The perennial contrast that exists between the role of the law in salvation versus the role of the gospel in salvation is profound. The gospel saves; the law damns. When the separate function of each one becomes confused in our thinking, however, the problem is as profound as the difference between the two roles. When such confusion is allowed to permeate our idea of how we ought to teach our children, that problem enters a realm that is particularly problematic. Do we educate our children using a framework for education that is modeled after the law or after the gospel? That is the question. Ultimately, those are the only two choices we have. And the answer affects souls.

What would be a law model for education? The law says, “Do this, and you will live; don’t do this, and you will die.” It is a system of good rewards versus bad consequences. Which one you end up with is up to you and the behavior that you choose to exhibit. Work hard, study hard, follow the rules, and you will likely receive an A. Don’t do the work, don’t follow the rules, don’t bother to study, and you will likely receive a poor grade. The result depends on the student’s ability, motivation, and drive. It is up to the student to perform.

Under the law you get what you deserve. Under the gospel, however, you don’t. A gospel model for education will function quite differently. The gospel is all about grace, the undeserved favor and love of God. The gospel is all about free and unconditional salvation. The gospel of God takes the law of God and turns it inside out, so to speak.

Note well that the gospel does not annihilate the law. Quite the opposite, in fact. Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law, not to destroy it. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matt. 5:17). But in fulfilling the law, Jesus did more than simply keep the law of God perfectly for us. His obedience to the law not only counts as ours in God’s plan of salvation, but also his obedience affected the law itself. The law is established. “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law” (Rom. 3:31). This means that the foundation of the law is set. What is the sum of the law? First, to love God and then, ipso facto, to love the neighbor. Thus it was in the Old Testament, and thus it is now. So what has changed? The possibility of keeping the law has changed, and that has everything to do with Jesus Christ and his work of salvation. This is not to be confused with our ability to obey the law or even with Christ’s ability to obey it. Possibility is the issue, not ability.

It is true that only Jesus Christ as the Son of God was able to obey the law of God perfectly. It is also true that only those who are in Jesus Christ and have been given the Holy Spirit to live in their hearts will be able to obey the law of God with the principle of a small beginning. But before the gospel came, before Jesus Christ loved God perfectly in our place while dying on the accursed cross in order to atone for all of our sins, the law could not be fully obeyed by any mere man at all, ever. It was impossible even for Adam, though Adam was perfect. Why? Because in the end, obeying the law of God amounts to pure, full, and complete gratitude to God. That is what pure, full, and complete love for God is. In order to understand how this applies to Adam, it may be helpful to answer two more questions. 

First, how could any of the Old Testament children of God be fully and completely grateful for a salvation that had not yet happened in time? Christ, the promised Messiah, still had to come. Even though his coming was absolutely certain and, from that point of view, thanks could be given for salvation in the Old Testament as well as in the New, the fact remained that those main events involving salvation still needed to unfold. Satan still roamed the roads in heaven and needed to be cast out of God’s dwelling place forever, even though there was no doubt that Satan would be defeated and forever cast out. Now to see such salvation come in all its glory, power, wonder, and wisdom gives both the angels and the children of God every reason to thank and praise God in all purity and fullness forever and ever. Such was the celebration in heaven when Christ ascended his throne there. 

Concerning Adam, however, one more question remains. In Adam and Eve’s perfect existence before the fall, they could thank God for many things, and they undoubtedly did; but they knew nothing of thanking God for a bloody sacrifice that would atone for all their sins. Not until they experienced how utterly miserable sin is and not until God sought them out in the garden and made them coats of skins to cover their nakedness did they begin to comprehend that news, news that was the gospel to them. Before they fell such news would have meant little or nothing to them. They would not have understood. After they fell that news would have meant everything to them. And that is what the gospel is to all of us. It is everything.

