverence and love. But it also has this idea of a holy, uh, not looking forward to the prospects of God when we anger him, when we disobey him. Fear is not completely devoid of, you know, being careful and cautious and having an anxiety about not wanting to have dad punish us. It involves that.

So all of that comes together and it’s simply stated in the household code of Ephesians 6 as: “Fathers, don’t provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.” And those things are opposed to each other. And so if we don’t do this, we’re kind of, you know, exposing our children to wrath, it would seem.

So our job is simply: the basic educational task is this transmission of what Deuteronomy is all about, the Ten Commandments, the way of life.

Then we come to the great Shema and the great command to love God. Chapter 6:4-6. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now, this can be translated different ways, but the idea is pretty simple. Hear, O Israel, Shema, have big ears. Pay close attention. The content of what these Ten Commandments are telling us is the character of God itself: the Lord our God alone. He shall be the Lord your God alone. He has basic unity even though he exists in the diversity of persons, but he is to be your only lord of lords and king of kings.

So here, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

So here’s the great Shema. The great message is to love God. And this is what Jesus said, right? The first and great commandment. Love the Lord your God. And he’s quoting Deuteronomy here with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Or here in Deuteronomy, with all your soul, strength, and heart. So in other words, all that we are, the heart represents all that we have, our soul, our inner life, our strength, our discipline of what we do and say, all of our capacities—everything that we have is supposed to be being used in the love of God.

Now that means that whatever schooling you attend to has as its great goal the love of God and wanting to please him in your walk, okay? So education is formed by this great calling of all of our capacities—intellectual, emotional, you know, in terms of discipline, physical strength, et cetera. All these things are to be used to love God. That’s the content of what we’re supposed to do. That’s the goal, rather, of what it is we’re supposed to be listening up to accomplish.

And these things shall be in your heart. So you can memorize these things. They’re to form the basis for who you are.

Now, in Deuteronomy 10:12 and 13 this loving is talked about. Listen to now: “Now listen, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes which I command you today for your good.”

So you see, it’s all wrapped together again. Loving God, fearing God, keeping his commandments, serving him, walking in his ways. These are all wrapped together. So fearing God is loving God and loving God involves the fear of God and it involves the walking in his ways and it involves an understanding of his word at the very heart of our being. So that’s what our educational goal is: the love of God and it’s a holistic approach to it.

Verses 6 and 7 again: intergenerational instruction in the Ten Words. “You shall teach them (what are them? the Ten Commandments sermon he’s going to give them the Ten Commandments) 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.”

So here it is. Here’s the locus. Here’s the great text for homeschoolers. We got kids with us, and we’re walking in the way, and we’re lying down, we’re getting up. We’re having family worship in the morning, maybe at the evening. We’re praying. We’re talking about the Ten Commandments. And they’re supposed to be right there alongside of us. And so that’s where all this education happens.

Well, yeah, there is an importance of that, that as you raise children, they should know that all of your life is serving God who’s redeemed you through the merits of Christ so that you can keep his law as the way of life. The walk of Yahweh is what you’re engaged in. And you should be able to talk to your kids about that. “This is why I’m doing this. This is why we’re not going to the movie this afternoon. It’s fourth commandment stuff, okay? This is why we’re doing this. This is why we’re doing that.” Relating it back to the Ten Commandments.

Now, if you know more than just the Ten Commandments, if you know some of those case laws, if you know stuff about the ox muzzling being related to paying the pastor guy, you could talk a lot more about that stuff to your kids, but here the basic idea is that the instruction that’s going on, this intergenerational instruction is specifically tied, you know, not first and foremost to vocation or anything else, but it’s to the Ten Commandments. That’s what he’s talking about here.

And then, the Ten Words and all that we do and think: “You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your eyes.”

He doesn’t say “bind them on your hand” or “put them between your eyes.” They’re to be as something on your hand and between your eyes. And you know the Jews have phylacteries and mezuzos or whatever they’re called—little boxes. What a joke. Because what they’re supposed (to do)… now if that helps you remember that whatever you put your hand to do, whatever your eyes see and your mind thinks is to be understood in relationship to the law of God, okay?

