The Next Generation

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger. Once again we’re missing Bryan Broome, but he’ll be back soon, we hope.

We are kicking off a series on the book of Deuteronomy, and before we get started I wanted to clarify what kind of question we’re asking and starting to answer today, because it just never hurts to be super-clear about the gospel.

The gospel or the answer to “How do I become a Christian?” is just “Trust in Jesus.” It’s not complicated. Repent and believe, be baptized, trust in Jesus. That’s all there is to it. It’s not something you’ve done. It’s something that Christ did. He bought you with his blood.

So then the question that we’re asking today is, “What do Christians do?” which is a little bit different because it’s not, “We do trust in Jesus, but what else do we do?” We do lots of things, but they’re not salvific, so we’re asking the question, “What do Christians do?”

Micah 4 actually starts to say some things about this. It says, “Everyone will walk in the name of his god.” Greg is chuckling because that’s where he was going and this is a perfect transition – flawless.

Thank you for this hand-off of the baton. Tonight and the next few weeks are actually about handing off the baton.

For those of you who know the word, from my earliest years of studying theology I was, and continue to be, post-millennial. That is to say, without subscribing to particular details, I believe that Jesus wins in history. I believe that the Church will fulfill the Great Commission and that the nations will come to serve Jesus Christ, however preposterous that may seem at the moment.

I do not believe it will happen overnight, because 1) it hasn’t, but 2) the Bible never hints at such a thing. What the Bible keeps on talking about is long times, things that grow slowly like mustard seeds and leaven.

Anyway, given that perspective, there’s this passage in Micah that I never quite understood and it always nagged at me, like maybe I’m missing something and maybe I’m wrong about some things. Here’s how it begins. This is Micah 4 –

But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it.

And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.

Pre-millennialists would look at this and say, “Oh, this is a picture of what happens when Jesus returns,” but the traditional post-millennial explanation is more like this. The mountain of the house of the Lord, the temple, is an Old Testament symbol that we should be very familiar with for the kingdom of God, particularly as it relates to worship.

In the last days – that’s not the days just before Jesus comes, but that’s the days of Messiah, beginning with his first coming – God will exalt his kingdom, his Church, his temple, with the result that peoples and nations will flow unto it. It doesn’t say they will suddenly be there in a flash. This is a process. This is movement. In fact, there’s time for them to say to one another, “Come, let’s go,” so there’s this time of transition as the message passes from one people to another.

And at the same time, the reason for this is the law goes forth from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. The word of God is going out from the Church and calling the nations into the Church. Again, the very context is that of process. We’re not told how long, but it’s not something that necessarily is going to happen in a day.

Then in verse 3, “He shall judge among many peoples and rebuke strong nations afar off.” First you have to get to the strong nations because they’re afar off, so again this is a time thing. This is not describing something that’s going to happen really fast, but something that’s going to take some time. Again, we’re not told how much, but probably more than a few years, probably more than a few decades. It’s already taken 2,000 years.

The end goal is that after God has passed judgment on these nations and rebuked them – that is there’s going to be judgment, there’s going to be wars, there’s going to be plagues, there’s going to be things that we don’t like and that aren’t nice, but they’re going to be Christ swinging his scepter of iron and thrashing the nations to bring them into submission.

At the end of it, the nations beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. That is, all of the energy and monies they spend upon war now get turned to agriculture, to productive activity, to the dominion mandate.

St. Athanasius in On the Incarnation of the Word, even in his day said he saw it happening as the barbarian tribes came to Christ. They laid down their swords and started picking up plows. It’s a progressive thing that can develop over decades and centuries.

Augustine says something similar too in City of God. He says, “The whole world believes this.”

That’s interesting. Augustine was more post-millennial than people give him credit for. There are some hints here and there.

Or blame him for, depending on your perspective.

That too, yeah. “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,” an Old Testament figure dropped from the days of Solomon when the world is safe and you can go out and plow and reap and then sit back and enjoy the fruit of your hands. “None shall make them afraid.” War is over. God has promised it.

And then the verse that troubled me. “For all people will walk every one in the name of his god.” As a young person that sounded to me like it was just taking back everything he gave, that people will continue to walk in the name of their pagan gods, and how does that fit with everything and my understanding of what’s gone before? I was very confused for a very long time. What I’ve finally come to understand is he’s stating a principle that’s completely in accord with what he’s just said. “All people will walk every one in the name of his god.”

Every people, every nation has a god. How do you know that? Because they serve that god. How do they serve him? By walking in his ways. The god has a way that you walk in. He has an ethic. He has a law system or law code. And you show your allegiance to said god with your life. Walking, of course, is an image for living out your life, not walking on some red arrows or something.