That the gospel is everything to us will include how we view education. There is a gospel model for education. What might such a model look like? On the surface it might not look so different from a law model. Even though the law of God and the gospel of God are diametrically opposed to one another in what they contribute to salvation, the gospel never destroys the law of God. Rather, the gospel changes the law’s use. The law of God is good. But that law of God naturally functions from the outside in. The law is an external power that leaves only two options for those placed under it: obey and live or disobey and die. And since this is God’s law and God is absolutely perfect and holy and righteous, the obedience that he requires must be absolutely perfect as well. The law of God is indeed good. It is absolutely good. Nor is the good law of God thrown out of a gospel model for education. Instead, the law is seen differently within such a model.

Under the law, to disobey and die is the only option left for all men. “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). No mere human has obeyed nor ever will obey the law of God perfectly; and even if any human could, he would still bear the guilt of original sin. Thus all men from all time are bound under the law’s sentence of condemnation. It is bondage of and unto death. But that is not life in the gospel.

What is life in the gospel? It is to be set free from that bondage of death under the law unto the freedom of life in the gospel. And here we must take one step back before moving forward, for this is where many people stumble. They hear the word freedom, and they immediately think that there is freedom to sin if one pleases; and so they charge the gospel itself with antinomianism. Those who make such a charge have no concept of what this freedom really is. It is no freedom to sin.

 The bondage we were under was exactly this: we were bound to sin. In Adam we were not only “free,” or able, to sin; but we became bound and doomed to sin, so that sin is our bondage. To continue in the misery of sin is part of the death we deserve. Although Adam’s last breath would be many years hence, the very day that Adam sinned, his body began its descent into the grave. That was his physical death. Adam’s spiritual death occurred that same day as well. God did not lie when he said that the day Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, he would surely die. On that same day our spiritual death occurred with him. We became bound to be sinners who can do nothing but sin every moment and every hour. That is our spiritual death and misery. To sin is not our freedom. Freedom is being able to serve God perfectly with no sin at all. To be bound under the law as a sinner is to be held in bondage to sin. It is to be a slave to sin in no less manner than the children of Israel were slaves to the Egyptians. That is our bondage under the law. And we deserve it.

Now enters the gospel. Jesus Christ. The Son of God come into our guilty, hell-bound flesh. In his very person is salvation. He is salvation. The miracle of all miracles! That is the gospel. The cross was the culmination of our deliverance in time, but that deliverance was already there in eternity, and eternity was there on the cross. It took that kind of miracle, a miracle involving both eternity and time, to save us from the never-ending death that we deserve. And now men charge that unfathomably glorious and wondrous gospel with antinomianism? The charge is blasphemous. It is to say that Jesus Christ saved us so that now we can sin even more. To answer that accusation will help us to understand what life in the gospel really is and how that life can be applied to education.

The writers of the Canons of Dordt understood the false charge of antinomianism very well, and their response to it constitutes the whole of the Canons. Their attitude toward that charge is especially revealed in the conclusion to the Canons. They wrote of that false charge as that which they “detest[ed] with their whole soul.”¹ The conclusion explicitly begins with a holy rant against the Remonstrants’ charge of antinomianism, a charge that impugns the doctrines of grace and especially the truth of predestination. To teach predestination, election and reprobation, the Remonstrants said, “by its own proper nature and impulse, draws away the minds of men from all piety and religion.”² The delegates to the Synod of Dordt went on to write at length about that false charge, which tells us what the whole of the Canons is really about. The synod was countering the five points of the Remonstrants, and those five points amounted to exactly this charge: that being comforted and assured by the doctrine of election will ipso facto make you careless and profane. In today’s language that can be stated in these terms: if you truly believe in an unconditional covenant and you begin your soteriology with election, you will necessarily be a “doctrinal antinomian,” even if you do not exhibit the signs of being a practical antinomian—yet. There is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon observed. The apostle Paul was accused of that, as was Jesus himself. Paul’s answer to that charge was “God forbid.” “What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid” (Rom. 6:15).

