CALVIN CHRISTIAN SCHOOL

The Calvin Christian School of Lethbridge and Fort Macleod urgently requires, due to enrollment increase, qualified teachers, for all grade levels.

We hope to expand to grade 9 in the next school year.

For information, please contact the principal, Mr. A.H. Verhoef, phone 1-420-328-0495.

Applications are to be sent to the secretary, Mr. Adrian DeWilde, Box 142, Monarch, Alberta, Canada T0L-1M0. Telephone 1-403-824-3698.

TO WHOM MUST WE DEDICATE OUR SCHOOL BUILDING?

Part I

This article, the first of two installments, represents the substance of an address given at the dedication of the Rock Valley-Sioux Center Christian school building. It has been submitted to the Banner upon request with the purpose of setting forth Biblical, concrete foundations from the viewpoint and convictions of our Netherlands Reformed denomination. We hope and pray that our growing number of schools, principals, and teachers may learn to seek grace daily to work within the Biblical framewrok of education’s true purpose as it is here outlined. Dear Parents, Teachers, Students, and Friends:

On behalf of our consistories and schoolboard we wholeheartedly welcome you to this special occasion. For us, it is a grateful moment, a humbling moment, a serious moment, a prayerful moment— grateful because of all the labors performed in a cooperative spirit by our principal, administrator, teachers, schoolboard, consistories, various school committees, women’s groups, as well as the contrac-

tors, sub-contractors and workers; all who have had a part in the preparation of our school directly and/or indirectly, receive our hearty thanks; humbling because we dedicate this building this evening realizing that it is the Lord Who has given strength, desire, finances, ability, and completion according to His sovereign will; serious because the dedication of our building does not represent the beginning of the end of our labors, but rather the end of the beginning, for the overwhelming task of God-centered, Bible-based, daily education still stands before us; prayerful because now more than ever before we will need the only true Teacher, the triune God, to lead and guide us as teachers, parents, students, school-board, consistories, and congregations in our worthy endeavor.

Yes, tonight we are called to a weighty as well as a joyful task: the dedication of the school building which God has been pleased to provide for us. Such a dedication immediately obliges us to ask ourselves at least three questions: “What is the purpose of a dedication evening? To whom must we dedicate our school building? Who is Christian education really for?” I wish to briefly consider these questions with you at this time.

Let me state at the outset that the purpose of our school dedication this evening is not to proudly admire our fine building, nor to exalt ourselves through any efforts or tasks that we have performed. The word dedicate really means something altogether different. The dictionary definition of the word dedicate is “to set apart seriously for a special purpose” and/or “to devote and consecrate someone or something to a special use, task, or cause.”

Therefore, it is the desire of our heart this evening that we may receive grace to dedicate our school building, in the very first place, to the Almighty, All-knowing, and All-seeing God Who has commanded it of us and provided it for us. We desire grace to set apart our building to the Name of God for a five-fold reason.

(1) We wish to publicly return to the Lord this building which He has so mercifully granted unto us. We wish to publicly acknowledge that we trust we have seen the Lord’s hand of favor in both the construction and preparation of our school during the months that are now behind us. Therefore, in a simple way, we desire that the cornerstone laid a few minutes ago may serve as a faint reflection of the stone set up by Samuel between Mizeph and Shen, which was called “Ebenezer”, signifying “Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.”

(2) Standing before an unknown future, we wish to publicly confess our total dependency on the Lord. We freely confess that we need the Name of God, the Presence of God, and the Blessing of God and so shall our school truly become and remain prosperous. Therefore, the text which has been placed on our cornerstone plaque is at the same time our only hope and expectation, “In all places where I record My Name, I will come unto thee and bless thee,” (Ex. 20:24b).

Spiritually speaking, we need the Lord to “record” His Name upon this building; we need the Lord Himself to “come” within this building; we need God to “bless” the endeavors that shall be attempted within these walls. We need His Divine Name, His Divine Presence, His Divine Blessing.

The recording of the Name of God is the only possible foundation for our school that can be acceptable in God’s sight. By God’s Name we mean God Himself, His attributes, His perfections. God’s Name comprehends His eternal Self-existence, His everlasting sovereignty, His boundless power, His unspeakable holiness, His fathomless wisdom, His unshaken truth, His unflinching justice as well as His matchless love.

To “record” a name signifies first to proclaim or write it, and then to cause the writing to be preserved or the proclamation to be remembered. Thus the Lord records His Name in a place when He declares His perfections and makes Himself known there—when He tells and shows sinners something of Who and what He is; when He displays something of His holiness, majesty, and grace, and keeps up this revelation of Himself by “causing His Name to dwell in the place that He shall choose.”