It’s lifestyle.

Lifestyle. “And we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.” That’s what he’s been saying. As people come to Christ, their whole lifestyle changes. They stop walking in the name of Zeus or Apollo or Odin or Ra or the Soviet State or whatever, and they start walking in the way that the God of the Bible has ordained in scripture.

So that’s what we’ve seen. As these people come to worship, their lives and their civilization and their culture is transformed, even to the point of how one nation relates to another, and whether they choose agriculture over military industry, what they do with their hands and what they do with their free time. All of this flows out of their prior commitment to, their trust in their own god, because every people will walk in the name of its god. This is true of Christianity and it’s true of every other belief system. Every other religion is going to produce some kind of culture.

I think it was Henry Van Til who said, “Culture is religion externalized,” but religion itself begins in the heart and flows out into all that we do. It’s not just that religion is the impulse and then it becomes culture, but the culture itself is part of our religion. We’re to glorify God whether we eat or drink or whatever we do.

This is what we’re talking about here. As Moses looks at the generation that’s about to enter the Promised Land, he’s telling them, “You’re it. We’re passing the torch to you. You have to carry on and you have to carry on in all of these ways.” There’s a lot going on in Deuteronomy. The law of God in its fullness speaks to every area of life, so there’s all kinds of things we need to know as believers, that they needed to know as people who feared God, about how to live, how to walk, how to serve the God they professed faith in.

Any kind of deviation from the faith would lead to a deviation in lifestyle, and any deviation in lifestyle would ultimately represent some deviation in faith. You can’t fear God and live like the devil, as an earlier generation would have put it.

There are two things that come to mind as to what this is opposing. On the one hand you have pure pietism, the internalization of religion that says religion is in the heart, it’s a private matter, it doesn’t affect anything else. As long as I’m having my daily Bible study to myself, everything’s fine.

Then on the other hand there’s the pure externalization of religion, that it is only the forms you go through on Sunday in corporate worship that makes you a Christian, that is an expression of religion.

So this is a whole-life all-compassing view of the worship of God.

And the heart of Deuteronomy is the Shema – “Thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength.” That’s where the law begins, before even the Ten Commandments. God sets that forward. This is not about a bunch of external rule-keeping. The question here is where your heart is.

We want to look broadly at Deuteronomy now and see the outline, and we’re going to continue with the outline for the new few weeks, poking at it and pulling at it and seeing some specifics we can pull out of it.

This idea of the next generation – I got stuck with that phrase because once upon a time there was this teeny show called Star Trek that moved on to The Next Generation.

Never heard of it. What’s it about? [laughing]

Actually, about the same time there were a number of old ‘60s shows that people tried to bring back and they tagged them with the title “The Next Generation” or something like that. They tried to bring back Bonanza, for instance, the old Western, so it was a phrase back then.

In my generation it was the babies version, like you had the Muppets Babies, where they all go on adventures in the nursery.

The next generation implies a prior generation and, as I said before, the passing of the baton, to borrow the figure from the relay race. The older generation, one hopes, has developed some insights, some wisdom, some knowledge, learning, patterns of behavior, faithfulness in certain areas, institutions, systems of law, art, books and such, and they want to pass the best and the surest to the next generation, because what you’ve done that’s good you want to keep, and some things you understand, “Well, that was fun but, you know, my children don’t really need to know about I Love Lucy. The Dick VanDyke show, absolutely.” So some things you keep and some things you leave behind, and every parent faces this sooner or later, to some extent.

Speaking of Star Trek, I loved the original Star Trek when I was younger, and when my girls were hitting about 6, 7, 8 I said, “I need to at least show them a little bit. They may not like it, but they should at least know about it.” Then I started thinking through it, and even watching a few of the older episodes just to say, “Okay, what am I going to show them exactly?” and I was embarrassed and horrified to realize there was very little I could show them, because Kirk’s a womanizer all the way through.

I basically had to find those episodes where there was an impending alien threat or military threat and everything spun around that and he was too busy to be hitting on women, and I ended up only showing three or four of them to them, like “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “The Doomsday Machine” and a few things like that.

I’m so glad you mentioned “The Trouble with Tribbles” because we have a Tribble meme coming up this week!

The point being, there’s some stuff there that I think has some value in terms of developing one’s imagination, and certainly understanding the culture your parents grew up in, but do I want them to watch all those episodes? No, I really don’t. I read sci fi and fantasy books when I was younger that I certainly do not want them reading, so we do edit, we do censor. We say, “This is not worth your time Please work on these things. Read these books. Listen to this music,” and sometimes they will listen and sometimes they won’t, and sometimes they’ll surprise you and go beyond your taste and develop better tastes.

