The Beginning of Wisdom

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 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. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

The education of the child, then, is not simply filling his mind with information; it is training his affections to love God. It is training him to seek after the Object of his affection with the meditation of his heart, the powers of his intellect and the work of his hands. We do not embrace the narrow view of education to which the rationalism of our age would lead us; we seek to educate the whole child to be wholly human with an appreciation of the God-given gifts of the spiritual and the material, the revealed and the discovered, the dialectic and the poetic.

We are to teach the child when we sit in the house, when we walk by the way, when we lie down and when we rise up. This speaks not only to our faithfulness in regards to time, but also in regards to application. This is not a command to multitask! God is not saying to us, “Talk of heavenly things while you mindlessly do earthly things.” He is saying the Word of God applies at all times and to all things and we are to live out that truth before our children. We are to awaken their minds to understand that everything they see or do or say or think is touched by the divine. This is the knowledge of God that is the beginning of wisdom.