Many churches, schools, and institutions that represent the means of grace have been begun, have continued, and have ended without the Name of God ever being recorded upon them. Such places Scripture calls “synagogues of Satan”. Do we not have urgent reason this evening to pray that the Lord may give us the prayer of Solomon when he dedicated the temple, “That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which Thou hast said, My Name shall be there”? (I Kings 8:29a)

And still we need more—more than the Lord’s recording of His Name. We need more than the obtaining of His approval. We need also the retaining of that Divine approval. We need, therefore, God’s continued Presence. We need Him to “come unto us” as our dedication-text states it. Missing His Divine Presence we should enter the future with no other prayer than Moses’, “If Thy presence go not up with us, carry us not up hence,” and with no other confession than David’s, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Let us never forget the warning of God’s Word that Bethel, which means “the house of God”, later became Bethaven, meaning “a house of iniquity”, and became subject to heavenly vengeance.

Without God’s recorded Name we shall miss everything we need, but with His continued Presence we shall receive everything we need. For God’s people the Presence of the Lord is everything. Three words that Jesus said to the thief on the cross contains all their desire, all their love, all their joy, all their strength, all their refreshment, all their heaven. Those three, simple words are: “Thou … with Me.” When that may become reality within they may say with Jacob, “The Lord is in this place. We have seen His glory.”

May the Lord give us to pray for His presence in our school. May He especially give to His people to wrestle at the throne of grace on behalf of our teachers that they may receive a crumb of Divine Presence and Divine Wisdom to teach the children according to the Word of God.

Teachers: I hope that the Lord may give you grace to need Him. That it may become your prayer with respect to the necessary but impossible task lying upon your shoulders:”come unto me”. “Lord, teach me, so that I in turn may receive wisdom to teach the boys and girls. Grant me a crumb of what David possessed when he said in Psalm 34, ‘Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.’ “ That the Lord may give you a heart to take your weakness to Him, and to seek your strength in Him. Plead with Him for pleading grace to tell Him that the Bible says He can take hold of a worm, and enable it to “thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and make the hills as chaff.” Beg of Him, “Lord, could it please Thee to use daily school instruction to my own eternal welfare as well as the eternal welfare of the many children which are seriously and fully entrusted to me for 30 hours every week.”

Our dedication-text teaches us we need not only God’s recorded Name and continued Presence, but also His Divine Blessing: “and I will bless thee.” His Name and Presence without His Blessing would be the greatest tragedy our school could experience. We know He is just as free and sovereign with His blessing as He is with His Name and Presence. We confess our total dependency upon Him for all three necessities. We know that free grace alone is the beginning, the continuation, and the fulfillment of all Divine blessing. We confess that there is nothing in any of us that can ever expect His indispensable blessing for we have forfeited everything in our deep fall in Adam. Also in our school, man must totally fall away, for His blessing is always a one-sided work. That the Lord may make it our heart-experienced confession, “Bless us, O God, and we shall be blessed.”

How shall we know if the Lord is blessing? We shall know if and when it may please Him to lay bare His arm of mercy, to discover Himself by His operations and tokens of grace, and therefore it must be our unceasing prayer that the Lord may also use this means of grace to uncover to boys and girls death in Adam and life in Christ.

Everything depends upon God: His Name, His Presence, His Blessing. therefore we ask of Him grace to turn our rich dedication-text into a fervent petition that the Lord may record His Name as Lord upon this building, that He may come to dwell within these walls as Lord, and that He may bless both students and teachers as the Almighty God of heaven and earth.

(3) In the third place, we desire grace to dedicate our school building this evening to the Lord not only to return to Him what He has given and to confess that we are totally dependent upon Him, but also because He is worthy to receive all honor and glory. His glory (combined with the true welfare of man in subordination to Divine glory) is the deepest and richest purpose for the establishment of a Christian school. Only when the glory of God is the great aim of any endeavor can the true welfare and happiness of man be obtained as a by-product. Thus we desire grace to dedicate this building to the Lord. For the purpose of real education goes above and beyond teachers and students. It transcends both human society and human race—its real purpose centers and focuses upon God’s honor and glory alone.

(4) We desire grace to dedicate our building to the Lord because we confess that the knowledge of God is the highest goal of all education. We confess wholehearted agreement with Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” The deepest goal of education is not the knowledge of self, nor the knowledge of mankind, nor the knowledge of state, but rather, by grace the knowledge of God. John Harvard, a godly forefather who founded Harvard University, once wrote: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life.” Even though no teacher, no textbook, no visiting minister or office-bearer can form this knowledge within a child, still it must prayerfully be the aim and goal of real education. A teacher must labor with all the gifts that the Lord may entrust to him/her, to proclaim to the boys and girls the God of the Bible as the All-knowing, All-seeing, Sovereign and active Lord over all reality, hoping against hope that the Lord may apply such instruction with the Divine blessing of John 17:3 which He alone can give: “And this is life eternal, that they may know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.”