But usually it’s some kind of formalistic idea of doing this that doesn’t really accomplish the purpose. What’s being said here is that while this is religious instruction, it’s religious instruction that impacts every discipline of intellectual thought you’re going to attain because that’s where your mind is. That law is on your forehead. It’s between your eyes. Everything that you think about has to be seen in relationship to your love for God and the relationship to his commandments. And everything that your hand does, your work, then thinking and working credentials for the purpose of exercising dominion by keeping the law as those who have been redeemed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So it’s a comprehensive call to teach the Ten Commandments, the one great commandment—love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—in such a way as to impact your children intellectually and volitionally. What they think and what they do.

And then finally, verse 9: the Ten Words in our homes and cities. Now, this is addressed not to parents here. O Israel, corporate Israel is being addressed here. Now, he’s got some stuff about parents in there, but this is not all about parents and families. It’s broader than that. And that’s what we’re reminded of that at the end of this section of verse 9.

“You shall write them on the doorpost of your house.” There’s the forehead, doorpost. Great. Good ministry. Praise God for it. Here’s that verse: “First they got it from, right? Put these things as doorposts on your house. So take the word of God, find ways to apply it to your children. You know, put it up in your home in certain ways but apply it in your home. May it be at the door. What are the doorposts? Well, they’re the entrance place. Your home is a place that’s dominated by these strong doorposts that sort of hold the thing up. And so that’s the word of God—that’s an understanding of the Ten Commandments that applies to everything that we think and do—that should apply to your house.

But then it says, “and on your gates.” Well, you know, you got a gate at our house. All you go to Poland, they all got gates. They all got fences. Uh-uh. Gate in the Old Testament is almost always… I’ve never found an instance where it’s not if we don’t… is the text and we exegete the text, we’re going to say, “What are gates in the Bible?” Gates in the Bible are city gates. They’re the political house. You got your house and then the city has a house and the gates protect the city house.

So what he’s saying is: the Ten Commandments have an application in terms of your homes certainly, but he’s also saying they have an application in terms of your cities, your gates there. And it broadens out Deuteronomy 6 from being just a little household thing to being the kind of comprehensive world and life view thing that we really know it to be with the rest of the scriptures.

Oh boy. Okay. Quickly, some observations on Deuteronomy 6 and schools.

Law is prohibition. Thousands of points alike. All kinds of educational alternatives are starting to flourish in the context of churches like ours, Moscow, Idaho, CRC. People are trying all kinds of interesting things. We got Kings Academy. We got total homeschoolers. We got some people sending the kids off to certain courses at Clackamas, certain courses at a tutoring service. We got Amy teaching a couple of kids other than her own. We got all things going on here. Lots of stuff. Who’s right and who’s wrong?

Well, whoever is doing that without the parent overseeing the education of young children to the end of loving God with all the knowledge you learn, that’s the one doing it wrong. There’s nothing here about method. There’s a description of the general course of life when your kids are walking around with you. Great. But there’s no prohibition against different kinds of education here.

I mean, we could draw and we have analogy out and think it’s not the right job of the civil government to do what Luther did, but maybe it is. You got to find a specific verse prohibiting an action before you can call it sin or you’ve got to find the action somehow not the best course of wisdom because it doesn’t meet the goal of training up kids who love God. So in everything they think and all that they do, their education must be governed by an application to love God, applying the Ten Commandments.

So remember, law is primarily negative in the scriptures, which gives us a great deal of freedom to have all kinds of educational alternatives flourish. Now some may be wise, are better than others, okay, fine. But please, let’s remember (and I think we’re doing good at this), I’m not doing this because we’re not, but just remind ourselves: we want to see all kinds of things flourish. I’m not so sure it’s wrong. Well, I don’t think it is wrong. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s let’s move on.

So first of all, understand that there’s a positive call to have your child guided in education toward the love of God and knowledge of the Ten Commandments. But there’s no prohibition against all kinds of methods to accomplish that.

Israel and parents.

