Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord: 17 Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. 18 And some of your own sons, who shall be born to you, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” 19 Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?” (2 Kings 20:16-19)God’s answer to Hezekiah’s prayers, extending his life by a decade, is noteworthy for His grace. Yet the King’s selfish response reveals the opposite, an extraordinary betrayal of the generational covenant fidelity he had once stood for. Although Hezekiah learns his sons will become eunuchs, palace slaves of a foreign power, he is pleased because his own last days will be safe and secure.
Regimes that operate for the safety and security of the older generation at the expense of the young are not covered in glory.
Democracies may operate less decisively than monarchs. Make no mistake though, the ‘culture wars’ of the past decades are our Hezekiah moment.
That is because there hasn’t actually been a culture war.
The phrase sells newspapers, but it is fake news.
While some have noted that politics is downstream from culture, mainstream conservatives have tried to win elections as if politics and the governance of nations had as little to do with culture as possible. This short-term strategy has meant that elections are always fought around issues that even their opponents’ leaders wouldn’t have dared to mention in the previous election cycle. Political scientists call this the Overton window. What the term ignores is that the window is on a train conducted by an education system progressively leaving the wellbeing of children behind. A future of slavery lies at the end of the trip.
Neil Postman complained that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death. A less complimentary judgment would be that our children are being handed to the King of Babylon. Like Hezekiah, we have turned our hearts away from our children.
The most egregious part of Hezekiah’s conduct is that he abandoned the cultural mandate that had characterized his regime.
What is the cultural mandate?
The cultural mandate is part of the first command God gives to Adam and Eve. They are to be fruitful and multiply, to exercise dominion over the earth, and to develop its latent potential (Gen. 1:26-28; Gen 2:15; 9:1). God commands people as his image-bearers to work to fill the earth with his glory through creating what we commonly call culture.
This commandment is repeated by Moses when Israel has been delivered from the bondage of Egypt:
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)This is a passage central not only to the identity of the nation of Israel, but to all Christian conduct. Jesus alludes to this passage and its context of education when asked what the greatest commandment is. So it is abundantly clear how vital religious education remains to avoid cultural bondage.
Education is not value-neutral. What is for God’s glory also happens to be for the public good.
Because of sin, only the people of God following His ways will be able to fulfill the cultural mandate as it was intended — according to their desire to give glory to God and to love their children. They will interpret the cultural mandate as God intended it to be, as a culture of life and a culture of grace.
The Enlightenment, as I discuss in the embedded video, has led us to reduce education to the accumulation of bare facts without values, and to serve utilitarian ends, largely for the purpose of domination over life, rather than dominion under God’s commandment of love. The true purpose of education is to train children in wisdom and virtue, not to walk in lockstep with changes in the Overton window. It should cultivate the human spirit by presenting a complete vision of humanity as it ought to live in all its domains — the individual, the domestic, the civic, and the religious.
Christian education should teach the student how to fulfill his obligations to God, to himself, to his fellow man, and to the created order. It should not be arbitrary or marked by the allegedly ‘child-centred’ chaos of our public education, which merely follows the bidding of its political masters.
Because we know the perfection of human nature in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, its understanding of human nature ought to be prescriptive, and its curriculum and organisation will allegorise the scope and sequence that all men must recognise and accept as fundamental if they hope to grow to their full human stature, which is in Him.
The Old Testament concludes with a promise and a warning. The hearts of fathers must change is we are to avoid the inevitable consequence of our own Hezekiah moment:
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. 6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” (Malachi 4:5-6)
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