My own daughters have done that with regard to music. Their taste is much better than mine because it’s much more well-rounded than mine is. Every now and then they’ll pull up one of the favorites that I used to play in class for them, and I smile, but there’s so much more. Music is not my strong point, so they’re developing it. Anyway, the point being, those are side issues, they’re examples.

As Christians, we ought to believe that there is more to our religion than, as you say, my private Bible study, my private devotions, my getting together with a few friends to pray, and things like that. There actually is a thing that could be called Christian culture, or the culture which Christians produce.

We have to be careful what we mean with our adjectives. The culture has not been born again, but the people who made it we hope have, and they’ve developed this culture in obedience to the Word of God and through faith in Christ. They have indeed tried to bring glory to God in all that they do, and in the process have created some wonderful and beautiful and glorious things that reflect the glory of Christ, and that they can share with their descendants, their children and grandchildren and so on. So how do you pass those on?

That’s kind of what Moses is talking about. He does four sermons that correspond roughly to not the first point of the covenant, but the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts of the covenant, because the first part of the covenant is taken for granted. We’re talking about Yahweh. We’re talking about Jehovah. We’re talking about the Lord God of Israel. We’ve spent four books proving he’s sovereign. Can we just assume that now? Can we get on with what we need to talk about? So aside from Moses saying, “God spake these words,” now we move on.

But in saying that, I think we do need to take a moment and remember who God is, particularly at one point. Interestingly enough, my wife was talking to me about this last night. My sister-in-law asked two pastors whom she knows, “What do you think is the biggest problem facing the evangelical church right now?” and they both responded in terms of the whole transgender and LBGTQ issues and all of that, and all the things that go with it, including the Black Lives Matter and all the stuff that makes the headlines.

My sister-in-law said, “No, that’s not it.” She said what she thought, and our friend chimed in and said, “What’s really going on here is a question of who your god is.” I thought, “Hmm, we’re going to be talking about that.” His wife chimed in as well. Her major is in genetics, so she knows about genetically what defines gender. Apparently she gave an amazing little lecture on the whole thing. But it came back to do we believe Genesis 1? Did God really create heaven and earth?

In fact, is that exactly the God we have? Or are we going to start by throwing out Genesis 1 and then leaving ourselves to decide what God might be? Because once we do that, we’ve then invented for ourselves a god in whose way we will now walk. In other words, we’re worshiping and serving ourselves, and our desires and intents by nature are horribly perverse. The farther history goes along, the more perverse they become – the wheat and tares kind of thing all over again.

So as we look at the sermon here, although Deuteronomy doesn’t drive it home, we can’t forget that we’ve been told now for four books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers – that it’s this God. It’s the God who, at the beginning of the universe, spoke the universe into existence by the word of his power, so that he is not the universe. We speak of the Creator/creation distinction. The universe never becomes God. The universe does not touch or lay hold on God. The universe cannot manipulate God. Magic is right out. Mysticism is right out.

What we’re left with is the sovereign covenant God who, although he is transcendent, condescends to meet a people on his terms, but terms they can deal with because he’s made them capable of dealing with, because he’s made them in his image and he befriends them and loves them and offers them his grace.

We can’t force his hand. We can’t rewrite the contract. We can’t make up the laws. If we walk in his ways, there’s blessing there. Of course, the problem is we sinned and blew that one right at the beginning, so now we not only need to continue in his ways, we need to get back into his ways, as you said at the beginning, by repenting of our sins and trusting in Jesus.

By the way, when you were saying that something came to mind, and we do want to keep on emphasizing the simplicity of the gospel. Once upon a time as an elder I was sitting in on the interview of a potential new member, a fine young man, strong church background, his father was a pastor. He had good answers to everything and it was great.

One of our other elders asked him point blank, “So how would you share the gospel to someone in just a few words?” and he hesitated and he paused and he balked and he said, “I don’t know. There’s so much you have to say. I don’t know how I could do that,” and the other elder said, “How about ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house?’” And we got that response of, “Whaaat?” He had never thought about it like that.

There is this danger of knowing so much that you think you’ve got to pack it in to your initial presentation, rather than simply say, “The God who made the universe sent his Son to die in your place for all of your sins. Will you receive him as your Savior?” It can be that simple. It can be simpler.

When I was interviewed for membership at a church after college, the first question was, “What is a Christian?” and I was so flustered. I was panicked and was like, “Oh my goodness, how do I say everything?” And one of the elders looked at me and said, “Keep it simple.” Oh my goodness, the relief those words brought to my heart.