All of this applies to education. To conceive of a scenario where the law is the main basis for instruction is quite easy to do. “Do this, and you get that” is not difficult to understand. And there is truth to that! Things really do happen that way. There are consequences for certain behaviors, whether the consequences be pleasant or unpleasant. But is that all there is? If we have administered the law, if we have communicated certain facts about this or that subject, have we done our full duty to the students, so that they have truly learned and grown in their understanding of the boundless glory of God? To ask the question is to answer it. No. There must be a certain freedom involved in order to truly learn and grow: a freedom to wonder, to ponder, to ask questions, to discover, and to express what one has found to be true.

To ask what is a beginning. To ask how is to go further. To ask why gets at the core of the matter. And discovery is key to all of that. If I am simply told that fifteen divided by three equals five, I might remember that fact. I also might not. I can believe that fact is true, but I don’t know how the division works, and I certainly don’t know why. In this case it is a matter of sheer memorization for me to know that fifteen divided by three equals five. I don’t understand it, but I will take the teacher’s word for it that it is true. Have I learned? I wrote down the correct answer! I obeyed the law!

The problem is, I discovered nothing. I haven’t put two and two together in my own mind. I haven’t learned how to think. Retaining facts is only the beginning. I have to know how to use those facts, how to apply them, and how to see them in relation to one another. I have to understand the why of them. And how does one acquire that kind of deep and lasting knowledge? It is by discovery. When one discovers something, one now knows it by experience. One understands it. It is an aha moment. Even if someone is teaching me a concept, in the end I have to reach the conclusions involved in the concept myself if I am going to truly understand it. If I am simply told what facts to remember without myself struggling to grasp how those facts function together and why they are important, have I learned, and will I likely remember them, simply because I was told to? Even if I do remember them, what good will it do me if that is all I know?

That is the way the law works. The law tells you what to do. Period. And there are consequences for not doing what the law tells you to do. Ultimately, are those commands of God, as infinitely righteous and authoritative as they are, going to impart to you the strength to actually obey the commands? No, they will not. And that truth is incontrovertibly creedal. Canons of Dordt 3–4.5–6 cannot be denied:

5. The reason (…or purpose…) of the decalogue, particularly delivered from God by Moses to the Jews, is the same as that of the light of nature; for when indeed it exposes the magnitude of sin, and more and more convicts man of guilt, yet it neither discloses a remedy, nor confers the power of emerging from misery; so that, being rendered weak through the transgression of the flesh, it leaves him under the curse, and man cannot through it obtain saving grace.
6. What, therefore, neither the light of nature nor the law could do, that God performs by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the word, or the ministry of reconciliation; which is the Gospel concerning the Messiah, by which it hath pleased God to save believers, as well under the Old as under the New Testament.³

These articles, which are based entirely on scripture, might be swept under the rug and ignored (and often are!), but they cannot be denied. This is creedal. This is Reformed. This is scriptural. The law does not and cannot save or impart strength to obey the law. Only the gospel saves. Only the gospel imparts faith, and faith is the only thing from which all the blessings of salvation can proceed, including the blessing of obedience to the law.

Only the gospel gives the full why to obey the law of God. Apart from the gospel, there are only two reasons to obey the law. One reason is out of fear of damnation, and the other is a desire for self-preservation out of self-love. Article 24 of the Belgic Confession throws both of these reasons over the cliff as wholly unacceptable.⁴ To obey the law for selfish reasons amounts to nothing more than a ruse of pious behavior and is no true obedience at all. With the gospel, however, there is every good reason to obey the law of God, and that reason may be summed up in one word: gratitude. Only the gospel can give a sinner that kind of grateful, enamored heart out of which genuine obedience flows.

