<p>What is the point of being educated?</p>

Hope Channel

InVerse, 4th Quarter 2020: Education

Justin Kim

Israel Ramos

Jonathan Walter

Callie Williams

01 Acquaint Yourself with God

Sebastien Braxton

Sikhu Daco

02 Knowing God as Creator

03 Knowing God as Redeemer

04 Higher than the Highest

05 Unselfishness and True Development

06 Adventist Education

07 Education and Character

08 Education and Faith

09 Education and Sabbath

10 The School of the Sanctuary

11 The Schools of the Prophets

12 The School of Life

13 The Revolution of Jesus Christ

Whether it's your doctorate, your master's, your bachelor's, or high school diploma, or even your kindergarten diploma, what is the point of being educated?

Coming to you from Silver Spring, Maryland, welcome to Inverse, a Bible-based conversation on life principles, contemporary issues, and thought-provoking perspectives.

Now here's your host, Justin Kim, with Inverse.

Function of education has been around for centuries, But what's the point of it?

There are some who think God needs to be at the center of it and there's others that say God does not have anything to Do with education Welcome friends.

We are watching you're watching We are on inverse and we're so happy that you decided to spend the next 30 minutes with us We have in the studio my friends and another friend from very far, very far away, but she's streaming in, so happy to see her.

And we are in this new topic, new arc on the topic of education.

And before you were like, oh, that's so weird, I don't wanna, I don't like school.

We're not talking about education in terms of curricula and homework and degrees, but what's the point of it all and taking a deeper look on education, especially from the perspective of the Bible.

So we're gonna have a prayer by Callie, If you can pray for us and we'll get into the Bible.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the privilege it is to study your word together.

As we look at different scripture, as we discuss, I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us and we would walk away with a practical understanding of what the true goal of all education is.

We ask and pray all this in Christ's name.

Israel, can we, let's go to Job, Job chapter 22, chapter 22, verse 21 to, well, let's just read to 24.

It says, Now acquaint yourself with Him and be at peace.

Receive, please, instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.

If you return to the Almighty, you will be built up.

You will remove iniquity far from your tents.

Then you will lay your gold in the dust, and your gold of Ophir among the stones of the brooks.

All right, so Shonathan, let me ask you, so we are in this, the book of Job.

Give us kind of an introduction, maybe some people don't know anything about this book.

It's pronounced Job, it's not job, right?

So it's not about jobs and education, but we're just looking at, what's, give us some background.

Job was a man, lived a long time ago, who had a very, very brutal experience of losing everything he owned and really almost everyone he loved.

And so in this experience of not knowing why this happened, because he could not see the background of the situation in which Satan was trying to get Job to go away from God.

And so some of his friends came, they talked to him, they tried to give him advice, some of the advice was not so good, some of the advice was good and Job is responding and it's going back and forth and this whole book is really about trying to understand why is there suffering?

What does our connection with God have to do with all of this?

And so this is just in the middle of the book, almost the exact middle of the book here, where we receive this really good advice about acquainting ourselves with God.

Yeah, this is 1 of those wisdom books that in the form of a dialogue, and it kind of addresses what's the point of life?

Especially as you said, brutal experiences that Job has.

Like what's the point and different perspectives.

But as you said, in the middle of it, you have some good advice.

Well, as Jonathan was already mentioning, in the middle of Job's experience with God, he's suffering.

And his friends actually, they think that he's suffering because of his sin.

And the crazy thing is that Job's friend is giving him great advice, but for the wrong reason, which goes to show that there are sometimes, it's important for us as Christians, not only to not always focus on the source of the advice, but focus on the advice itself.

Is the advice that I'm receiving, even though it might be intended for bad, for evil, is it good advice?

And the bottom line point that Job's friend is making here is it's critical to know God.

And how this ties into education is when we talk about education, the purpose of education around the world is to make better citizens.

Thinking that if we make better citizens, if we educate people, if we build people up from the time that they're little, that ultimately these will be the answers for the success of nations, for peace in the world, for...

And if you look at verse 21 onward with a critical eye, you'll notice there that what we look for in society doesn't come so much from education, but it comes from an acquaintance with God, which is ultimately from the Bible's perspective God's own way of educating.

The Bible says, acquaint yourself with Him, and then Israel has brought this in with education.

Has that been your motivation for education?

Is that the reason why you got your bachelor's, master's, doctorate, postdoc, fellowship, and you know, honoree?

I mean, this is the society that we're living in.

Yeah, We're always wanting to have those letters after our names and even my son.

I mean hey, let's get it and education is great.

But how does that line up with your spiritual experience?

I think at the definitely not all of my, I don't have all the degrees first of all, but the degrees I do have, and even just in high school and middle school and going back to kindergarten, like you said earlier, my motivation at those times were not, I want to know Jesus more or I want to become more like Christ.

It was, well, part of it's kind of just like, that's what you do, right?

You go to school, you get degrees, you're supposed to do well.

But also the emphasis that I experienced was more, this is to make you independent, this is to make you self-sufficient.

And so it actually downplayed any kind of idea of dependence on God.

And sadly I'd say that was even my experience in the Christian education that I had.

I went to Adventist schools up through high school and not that people you know didn't talk about God but it wasn't like yeah we need to learn so we can like serve Him more.

It was kind of like okay you take your science classes and you take your Bible classes and they're separate and there's no like overlap.

There's no overarching coming to know Christ in all of the classes.

So yeah just that big push on independence versus any kind of dependence on God was what I experienced.

That's a very profound point that in the systems of education that we are in, it's not just the knowledge that we learn, but you're mentioning that there is some character impact that it's making.

And in your case, it's made your character to be more independent.

Whether that's good or bad, that's not assessed.

It is impacting, it's shaping who we are.

And this is where we're talking about in the book of education, on the topic of education, that this is more than the courses that we're taking, yeah?

Looking at the philosophy of education and how that interplays with the Bible.

You know, you pointed out earlier that the text here talks about, or was it Israel, that the things that the world wants, God is offering, but we have to understand that, you know, Kell is saying education, and we all have experienced, you know, public education, it makes you more independent and self-sufficient and all these things.

And you have skills and whatever you get from it in order to have a stable life, in order to build yourself up and to have freedom.

And so the desires of the human heart are for peace and freedom and for stability.

So the desires are not necessarily wrong.

It's just where do we find the fulfillment for those desires?

And so we do know that as humans, if we focus on humanity alone, we will fail because we are sinful.

But God is offering, hey, I have the true path, the real path, the path that will fulfill you and uplift you.

Series

InVerse, 4th Quarter 2020: Education

01 Acquaint Yourself with God

Transcript

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Parent Series

Sponsor

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