Because there is so much you could say, but you don’t have to say it all. As we watched the apostles preaching, their sermons in the book of Acts are ridiculously simple. Now, they were speaking to Israel, so Israel knew about God the Creator and some of Israel’s history, so they’ll usually recite just a little bit of that history – Abraham, David – and then, “And here’s Jesus. He’s the fulfillment. Here’s what happened to him. He was betrayed. He was crucified, but God raised him from the dead, and through him I’m preaching to you the forgiveness of sins. Repent and be baptized,” or repent and believe, or believe and be baptized. That’s generally the three ways it’s expressed in the book of Acts. Paul on one occasion said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

And these are not three different things. They’re all believing in Jesus.

No, those are not three different things. And I probably should say in passing that when we say, “And be baptized,” that’s because the New Testament says it, not because it’s a separate act other than the other, or in addition. You believe, plus you’re baptized. Being baptized is part of this whole believing-and-submitting-to-the-covenant thing. The thief on the cross wasn’t baptized. The issue is faith, trusting Jesus, as you said. So there’s that, but then once you come to Christ there’s a lot to learn.

Another friend of ours, Mr. Tim French, sent me a question last night about something I’m not familiar with – at least, I’m not familiar with it under this name. He called it missional theology. Apparently it has a number of meanings, but what he was talking about was something very specific, so for those of you who know something about this and you say, “That’s not it!” this is what he’s experiencing.

What he’s hearing a lot of is, “You come to Christ, then you turn around and you make disciples,” which is to say you bring other people to Christ, who will bring other people to Christ, who will bring other people to Christ, and that’s it. There’s really not to be much discussion about anything else. The sole goal of the Church is just that.

It sounds like an MLM – recruitment, recruitment, recruitment.

Exactly. And while we certainly don’t want to discourage anybody from evangelism – the Reformed churches particularly need to be encouraged and have their tush kicked a little bit on that area – it is a mistake, and I’ve seen it long before at evangelical churches, where the emphasis becomes so fixated there that you miss that the Great Commission actually says, “And teach them to observe all things that I’ve commanded you,” and Jesus has commanded a lot.

He wrote the Old Testament. He wrote the New Testament. There’s a lot of things going on here. He tells us how to be good mommies and daddies. He tells us to have children and how to raise them and nurture them in the admonition of the Lord. He tells us to be hard workers and smart businesspeople and to save and not waste our money. He tells us to be charitable to the poor. He tells us to love in all those one-anothering verses in the New Testament epistles, how we’re to interact with one another, to help and build up one another.

Then of course there’s this whole thing called worship. We’re not just saved to save other people. That’s a kind of man-centered process. We save them to bring them to God so God can transform them into the beautiful things he wants them to be, part of which most certainly is leading others to Christ, but there’s this danger of collapsing the whole cultural worldview that is the Bible and reducing one act of piety to pietism.

“I’ve witnessed to three people today. One of them is even coming to church. I’m okay. I don’t have anything else to do for Jesus today. My job? Yeah, that’s not important. My family? Well, I guess God probably says something about that – but I witnessed!”

Well, it’s great that you witnessed. Keep up the witnessing, but God requires more of you – not to be a Christian, but because you are one. His Spirit is in you. You’ve been bought with the blood of Christ, and he demands all of your life.

It’s very simple things. Do you drive a car? You read books? You watch Netflix? You go out to ball games? Okay, you’re involved with culture, whether you like it or not. You can either do these things in a biblical fashion to the glory of God, or you can follow your natural impulses and walk in the flesh, but to do the first there’s some stuff you need to know, and the Bible speaks to all of those things.

This is the kind of thing we want to impart to the next generation. We want to give them a well-rounded education that speaks to literature and math and history and science, so as they look at the world around them they’re not tripped up and they at least have a starting point of, “These are the kinds of things that God says here.”

Now, you find your calling specifically in terms of your gifts, and you serve God in that area, and yes, while worshiping God and maintaining your private devotions and bearing witness to the truth to other people, and leading people to Christ – coming to Christ is cheap and free for us. After that, not so much.

The Christian life is one of warfare. It’s a battle. It’s labor, but it’s wholly blessed, and the more we trust in Christ and the more we rely on him, the more the battle becomes kind of fun, with its very sad and tragic moments, nonetheless, of course, because of sin and all that.

We’re talking in traditional terms of the third use of the law. You’ve got three uses of the law, the first being the kind the government uses, like “We’re going to tell you not to take people’s stuff, in order that you might actually follow the rule and not take people’s stuff, because that makes a lot of trouble.”

Secondly, the law is there to point you to Christ, to show you that you are not perfect and you need redemption. You need Christ to pay your debt.

Then the third law is how do we live out this thankfulness to Christ.