Before the fall Adam could love God, and he did; but he also could sin, and he did. After the fall Adam could not possess any measure of love for God without the gospel being applied to him first. Thus it is for all of us sinners for all time. To love God is an infinitely strict command, but it is more than a command. It is also an infinitely blessed privilege, which makes this command to be of an entirely different nature than a command that a master might demand of a slave. To love God is no bondage. To love God is and must be a matter of freedom, or it is no love. And more, Adam’s love for God after the fall and after Adam was given the gospel was no mere repair job. Adam’s love was a new and better love, a love that was not possible before the fall. It was an incorruptible love. Adam’s first love for God was in Adam himself, and thus it could be lost. Adam’s second love for God was in Christ and therefore could not be lost, ever. Indeed, Jesus Christ is the second Adam (1 Cor. 15:45).

To consider what the gospel is will help us to understand how all of this is so. The gospel is Jesus Christ. The gospel is all our salvation. And Jesus Christ is our righteousness. He is our justification. He is our sanctification. He is our holiness. He is our all.

The gospel does more than give us a correct, grateful motive to love God and obey his law. If that were all that the gospel did, we would still not obey the law. We are sinners. Sheer intent is not enough. But God through Jesus Christ gives us the actual obedience of gratitude too. He must give us the willing and the doing and the thanks, and he does. This is the gospel. In the gospel we have everything.

The devil is not finished with his tricks though. A wrong inference might still be drawn, which would presume that God gives us this obedience in Jesus Christ so that we can be saved, as if this proper and grateful obedience must contribute somehow to our salvation. The truth of the gospel is hard for us to grasp because we are still such sinners. We can barely understand what real thankfulness is. When God gives us the gratitude that he wants us to have, we must understand it to be a matter of resting in Jesus Christ, not a matter of trying to see how many good works we can add to a religious scorecard. Gratitude is not a game. Jesus Christ played the game already, so to speak, and there are no more moves left to make. He won, and we won in him. Gratitude is to enjoy and to live in that victory. Gratitude is not an attempt to get something more from God. How could we do that? To be joined to Christ is to already have everything because Christ is our all; he has everything. What could we possibly lack? Gratitude is to rest fully contented in Christ’s saving work alone, seeking nothing more outside of him and his gifts. That such contentment constitutes the tenth and final commandment is no coincidence. Contentment is the sum of gratitude.

God made this plain to Abraham: “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward” (Gen. 15:1). That is justification, sanctification, preservation, and glorification all in one. Or, more literally, all in One. What might we yet lack? Because we have not yet reached the glorification part of salvation in time, is that what we still need? We still pray to God to request of him many things, do we not? Isn’t that proof of some lack? We ask God for forgiveness exactly because we do not presently experience it, isn’t that correct?

No, that is not correct at all. God spoke in the present tense to Abraham. I am thy shield. I am. i am. Abraham lacked nothing. Nor do we. One might scoff that the end of time has not yet come, and so we still look forward to receiving that final perfection. We don’t really have everything yet then…right?

Does God lie? Does the i am that i am lie? Creatures of dust have a difficult time understanding that God does not lie. This means that we have a difficult time understanding this. But no, God does not lie. God is our shield and our exceeding great reward. We don’t wait for that to be true. That is true. Of course, there are events that still must happen in time. But that is the point: they must happen. They will. And as far as eternity is concerned, they already have happened. To speak foolishly (for that is all we can do on this earth), eternity has already begun. The child of God stands with one foot on earth and one foot in heaven—right now. That is Lord’s Day 22, answer 58: “Since I now feel in my heart the beginning of eternal joy…” (Confessions and Church Order, 105). Even though we dwell in another country at the moment, we are citizens of heaven—right now. And not only can we know that, but we also do know it.

That we belong to heaven means that when this universe is rolled up like a scroll, we will not be rolled up with it. We will be left standing. There was never any question about that, even though time has not yet come to a close. What God has determined from all eternity to be in time will be. Time is a creature that God has made, along with all the creatures found inside of time. Did he not turn the sundial back ten degrees just to prove it (2 Kings 20:11; Isa. 38:8)? Only God can do that. But there is more proof still. God is not stingy in his gifts or in his proofs.

