Christian Education Series

The Jews loved to tell stories about the importance of choices. Nathan Ausubel tells one of the

wealthy Jewish merchant who took his slave on a long journey leaving his only son behind. On the

journey the merchant became very ill, and at the point of death he made a will leaving all this wealth

to his slave. To his son he left only the right to choose one thing among all his possessions. It seems

like a cold and cruel thing to do to his son, but the father counted on his son to be wise in his choice.

When the slave returned with all his master's wealth, he and the son appeared before the judge to

fulfill the terms of the will. The son made his choice. He chose of all his father's possessions, his

father's slave. In possessing him he retained possession of all his father's wealth. A foolish choice

would have lost him his inheritance, but a wise choice kept it all.

Wisdom is the ability to make right choices in life. Folly is the making of wrong choices. The

goal of education in both the secular and sacred realm is to give to people the knowledge and

awareness they need to make wise choices. Ignorance leads to making wrong choices, whereas,

knowledge leads to making wise, creative, and helpful choices that lead to success. If you fail to

bake a good cake, get your driver's license, win the ball game, pass your test, get the second date, or

come up with an appropriate Bible verse to fit the situation, you can count on it, somewhere along

the line you made a poor choice. You probably did so because you did not know the better way that

would lead to success. Education is the process of learning the better way.

The Pharisees were not interested in the better way, but only in obscuring the way. The result is,

they did not come to Jesus to learn, but to muddy the waters with complex but trivial questions.

They tried to trick him into a corner with a complex example of a wife with 7 husbands all of whom

died. The question is, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Jesus, of course, has an answer,

and informs them that the eternal relationship of persons will not be sexual as in time, but rather,

like the relationship of the angels. Jesus rebuked them for their ignorance of the Scripture that led to

wrong understanding of the plan and power of God.

One of the Scribes came forward and asked another question. He asked, which commandment is

first of all? After Jesus answered him, and he gave a positive response, Jesus said to him, "You are

not far from the kingdom of God." Here was a man who pleased Jesus, for he truly sought for light

and truth. The Pharisees aggravated Him because they only asked questions in order to make things

complicated, and not in order to learn. We see from this passage that education begins with asking

the right questions. C. S. Lewis wrote, "Can a moron ask questions which God finds unanswerable?

Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there

in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half of our great

theological and metaphysical problems are like that."

One of the major problems all through history is that men keep asking the wrong questions. The

result is, no matter how much they learn they never really get educated in a Biblical sense, for they

never learn how to make the choices in life that really matter. The Scribe asked the right question,

and in so doing he opened the door to the answer of Jesus, and that becomes the foundation of all

Christian education. We want to focus our attention on one aspect of the first commandment about

loving God with all of our mind. This is the alpha and omega of Christian education. There is no

wiser choice in life than the choice to love God with all your mind.

No Christian can be anti-intellectual, for God is the Creator of the mind, and the Author of all

truth. To believe anything false, or anything built on prejudice or superstition is inconsistent with

loving God with all your mind. One can be brilliant and learned, as were the Pharisees, and yet be

stupid because the mind and all of its knowledge is not devoted to loving God, but to self-centered

purposes.

Hitler's companions in crime were educated men. Some of them were brilliant and had a well

developed taste for high quality in culture. But with all of their education and brilliance they made

the choice to be more cruel and brutal than the beasts, and they became tools of darkness rather than