It’s almost like you’ve walked your whole life with a limp, and then you’re healed of your limp, let’s say, and you have to re-learn how to walk. The law and the exhortations of the Bible that show us what the Christian life is like is saying, “Hey, you’re used to compensating for this part of your stuff that’s not right. Here’s what it looks like,” and these are all pointing us to Jesus because all these exhortations are telling us what Jesus did.

What Jesus did, what Jesus is like, what Jesus wants for us. What they are not is commandments to perfect ourselves. They are not a self-help program of, “Do this and live,” and we both know that, but we have to keep saying it because for good or bad – and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad – evangelical ears are tuned to, “Wait, they just told me to do something.”

Some people say, “Yay! A to-do list!” Others will say, “Oh no, legalism!” and we don’t want either of those. God is showing us a pattern for holy living, all the while realizing we’re not going to do it, and yet he gives us his Spirit, who gives us the beginnings of obedience.

And the ‘want.’ He gives us the ‘want,’ and if you’re a Christian, you’re looking for some way to be like Jesus. This is not, “Oh, no. Now I have to be like Jesus.” That’s what you want.

Yeah, you want to be like Jesus and you want to show your thankfulness, and it is the best possible life. It’s a blessing to yourself and those around you, so all of that’s coming into play.

I mean do we really want to say, “You know, Christianity doesn’t apply to watching television. Kids, go watch whatever you want. It doesn’t apply to books or magazines. Go pick anything off the stand you want. We’ll buy it for you.” You see where this is going. Obviously, any good Christian parent is going to say, “No, there are things we don’t do.”

Okay, you’re right. Can we tighten up that list and understand it better? Maybe more than saying some things are morally perverse on the surface of it, maybe some of them are morally perverse once you think about them a while. Maybe there are some novels your kids shouldn’t read, or at least not read until they’re older.

Harry Potter came to mind just for a second. I know a lot of Christians objected because of magic. It never bothered me, and if it bothers people I don’t care, that’s their business, but what really bothered me was simply that Harry Potter was a punk for most of the books. Now, in the end there is character transformation, let us say, which read backwards into the whole story you’ll say, “Oh, this was a story arc. It’s like a real book with character development. It just took her however many novels to get there.”

But I had to ask myself, “Do I really want my children hanging out with this punk Harry Potter for all of these pages when they’re young?” and I said no. When they got a little older and they understood what my concern was, I said, “Okay, you can read it all you want,” and of course they did and they came away with a lot of the same conclusions. They enjoyed it but they realized, “This guy is not a role model.”

That’s a minor example, but sometimes it’s as little as that. “This is just a fun fluffy story,” but nonetheless you’re hanging out with people. You’re keeping company with these people. God has a lot to say about companions and friends, and for teenagers that’s huge.

As a high school teacher, I have found that one of the biggest threats to the spirituality of my students is their friends. Yeah, the internet can be a danger, and all kinds of things are problems, but by and large they will make friends who are not good for them, and once they’re there, they’re stuck. They’re caught, they’re trapped, and they don’t have the guts to walk away and say, “I can’t hang around with you. You are a source of temptation and spiritual danger to me. Bye!”

They can’t do that. “That’s not cool. Everyone will laugh at me. I’ll be isolated. I’ll have no friends.” It’s a horrible thing, and this is exactly where parents should be involved on a personal level, but then books and movies. What is putting information into your kid’s heart and mind? This is part of this cultural hand-off.

So back to what I started with at some point. What books are you going to pass on? What movies? What songs? What liturgy? What are you giving them that they can pick up and run with into their next generation, that they will in turn hand off to their kids?

We have to realize that sometimes we’re going to get it wrong. Our grandchildren will look at this and say, “What were you thinking?” We look back at the Victorian age. “Okay, Dickens may have been a genius, but far too wordy. Let’s face it.” You can look at the Victorian age and find things that were really nice and cool and wonderful, but there’s some things you say, “Really? No, nobody does that anymore.”

Just trying to read even commentaries written in the Victorian age – “Can’t you just say this is flaming heresy, bud! Good night!” rather than, “It is to be observed that this is nowhere within the bounds of orthodoxy and should be called into question by all reasonable men.” Just say it stinks and get on with it. Calvin would have. Luther would have said something worse.

So let’s look at the outline and get on. Assuming the God who is transcendent and immanent, who is absolutely sovereign and who we are not, these are the things that he calls us to. First of all, the first sermon emphasis is upon, “Here’s what God has done for you in the past. Here’s your court system. And don’t you dare make idols.”