You know, as I said, this relates both to Israel and to specific parents, right? So we don’t want to take this text and narrow it down to just a set of household regulations. It’s much more comprehensive than that. And some people think that because this is written to all Israel, (this is probably what Martin Luther was thinking) that means the civil economy, the government, Israel, as a corporate body has a responsibility to make sure parents are doing this stuff. And so he can preach a sermon called “On the Duty or Obligation to Send Your Child to School.”

Now just before you get Luther wrong, those schools were two hours for boys and one hours for girls. You want them at home most of the time. So but that was his model. But the point is, here is that you know there’s some idea that Deuteronomy 6 gives us some obligation on the part of the civil state to at least encourage and praise the well-doing of Christian parents who are going about educating their kids, right? And maybe to punish an evildoing parent that won’t teach their kid to read the Bible well enough, okay?

So there’s room in Deuteronomy 6 for some obligations, not just on parents, but on the civil economy as well.

Now, the rabbis took these verses and said, “Well, in addition to the law, you got to teach vocation because any parent that doesn’t teach his child a vocation is teaching his child to be a thief.” Now, Deuteronomy 6 is about religious instruction. But it has implications, right? If we want to get our child not to be a thief, that means we got to teach him how to work with his hands and actually to give money to poor people.

So it seems like somewhere as we oversee our children’s education, we have to be thinking about vocation. I mean, it’s again: economics and theology should go hand in hand in elder training. Praise God that Flynn A. had a wise instructor at his Bible school who told him, “Well, you know, if you still want to be a good [pastor], go work, be in the workplace for a while and if you still want to [go into ministry], several years of that—you still want to be a pastor, then become a pastor. I think you’d be a real good one.” Flynn’s had experience in the workplace. He’s not some young guy who’s never worked, doesn’t understand economics. He understands all that stuff. He’ll make a great pastor because of that. And that’s why I rushed him. He said, “Economics, essential to the training of Christian pastors, essential to the training of Christian children.” Economics.

It ties what we’re doing in terms of our education to a fuller sense of the Ten Commandments, giving our children, plus, forget the not healing thing. Remember, the overarching context for education is the exercise of dominion. It’s transforming the world. You got to know stuff in order to transform the world.

See, kids by our size and kids grown up. Even if we take Deuteronomy 6 to talk about kids as they’re walking in the way, how long do they do that for? I mean, kids grow up and as they grow up, your educational alternative to them probably will expand, right? I mean, people say, “Well, since it’s got to be Ten Commandments, every text has to be written by a Christian.” Well, no. You’re supposed to be overseeing what they learn by looking at things that non-Christians [have written]. It may well be that non-Christians can write books, conduct classes that’ll be useful to your kids. And as they grow up, increasingly in this culture in Babylon, that’s where they’re going to go for high education the same way that Daniel did.

So there’s a difference between kids walking alongside us and kids grown up. And we can see this difference also in what kind of economy we’re in. We’re to apply the general equity of this law, these laws. These laws were given in an agrarian and agricultural economy. And it’s different in an urban and technological culture. You know why you didn’t have pencils and slates in the Old Testament or calculators? Because you’re supposed to multiply on the face of the earth.

Going a little long had to wake you up. But the point is you’re supposed to apply the general equity of the thing and in our education will look different in a technological society, an urban environment than it does in an agricultural environment. And more specialization is what happens as economies grow and in urban areas. Education takes on more of a specialized cast at certain points. Now, you might go about getting that specialized instruction through an apprenticeship program, through taking a class directly from somebody, maybe having 10 people take a class from a business guy, maybe going off to Clackamas Community College to find out how to do welding or computer science or whatever it is.

There’s different ways to accomplish it, but the point is education is different in a technological society. So we’ve moved from the immediate context in which Deuteronomy is given into more of a specialized urban culture and education has to reflect that.

Look at Moses in Acts 7:22. Here’s what it says about Moses and it’s not putting this down. Moses is being commended. It says that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and deeds. Moses had an education like Daniel got in Babylon. Moses got that in Egypt. So don’t think that it’s wrong to send kids who are grown up and have their Christian worldview in place and who are understanding the Ten Commandments and evaluating that stuff in that way to go off and learn from the Babylonian astronomers or the Egyptian wisdom guys. Moses did it. God used it with Moses.