(5) Finally, we desire grace to dedicate our school building to the Lord not only to glorify Him, to return it to Him, to confess our dependency upon Him, and to set Him as the highest goal of all education, but also to stress the necessity that God be at the center of all education. Real education is not only God-directed but also God-centered. The Lord must be recognized and honored in every field in which the human intellect operates. The living God of the Bible must be the major premise of every textbook. He must be the great assumption in every classroom. He must be the Person whose handiwork is investigated in every laboratory. “In the beginning God” must be the watchword of all true education. In plain words, God must be at the center of every subject.

But perhaps you will ask: “Is there really a Christian view of science, literature, “history, and mathematics? Aren’t the facts the same no matter where they are taught?”

Yes, the facts are the same. Mathematics is mathematics. History is history. But it is the interpretation of these facts that makes such a critical difference. In a Christian school students learn to understand, interpret, and analyze these facts from a Biblical perspective.

The public/secular vs. Christian school issue is really a question of whether a child should learn to view life, even outwardly, from man’s perspective or God’s perspective. From man’s perspective, history is purposeless; from God’s viewpoint, His Divine hand is stamped upon and guiding every page of the entire stream of history to His own glory and to the everlasting welfare of His chosen people. From man’s viewpoint, science is the laws of “nature” at work; from the perspective of the Word of God science is the outworking of God’s laws—the laws of the Incomprehensible Creator and Maintainer of this vast universe whose magnitude, majesty, and order science is only beginning to probe. From man’s perspective, mathematics is a complicated system that happened to be discovered; from the perspective of Christian education God is the God of order Who has established the mathematical system to reflect a small shadow of the unspeakable harmony that there is within Himself, the Divine Being Who is One in all His attributes. Literature from man’s perspective is based on talent; from the viewpoint of Christian education, the gift of literature is subordinated to and evaluated by Biblical standards. From man’s perspective health and hygiene is humanistic and cannot go beyond pragmatism; the Biblical perspective teaches that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”, have fallen deeply into deadly sickness, and every second of health we receive is only a gift of God’s long-suffering, common grace, all of which we shall have to give an account of one day at the bar of God.

In other words, Christian education must be Christian throughout. It must not be what I call a “Christian-public” school nor a “public-Christian” school.

By a “public-Christian” school I mean a school that teaches a secular form of education with religious features externally added to each subject, thereby denying that the core and inner character of every subject must essentially be God-centered. It is a school that operates with a public school philosophy of education, a public school approach to discipline, and a typical public school approach to the lack of moral standards. Like the public school, such a school can never rise above humanism even if it punctually performs prayer, Bible-reading and doctrine, for the secularization of any given subject can not but lead to atheism in practice even if a little external “christianized salt” is sprinkled throughout.

By a “Christian-public” school I mean a school that prays and reads the Bible because it is a public school which happens to be located in a primarily so-called Christian area. Such a school may not deny altogether the Christian view of salvation and religious life, but it certainly must ban by law from its classroom the Christian view of history, science, mathematics, and literature. It cannot help but deny the truth that either God is God everywhere or else He is God nowhere.

Thus we must promote the only alternative that is left: a Bible-centered school that advocates a God-centered perspective throughout education. The main purpose of such a school is not negative. Although public education is becoming increasingly amoralistic, still the primary purpose of real Christian education is not to take a child away from evil influences such as Halloween and Christmas festivities, television references, and degrading moralistic influences. Rather, 98% of the reason for Christian education is positive, i.e. to teach not only creation, morality, and providence according to the Word of God, but to include it in every subject area. This does not mean that the Word of God must be the textbook for chemistry, mathematics, or psychology. But it does mean that the relevant principles of the Bible are normative for every field of study. The Bible has a relationship to every field of life and knowledge since God is the real source of all life and right knowledge.

Thus, God-centered necessarily means Bible-centered, for God cannot be separated from His Word. The Word of God must be the foundational textbook of all education.

May the Lord give grace this evening to dedicate our school in the very first place unto Him: (1) to return it unto Him, (2) to confess our total dependency upon Him, (3) to acknowledge that He is worthy to receive all honor and glory, (4) to confess that the knowledge of God is the highest goal of education, and (5) to emphasize that God must also be at the center of all education. To this God we commend ourselves, our parents, our teachers, our students, and our school, with the hope that He may grant some amongst us to humbly dedicate all to Him in spirit and in truth.

(To be continued)

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