At first it might not be obvious what those things have in common, but they all have to do with how God has revealed and represented himself, first in their history. This is a real God who acts in history. Secondly, he has established a legal structure that you are to submit to and observe. And third, what he has not done is shown you any kind of image of himself.

Don’t do idols. Don’t do pictures. Don’t imagine what God is like. Don’t try to draw him. Don’t do pictures of Jesus, please. Don’t do pictures and say, “This is your God,” especially when they go, “Moo.” No golden calves. No pictures of men or women or old bearded guys sitting on thrones. Whatever you think God is like or looks like, anything you can visualize, you’re wrong. Don’t do that because that shifts how God represents himself from the Word to the image.

The second commandment, like the second part of the covenant, is Christianity is word-centered. It is not image-centered. That doesn’t mean there’s not a point for images in some contexts, but approaching God in worship, that’s not it. We do not approach God through images, nor does he come to us through images. He comes to us through his Word, so one of the key things about this whole idea of passing on to the next generation is teaching them words.

We’re talking grammar. We’re talking foreign language. We’re talking literature. We’re talking, “Read the text. What does it say?” It’s teaching them to do careful close reading, as my wife would say, to understand that there is a logic about the words. There’s also a style and beauty and intuition about the words that cannot be reduced to mere logic.

Good writers do both. They fall back on imagery and pattern and rhythm and metaphor, and they also call out, “A, therefore B, therefore C, therefore D. Argument complete. Now you have to believe it or you’re an idiot.”

All of that goes into it, and our kids need to know how to use words. Words apply in worship and in religion generally. We can describe God in words because he gave us a book full of words. So word culture, a culture rooted in history over against the image-based cultures of the pagan world. We’ve talked about that before.

The second sermon is a restatement of God’s law. It starts with the Shema, “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Teach it diligently to your children.” We’ll be talking more about that in the future. Then the Ten Commandments follow, re-written from Exodus with some minor alterations. Then case laws that echo Exodus and Leviticus, but have more of a specific edge of, “Now that you’re in the Promised Land, some things I didn’t mention before are now going to be applicable.”

The heart of the law is in the heart. Then there are the basic commandments that provide the broad categories, but we might not understand those without concrete examples to show, “What does it mean not to steal? Is it theft if the government does it for you? Is it adultery if…” and you can fill in the blanks. All the “But what if…?” We have those in the case laws so that we will understand how these general principles apply.

That goes on for quite a few chapters, and yes, some of them belong to the older covenant or to an agricultural society that is covenantally conditioned by the flow of redemptive history, but they show us how God thinks. Even if we think, “Okay, it doesn’t apply now, but God thinks that that means that under those conditions,” that still tells us something about God’s thinking, and it can lead us to make other applications. So that was the second sermon.

The first sermon is the second point of the covenant. The second sermon is the third point – law stipulations. And the third sermon is the fourth point – sanctions of the law.

It’s here that we come across the blessings and cursings, and also instructions for a formal covenant-cutting ceremony once they get into the land, a self-valedictory oath whereby they publicly say, “God is our God, and his law applies to us as individuals and applies to our society. It applies to our worship and it applies to things in secret.”

When they stand in the future on Mount Nebo and Mount Gerizim and they recite the specific curses, a lot of those are secret things that no one would ever know. “Cursed be the man who takes a reward to slay the innocent.” Who’s going to know about that one? It’s secret. “Cursed is the man who lies with his mother-in-law.” You know, no one’s going to come out and say that publicly – well, they did in Corinth, but generally it’s not the kind of thing that you advertise.

Most of the things in that list are secret things, private things, things we do in back alleys, things we do in closed rooms, and God is saying, “Yeah, I’m Lord there, too. You don’t get to duck out of sight and get away from me. You’re going to swear by my name and your life that you will honor me even in the quiet dark places where you think no one’s watching.”

That brings us to the fourth sermon or collection of things that constitute roughly a sermon, and some instructions. This is the continuity section. We get Joshua as the new leader. We get instructions of how the law is to be preserved and read every seven years at the Feast of Tabernacles.

Side note – this is a pet peeve of mine. There are parents who don’t think that their children should read the whole Bible, because some of it is just too sensitive for their delicate ears. First, they probably already know about this stuff from watching TV. If not, they got it from their friends at school. So what you’re doing effectively is withdrawing the Bible’s witness on these things that they are already being hit by comic books or signs along the street. It’s a very naïve approach to life. Someone’s going to get there first. If you’re not there talking to your kids about the facts of life from a biblical perspective, someone else will be and it will not be a biblical perspective.

So the law was to be read out loud every seven years at the Feast of Tabernacles, with everyone present. Will the kids get everything? No, but you get it when you’re 7 and you’re 14 and you’re 21, and at some point in there it begins to hit. “Oh, really?”