Moses, okay, it’s commended to us in Acts 7:22.

In 2 Kings 10, King Ahab had tutors for his kids. And this was a normal practice amongst the kings of Israel—tutors for his kids. He didn’t teach them directly. They probably didn’t do a lot of things directly.

And in Daniel 1, of course, Daniel is given three years of instruction in the language and literature of the Caldeans. Now, I can bet you that the literature of the Caldeans didn’t look much like the book of Deuteronomy. And it’s interesting that Daniel didn’t bulk at that. Now, he did bulk at eating at the table of the king. Interestingly enough, he knew when to bulk. He balked when the prohibition against prayer was going up. He balked against giving obeisance to the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, right? He knew when to bulk.

He didn’t bulk when he was told to, at 18 years of age, probably a young guy to go to Babylon. You, and point of fact, did he go there and throw a fit and, you know, be overt about things and get himself kicked out? No. He learned. He was like Moses. He learned what he could learn. He knows that overarching everything is the providence of God. He knew how to spit out the chaff and to take what was useful—about geometry or whatever it was they taught him. And as a result, at the end of three years, those Hebrew boys who knew their Ten Commandments because they’d been raised up by Jeremiah and taught the Ten Commandments, they put all the understanding of the Caldeans in the context of knowing what God really is about in the world and what the Ten Commandments tell us what to do, too.

And they were at the top of the class. They didn’t just go to USC. They were on the honor roll. And they weren’t just on the honor roll. They were, you know, top of the class is what they were.

See? So let’s not get all worked up about thinking that somehow higher education has to be explicitly Christian. Or also, of course, another implication of this is that clearly Babylon U was not financed by the good-natured offerings of the people. This was Nebuchadnezzar. You know, you know, why Daniel’s there is because he took him there. He stole him. He stole the gold out of the temple. They would conquer cities and take everything they had and then they would use that to build up their educational institution. That was direct plunder.

I don’t think the Bible calls taxation plunder. At night, I’d have to see where it does, but this is direct plunder. And still Daniel had no compunction, no problem with making use of that plunder-supplied higher education.

So higher education is very useful for certain people who are called to be leaders and it’s not wrong to get that in the context of a university setting or even in the context of you know wise men from their own particular perspective who are ethical rebels against God. Bible commends Moses and says Daniel did the same thing. So let’s talk now about measures 58 and 60.

And I bring all this up because I don’t even know if we should be voting on them. John Loftton once said, you know, these two measures are an attempt to reform the public schools. And Loftton said, “Reforming the public schools, what are you going to do? Bounce the rubble.” So that was one of his great lines: “bounce the rubble.” That’s how you can reform the public school system.

There are two measures. Want to go over them quickly. This will just take a minute. Measure 58, measure 60. Remember, these are statutes, not constitutions. That means the legislature can clean up whatever mess might be left. These are really policy-setting measures.

Number one, measure 58: prohibits teaching public school students in a language other than English for more than two years. So the idea is we got illegal ill immigrants here. We got legal immigrants. Some of them don’t want to learn the language. So the public school accommodates different languages and they don’t make them learn English. So is that a problem or is that not a problem? Maybe it isn’t a problem. Some people think it isn’t a problem. I think it’s a problem.

Because Genesis 10 gives us the list of 70 nations. And it goes on to say this: “These were the sons of Shem according to their families, according to their languages and their lands, according to their nations.” It connects languages and nations. A national identity is tied in the scriptures. Genesis 10 again in Acts 2: people don’t hear all one language. They hear it in their own language. He verifies or authenticates national language as God does in the day of Pentecost. Each nation has a specific language.

So it’s not wrong for a nation to say, “This, our language is going to be English.” The CRC, our official language. We’ve got delegates from Poland, Russia, Japan, and other delegates, but our official language is English. And if you’re coming and don’t know English, you have to have an interpreter. We pass this as one of our laws. It’s not wrong to do that.

And so this is an attempt. Measure 58 is to get kids to learn, you know, the language. And additionally, we’re told we have to love the stranger, right? God loves the stranger and he expects us to as well. Leviticus 19:34: “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one from among you. You shall love him as yourself.”