Jesus Christ ascended into heaven in all power, glory, and honor. That means we are there in heaven too. The union that binds us to Christ is faith, nothing more and nothing less. This means that by faith, by union to Jesus Christ, we are there in heaven right now too. This is our reality, creatures of time though we still may be. Because that is not all we are. We were not just born in time. We were also conceived in the mind and decree of God from all eternity. That is our reality. That is our election, our election in Jesus Christ. We would never know that except it were revealed unto us by God, but that does not change the fact of it. We are creatures of time, and we are creatures of eternity as well. We were there in eternity. We were not there in ourselves, but in Christ we were really there.

If we think we cannot comprehend all of this, that is understandable; it is certain that we cannot. How can creatures of time comprehend eternity? We can’t. But the truths of time in eternity and eternity in time happened. They happened in Jesus Christ, in his very person. They happened when the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us. We must return to that miracle again and again. Indeed, we will spend eternity returning to it. Christ is the elect one, the elect head. Without him our election not only has no meaning, but also there is no election at all. As our elect head he ascended into heaven, so that we are there in heaven too. May we say that we are physically there? Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. Our bodies will not be in heaven until the final resurrection, when they are made new. Yet we may say that we are in heaven even now. Why? Because Jesus Christ our head, to whom we are very really united, is bodily there in heaven right now. That is the reality. If he is there, so are we. Period.

That reality will count for great significance in a gospel-based education. When students are seen through the lens of the gospel, they are seen as citizens of heaven. That is how they need to be taught: as little citizens of heaven. Through the lens of the law, they will instead be seen as those who still need conversion and salvation or as “little vipers,” as Jonathan Edwards has famously called them. Within the mindset of the gospel, however, Edwards’ words become infamous. Such children already have one foot in heaven, just like the adults. At the baptism of infants we confess that they are sanctified in Christ. Not that they will be sanctified if they do enough good works but that they are sanctified even as tiny infants, even without their knowledge, even without a good work to their name. A godly education will prepare children for and instruct them in living that heavenly life that they already possess. They might indeed appear to be little vipers; but if we are honest, before the whole world we adults look like nothing more than big vipers. Faith doesn’t live by what is seen. Faith lives by what is not seen (Heb. 11:1).

We may note here that Isaac and Rebekah understood very well that this did not mean that all of their children head for head were elect citizens of heaven. There are Jacobs, and there are Esaus. But this does mean that we raise all of our children as citizens who belong to heaven. Whether they actually possess the citizenship papers to the land of Canaan or not is not our judgment to make. God told us that he would take his children from our children (Gen. 17:7). That is all we need to know and act upon.

In practical terms, what will such an education with an eye on heaven look like? Life on this earth is still necessary, after all. Instruction will still need to apply to what happens here. The difference, however, is that when one lives in the gospel, there is more. This life is not all there is. Heaven is not just a goal. Heaven is a present reality. How then do citizens of heaven live on this earth? That is the question that a gospel-based education attempts to answer.

With that in mind we may also ask, how does God teach us? Does he use the law or the gospel? Does he simply throw facts at us, or does he allow us to discover and learn by experience? Lessons learned by experience tend to be remembered much more vividly and certainly. Lessons learned by experience are “owned” by the student. God is the master teacher. When he teaches us something, we learn it. We own it. He knows how to teach. His example will show us how to teach. So once more, how does God teach us?

By his Word and Spirit is the simple answer. That is also the full answer. There are necessary facts that are communicated to us in the scriptures, facts we otherwise would never know or guess. How were the worlds created? None of us saw those events happen. We must be told by him who knows how creation happened. He was there. He did it. But the scriptures are much more than a set of true historical facts of which we may be informed. When we are taught by God’s Word and Spirit, there is a whole other dimension to the teaching besides setting forth information. Scripture explains this as well: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Heb. 11:3). Through faith. That is the key. Faith and discovery go together. Faith and learning go together. Faith and understanding go together. They go together exactly because of what faith is.