Then Moses gives them a song that they’re to remember. It’s a long song. It has what we would think of as lots of verses that go on and on, except it’s not versified. It’s just one long sung-through song describing their future. “You’re going to be idolators. You’re going to turn away from God. It’s going to be horrible. God’s going to judge you. He’s going to turn to the Gentiles. You’re going to get jealous and come back to him. Watch. It’s going to happen, and you’re going to have this memorized and sung and you’ll pass this on to your kids.”

How often do parents sit down with their kids and talk through the music – both the lyrical content as well as how it sounds and why it sounds that way? Back in the ‘60s when rock and roll became such a powerful force, a lot of Christians just said, “That’s the devil’s music. Turn it off.” Well, that shut down all communication real fast, because you’re still up against all the people in the kid’s life who say, “This is cool music,” and parents have given no real answer.

So now as I talk to parents of kids who are in high school, they grew up and the rock and roll that once upon a time their parents probably forbade to them is now their music, but now it’s the old classics. It’s kind of funny.

Kind of like the jazz music that was oh, so wholesome.

Yeah, before that it was jazz and blues and all the rest. Rarely have we stopped and tried to understand it, which is a good argument for good music classes and music appreciation classes in school or homeschool or however you’re doing it. They need to know about these things. They need to know how to watch movies.

I used to show a number of movies in Brit Lit because they were focused upon things I was teaching historically and literarily. Some parents wondered politely. I said, “Look, your kid is going through the rest of his life and he is never again going to bisect an angle or dissect a frog. He’s going to watch movies every week. It probably would be good if somebody talked him through what’s going on here, what they should look for and how they should listen.”

“Oh, that’s good,” and I got a thumbs up out of that. That was good, but not all parents would be that generous because just the very idea of movies for some Christians is just scary. They don’t know how to deal with them.

It’s leisure, right? It’s self-directed. It feels relaxing, and therefore can’t be part of a good education.

Or even part of a good lifestyle for some parents, and the same thing with some sorts of books. At our school we’ve had a certain part of our clientele that is very suspicious of anything that’s fantasy-oriented or has dragons in it or magic or witches. The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe – obviously, it’s of the devil, because they didn’t understand, nor did they try to initially. It took some time, and it’s still taking time because of that kneejerk reaction.

I once had young lady talk to me, and I don’t remember how we got into the conversation, but she just said in passing, “Oh, mysteries? I can’t imagine why any Christian would ever read a mystery.”

I’m laughing because – the Bible.

Like the Bible, exactly. I did not have the patience to correct her. I just at that point smiled and nodded and that pretty much was the end of our relationship. I’m sorry. Someone was trying to set us up and at that point it was like, “This is not working.”

Oh goodness! That person didn’t know you very well, apparently.

No, and didn’t know her well enough. On the other hand, when I met my wife and had my first real conversation with her, one of the first things we talked about was, “What are your favorite books? What are your favorite movies? Really? You even know who that is? Okay, maybe we have some things to talk about here, then.”

I am a teacher, and now she is most certainly one, too. Our job is to communicate a culture, not just a few ideas, not just some book learning, but a whole concept of culture rooted in the Christian faith into the next generation in a way that’s most effective and influential. Knowing what books are important and what books appeal to young people and what books we can use to touch their minds and their imagination, what music, what plays, what poems – this is all part of the bag.

So that’s what we’re doing, and you notice we’re not imposing. We are teaching and leading. We’re not manipulating. You look to Brave New World and it’s full of manipulation of the next generation. In 1984, same thing, because in these, since there is no transcendent God. Mankind becomes God, particularly in the form of the world state. Then it becomes the duty of that world state, as the representative of humanity, to perpetuate itself into the next generation, to pour forth its divinity into the generations that follow by technological manipulation, or in That Hideous Strength, with straight-up magic, because in the end there’s no difference.

If there is nothing that explains why our technology works, no providential God that can guarantee its success, then what ultimately is the difference between science and magic? What they have in common is power, the power to mold and shape and to create man after our image. See here The Abolition of Man.

When the controllers say, “We love you. Trust us. We’re going to give you a grand and glorious future,” why are we trusting them? It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, and they may really mean they want to love us and help us, but what’s their definition? By what standard? What does this love thing that they talk about mean? And to what image, to what standard, are they conforming us? What are they trying to turn the next generation into?

Of course, in Brave New World it goes as far as test-tube babies so that you can genetically alter people to be exactly and only what you want. We will have our laborer types. We will have our intellectuals. We will have our accountants. We will have our field workers, and they will be programmed for that so that they will always be happy with just that. And between that and drugs and free sex, they’ll be content and there will never be a question of an uprising, because they’ll have the things that they want.

