A brief reprieve from the lunacy - 7 April 2010 |
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The Christian Institute reports today that the government has “withdrawn its highly controversial home education and sex education plans for England.” These plans would have made Whitehall-controlled sex education “a statutory part of the national curriculum” and given government officials the right to interview home-educated children without their parents being present. The abandonment of this proposed legislation is most definitely a good thing.
Here’s one interpretation of today’s events: The government was forced into a “humiliating U-turn” during negotiations with opposition parties, and abandoned this part of the Children, Schools and Families Bill in order to force the rest of it through in the “wash-up” – that’s the period just before the dissolution of Parliament when (sadly) some (though fortunately not all) politicians seem tempted to abandon the job they’re supposed to be doing (carefully and thoughtfully scrutinising proposed legislation, for example) and concentrate instead on getting re-elected.
That’s one way of looking at it, and it’s true enough as far as it goes.
Here’s another way:
The God who taught his people not to put their trust in princes has answered their prayers and spared them (and the rest of the country) for the time being from one small piece of oppressive lunacy flying in the direction of godly mums and dads who are just trying to bring up their kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The God who taught his people to pray “Your kingdom come” has extended his gracious rule an inch or so further into an area of British public life where the devil was about to get his own way (temporarily) by enlisting the support of the powers that be in pursuit of his (doomed) project to overthrow the rule of the risen and exalted Lord Jesus Christ.
The God who commands all the earth to pay homage to his exalted Son and worship him with all their heart and soul and mind and strength has mercifully delivered us from being yet more deeply mired in slavery to the idolatrous and self-destructive statism that will one day ruin this nation if her people don’t repent in a big way.
The God whose people are too often tempted to doubt that the hearts of kings are in his hands has gently reminded us that the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes.
One or two civil rulers who apparently do not realise that they, like the rest of us, are required to submit to the authority of Jesus Christ in every area of their lives, and who have therefore apparently forgotten that their job is to enact the laws that God commands, not to make up their own, have received a less-than-gentle reminder that there is no authority except that which God has established, and that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and that anyone who thinks he is standing firm needs to take care that he doesn’t fall, and that the Lord drowned Pharoah and his host in the Red Sea, and that with an overflowing flood he will make an end of all his adversaries.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Current affairs, Minister's Blog