Aha!

I hate it when movies do weird things to books. I have a sick kiddo so we are watching a lot more movies than usual. The other day we were watching Piglet's Big Movie in which the entire corpus of Pooh is given a thorough historical revision so that Piglet is the main character in every story. One which jumped out at me and I was hoping was the same in the book however was the story of how Kanga and Roo first came to the Hundred Acre Wood. It is a cute story in which the other animals are all threatened by this newcomer so they engineer a plan to kidnap Roo and make Kanga promise to go away and never return. In Piglet's Big Movie, there is a great scene where Rabbit is explaining this plan, which included replacing Roo with Piglet, and Rabbit says they will all say Aha!
Piglet rightly asks what "Aha" means and Rabbit responds, "Aha means 'this is the way things are...and this is the way they were meant to be." Of course this is not the way the narrative goes in Mine's classic book, but the essence is the same.
Aha means maintaining the status quo. The people who get to determine what the status quo are is another question altogether. If we were good orthodox, biblically minded individuals we would immediately recognize that this is a question of authority and therefore must be submitted to God's pattern of governmental division. There are three spheres of government instituted in Scripture for the authoritarian rule of mankind: Civil, Family, and Church. Befre asking what the status quo is and whether it should or could be challenged we need to determine who made it the status quo and what level of authority they had to make it so. If a father gives an underage child authority to consume large quantities of alcohol, he is challenging the status quo. Does he have the authority to challenge the status quo in this way? There is where the real question is.
If a ruling authority has made a decision within its right to make a decision, this constitutes an area where the status quo should not be challenged, or at least not challenged in a rebellious or disrespectful manner. If a ruling authority has established a rule outside his authority, this form of status quo should be challenged, but how?
The current homeshcooling case in California comes to mind. This is clearly a case in which the state, or civil, authority has overstepped its legitimate authority and established a status quo that needs to be challenged. Homeschoolers all over the country, and Classical Christian schools as well, have been challenging the notion that the state is the appropriate agency for the education of our young people. We have been doing this as legally as we can (I know of many who flat-out resorted to illegal homeschooling when all attempts at reasonable compromise were exhausted). The state is not the authority granted the control over the education of children, that authority is clearly given to families in the Scriptures (Deut. 6:4-9, Eph. 6:4).
The history of government-controlled education goes back, at least as far as Plato. In the Republic, Plato recommended that the state take control of the education of the young in order to guarantee their training would be carried out as the state wished it to be carried out. Many people object to my calling "public education" government-controlled education or "public schools" government-controlled schools. I don't know why except that calling them what they are makes it increasingly difficult ignore what is going on. When the federal government determines what books can and cannot be used in the classroom, who can and cannot teach in the classroom, who can and cannot go to certain schools, and what can and cannot be eaten during the day, we have a government-controlled education system.
Those of us involved with homeschooling or private education have decided that we will challenge the status quo here. We will do so as biblically as we can, which means we will honor and respect the authority that the state does have while challenging the authority it does not have (Acts. 4:8-12, 18-20).
Hopefully we will not have to resort to Rabbit's "Aha!" Hopefully we can reform our world, through the saving power of the gospel, so that all spheres of government take their cue from Christ and stay in their pre-appointed jurisdictions.