That’s statist education because it assumes that there’s no transcendent God to answer to. The ultimate god is the State or the people, however you want to define it, because it merges into the same thing. Education becomes a program for replicating the existing State into more and more powerful forms in succeeding generations, whereas God wants to reproduce Christ in us, but he does it by the preaching of the gospel and by worship and by love.

We’re allowed to walk up and say, “No, I want none of this love thing. I’m outta here!”

Okay, but there will be a day of reckoning beyond history. It’s not the Church’s job to force itself, but to make Christianity inviting and wonderful and beautiful, or rather reveal the beauty that’s in it, so that people will want to come. We need to be winsome, while at the same time standing for truth and saying there are absolutes, and that actually makes the world better than living a meaningless life.

As you were talking earlier about choosing edifying books for your kids, the joy in that is that it’s not chiefly restrictive. You’ve got so much time to work with, so you can feed them as many good books as you can. If you’re reading good books, you don’t have time for bad books, so it’s not this restrictive, “Oh no, you’re not allowed to read that” chiefly. It’s, “Oh, I have something so much better than you’re going to enjoy,” and that’s a wonderful thing.

Do you have any recommendations to close out the episode with – or with which to close out the episode?

Okay, I will not recommend Strunk and White off of that.

Actually, I already thought about this and that is to read children’s books. I want to be a little more specific. I want to suggest some. First of all, the assumption is that if the book is worth a child’s read, it’s worth you reading it. If it’s not worth you reading it, it probably is a waste of time on your kid and you’re giving him fluff. You’re giving him cotton candy, so find something better.

Now, books can be very simple, but simple does not mean ignorant or stupid. It just means you have to get to the core of what’s going on with a limited vocabulary, and in children’s books, despite all I’ve said about images in worship, it’s a great place for images and for really excellent art.

Even before our first daughter was born, we were wandering around in what used to be called a department store. I don’t know what they’re called now. I came across a bunch of children’s books and looked through them and found one that I knew from childhood. It was called Make Way for Ducklings.

Oh yeah! I remember that one.

It is one of the sweetest stories. The artwork is marvelous. It’s not pretentious and it doesn’t talk down. It’s just the story of these ducks who are going from Point A to Point B, and then mommy has eggs and hatches them, and then she takes them on a walk and the cop has to stop all the traffic to let them by – a good humanitarian theme going on there. It’s just dwelling in the simple things of life and the beauty of them. So that comes to mind.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Story About Ping and The Little House. It’s not Little House on the Prairie, that’s something else. This is a hardback book and the chief character is the house itself, which is built on a hillside in the countryside, but then the city comes and encroaches, and there’s a little of the “urbanization is bad” theme going on, but you can work around that.

I’m sold on that theme lately. Every time I visit my parents in the country, I’m like, “This is the life.”

The house finds it too, because eventually the city comes and it’s just trapped between all of these big dark buildings and the shadow, until one day the heirs come and see it and say, “Oh, my grandma used to live in a little house like that, except it was way out in the country.” But they check and say, “Oh, that is her house and I actually own it. Well, let’s take it and move it,” so they take it back out further in the country.

Again, it’s a lot of just seeing human development, and it doesn’t have to be anti-urbanization. It can be, “Could we do this more carefully? Could we do this better? Does it have to be a rat race just to throw up as many buildings as you can? Isn’t there a Christian approach to city planning that doesn’t violate our basic free market principles, but calls into play Christian aesthetics?”

So those are some that come quickly to mind, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, but read children’s books. If you can read them to your children or your grandchildren, the good ones, you’ll keep on reading them generation after generation, and there aren’t that many super-great ones. I’m sure there are a lot I don’t know, but every time I ask a mom or grandma, they keep coming back with the same names. So those are some that are at the top and there’s some others I can’t think of right now. How about you? What have you got?

I can’t really depart from that theme once it’s established, reading out loud children’s books. Freddy the Pig is a great chapter book to read to your kids. You might want to think twice about reading out loud both Freddy the Pig and Animal Farm, because I get those two mixed up to this day because they were both read out loud to me. No regrets, it’s great, but I do get them mixed up sometimes and have to think very carefully.

I think that’s all we have for this evening, so thank you so much, Greg. This has been a lovely conversation. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

We have a special thank you this week from David to our financial supporters. Last week we had some crazy noise going on in the background. David and I live in an apartment, so there’s a little bit of neighbor noise and last week we had some music. We were able to edit that out so it does not disturb the episode for your listening pleasure, and the reason we were able to edit that out is because we have good software and it is paid for by our financial supporters, so thank you so much.

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