Notes on Californias Homeschool Squeeze

About the California usurpation of Gods role for parents. Mostly to clarify for myself ,here are some observations.

This is how successful government schooling has been. It inculcated wrong views into us. (There is nothing public about it other than they take our tax money to do it. That so many of us still call it “public” is another win for them.) We have gone from the legal concept and constraint that the US government is limited in authority and reach. To one where we accept without a thought things like… Well the government can do whatever it wants, but if there is something we want to do, we need to see if its legal.

Its been flipped around instead of seeing the state as limited unless the people grant it power ,we think we must be granted the right to do things.

We have been trained to accept that… as the starting point.

For so many , we think in these terms, that unless we can get a law or amendment passed saying that X,Y or Z is allowed, then we don’t have a right to do it. We also run to the machinery of government because we have stopped just declaring “thus says the Lord!.” We now feel we need a man declared law to back up Gods claim. We believe that we must get the state to bless that which God has declared or established. I don’t even think we see that this is how we think.

When you stop and think about it seems we modern evangelicals have given more respect and deference to the state then we ever did to God. We have given govt the absolutely widest interpretation possible of Romans 13.
So long as we don’t have to deny Christ , most believers are perfectly willing to let the state be a free range chicken doing whatever it wants.

But it is hard for us to lift off that deference from the state and place it on God. Even though the word is just full of phrases like, “the earth is the Lords and everything in it (psalms),and, that Christ has been raised far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come and he put all things und his feet and gave him to be the head over all things to the church. (eph1:21-22)

Now stop! I swear, that for years I read that verse and thought that it was proclaiming Christ as head over all things to the church. It does. But because of my training to see life as Secular and Sacred, I totally missed Gods claim for his Son to be lord over every atom and every second! And along with that….. he is head over all things to the church.

The state keeps making these little exact claims on this or about that. And with the compartmentalized way we have been trained to see life we totally miss the absoluteness of “ that in all things he may have preeminence”(col 1:18) which all by itself should really help put Romans 13 into a better light.

Because it doesn’t seem like God has made claims as clear as the state. Even though Gods word doesn’t exactly spell something out like some modern Law, so we think his word is silent on X,Y or Z. But HE is to have preeminence over ALL things. Even though its not spelled out for all of our compartmentalized views of life.

Now this threatens the modern Christian and Churchs ability to be a free range chickens like the state and I think it has something to do with why, so much of the word....can seem fuzzy.

Rome opposed and persecuted the early church just because it knew that they worshipped a God that placed his authority over Rome and its empire. That actually the Roman empire can be seen as just another nation raised up by God for his own purpose and pleasure.

We boxed God in and couldn’t see how our faith was supposed to affect how we see everything. Because we stopped proclaiming the authority of Christ over every area of life it was just a matter of time before the State was able to step into this vacuum and provide its definitions, and its understanding. This was mostly accomplished through the Schools.

It has reached the place where the State feels competent and thinks that it has a higher claim over not only what, but how children are taught. That it , the state has the right, that it, is the highest authority when it comes to education.

And after 80yrs of God believing Christians turning their children over to the state and seeing nothing wrong with it, why shouldn’t the state think it knows best?

I become more and more convinced the problem is with us and not the state.