He adds in Deuteronomy 10: “God administers justice for the fatherless and the widow. Loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. And then the next verse says, therefore, you love the stranger.”

It is not love to the stranger to let them continue in a path of not learning the language that will make them more successful in the nation that has that as its official language. It sounds—yeah, oh, it’s more loving. Just let them be. Don’t make them learn English. That’s not loving. Love says we want the best for you. We want you to prosper.

Now, a lot of people are going to vote for measure 58 because they don’t love the stranger. They’re tired of the alien illegal aliens, the immigrants. God says, “Give me your [hungry and tired].” The constitution [says]—no, no, no, no. The poem about the Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your huddled masses.” That’s the way we should be. We’re a light set on a hill. People want to come. We want to make sure it’s legal. We want to integrate them into the culture through language. But we’re supposed to love the stranger. That’s what God does.

But that love is not in contradiction to measure 58. It’s a way of loving them to ensure them that their children get to speak English as quick as possible. And that’s the policy set by that particular measure. So we recommend a yes on measure 58.

Then measure 59—well, here we go. Ballot title: “Teacher Classroom Performance, not Seniority, Determines Pay Raises. Most Qualified Teachers Retained Regardless of Seniority.”

So measure 60 says that performance should be the standard by which teachers are paid, not tenure. And whether they’re retained or fired should be based on performance, not how long they’ve been teaching. Seems like a no-brainer.

The scriptures, you know, 1 Timothy 5:17 says, “Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double pay.” They get double pay because they work good. It’s performance. If their performance is really up to snuff, they get more money is what he says. Several times in the New Testament, he says, “The worker is worthy of his wages.” The worker, one who is working. His work makes him worthy for getting wages, not just because he’s got called as a worker, but because he’s actually working.

So I think the scriptures are quite clear that we’re called to work and as a result of that we get wages based upon performance. Again in Luke 10:7 Jesus says the same thing. “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”

So performance-based pay, performance-based retention. I got a comment there that the Office, I couldn’t believe I was watching the Office that well, I wasn’t watching it. One of our family members was. The Office is a sitcom. I’m not recommending it necessarily. There’s a guy who heads up this office. He heads up a branch of I think it’s like an office supply place that sells office products. His name is Michael. He’s played by [a popular actor]. I don’t remember his name. And I just happened to watch for two minutes and he’s having lunch with [a woman] and the woman is evaluating one of Michael’s employees.

And she says, “Well, you know, there’s no way I can cut to the chase here. There’s no way I can go through this evaluation without recommending a termination of this employee. You got to be fired.”

So here’s Michael’s response. He says, “Oh, oh, you like, I just don’t want my employees thinking that their jobs depend on performance. Performance. I mean, what sort of place is that to call home?” Say you laugh. It’s supposed to be a joke line. But that’s what people say about the teachers. “We don’t want them to have their pay based on their performance.” So to me, it’s a rather obvious and kind of obvious deal, but it shows the great decline of our public education system that it’s not so obvious anymore.

Okay. Well, God says education is highly important. I don’t know if it’s worthwhile trying to clean up the public schools or not, but we’re going to live with the products of that public school. And so for that reason, I think it’s a yes on the same time. In our voters’s guide, we made quite a strong statement that it’s the obligation of Christian parents to provide for a distinctly Christian education. That the end result of what we think should be done in the public schools is its abolishment.

So that’s in the recommendation under measure 60 as well. But having said that, it seems like we should remember at least for ourselves that wages should be tied to performance and that our nation is not being harsh or somehow unkind to insist on a national language. We’re being biblical. That’s what the scriptures tell us.

Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for our young people. We thank you for our children. We thank you for the high calling and duty we have to teach them your word and your ways. Help us, Lord God, to intensify in this congregation our teaching of our children of the Ten Commandments and an understanding of them. Thank you for the great resources you’ve given to us, particularly this book of Deuteronomy, a set of a sermon on those 10 words.

Help us, Father, to instruct our children to evaluate everything that they think and learn and all that they put their hand to do in terms of their work on the basis of loving you, walking in your ways by obeying your commandments. Thank you that Jesus Christ freed us for this very purpose in his name we pray. Amen.