Faith is not something we do, as many would have us to believe—that faith is a “doing.” Faith inevitably and infallibly results in a verb, but faith itself is not a verb. Faith is a noun that we are given. It is a gift. Nor is our reception of faith something we must do, which is nothing more than yet another ploy of Satan to deceive the sheep concerning the doctrine of faith. Our receiving of faith has nothing to do with the meaning of faith. We are passive in our reception of faith. The only one active in faith is God, as he alone gives it to whomsoever he wills. And his saving gifts are irresistible. He is God. If he gives something to someone, will that one be able to refuse his gift? The answer to that question could not be clearer. Does God ever fail to accomplish his will? No, never. He is God. Whomever God delights to unite to his Son will surely be united to Jesus Christ. That is faith. It is what God does. God, by the Holy Spirit, who works faith in us, unites us to Jesus Christ. Faith is an instrument in God’s hands, not ours.

All of this translates into education because that is also exactly what God does when he gives us faith, uniting us to Jesus Christ: he educates us. He instructs us. He teaches us. He reveals his truth to us insofar as we are able to bear it. That is why we often think of covenant history as unfolding. In the Old Testament God showed the Israelites with more and more clarity who their savior would be. It was a learning process for them. And so it is for us. Jesus sent the comforter, his Holy Spirit, into our hearts—in order to do what? In order to teach us more and more of his truth (John 14:26). It is a learning process for us in the New Testament as well. God teaches, and we learn. That is our salvation. When God gives us faith, we are the saved ones. When God teaches us, we are the saved ones too. Faith and learning go together.

We might throw our hands up at this point and say, “But we can’t teach like that!” Can we enter a child’s heart like the Holy Spirit enters ours to create that bond that unites us to Jesus Christ? Not at all, but that is not the point. The point is that real learning happens from the inside out and not from the outside in. That is how the gospel operates as well, from the inside out. The law by itself operates from the outside in. That is why Paul said that the law was “weak” and “beggarly” (Rom. 8:3; Gal. 4:9). The law cannot save. Only the gospel saves, and it does so from the inside out. Nevertheless, the gospel does not throw the law of God out as if it were useless. On the contrary, the gospel uses the law to great effect. That is how the law of God enters our hearts, after all. God writes his law in our hearts (Jer. 31:33; Heb. 8:10; 10:16). The law has no power of its own to enter into our hearts. All the law can do is externally exert its rightful authority over us with all of its threats, guilt, and consequences. But God takes that law and places it within our hearts. With that law placed inside of us, we love that law. It is no bondage for us to obey it. It is exquisitely blissful freedom and privilege to obey it. All we want to do is obey it. Not that I have to love God, even though that is abundantly true. But there is no hope in that command alone. Rather, all hope abides in this: that I get to love God. That is what Reformed Protestant education will be all about—gift and privilege.

This is just an initial attempt to understand what education modeled after the gospel might look like. Many questions remain. Let it suffice to say that the goal and purpose of Reformed Protestant education is not to learn how to earn a million dollars or more so that the schools and churches can be supported by future generations. That may happen in God’s providence, but that is not the end goal. That is only an outward circumstance that God may or may not grant according to his will. Earthly wealth can be used of God for blessing or for cursing. Rather, the ultimate purpose and goal of Christian education is to be prepared for heaven. That is an inward thing, and that is a sure thing. That is where all our riches lie. No man knows the day or the hour, but that the day of the Son of man’s appearance is near is no secret. God has plainly revealed to us the signs of Christ’s coming. He has also plainly told us it will happen soon. That is what we look for at this point in history. That is what we need to know. That is the knowledge that prepares us for all the tribulation that is to come in what remains of this earthly history, and that knowledge also prepares us for all the blessedness of the new heavens and earth that we may anticipate with all certainty. God is with us, and he will be with us forever. That is the point of it all. That is all that matters. That is what education in the sphere of the gospel is all about.