As we saw in the previous study, the sixth commandment includes a broad reference to the concept of 'family' as a whole, and partly because I have been requested to do it, and partly because I half wanted to anyway, I'm taking a second bite at the cherry so as to balance the requirement that commandment makes of children to honour their parents with the obligation it places by implication on parents to honour their children.
Let me say at the outset that the only approach I'm qualified to take is that of a preacher, not a family counsellor. I'm no James Dobson, and I'd be a fool to try to be. My concern, as always, is simply to unfold the teaching of Scripture. We shall survey it swiftly in both Testaments.
The foundation statement the Bible makes about the attitude parents are to have toward their children is made even before the fall. That makes it about as basic as it can be. Jesus went back to it almost every time He was asked questions about marriage and family. It has a fundamental thing to say about the meaning of family.
Genesis 2:22: "The rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."
Note Adam's reaction to this glorious creature presented to him fresh from God's fashioning hand (God did make woman beautiful!): "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The Hebrew is quite difficult to translate; "Eureka!" is perhaps as near to it as you can get. It expresses entire and delighted acceptance of his partner.
And that attitude of total and unqualified acceptance of the whole person of your spouse is the basis of marriage as God intended it ... no reservations in the commitment, no retreat from each other, no area of rejection whatever, but only entire openness: "They were naked and unashamed." Nothing stood between them; they had no secrets from each other, and they knew no guilt.
"They become one flesh," the narrative says, and the word "flesh" in the Bible means our creaturely personhood. They're to be as one person. For that reason the marriage relationship takes precedence over prior family relationships. "Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife."
So ... the first duty of parents therefore is to train their children to leave them ... for another. You must let them go! ... or you thwart God's purpose for them. Fail to do it, and you do them a grave mischief. Parents may not demand that their children's first loyalty be to them. God is their first loyalty, their wife is their second, their children their third, and you, the parents come only after that. That is how God set it up, and if you want it some other way you are at loggerheads with God Himself. You are to be honoured, but not preferred!
They are to leave, to cleave and to weave! They are to leave you, cleave to one another, and weave a partnership whose purpose is to rear children to leave them! ... and do it all again.
Second, the counsel given to parents in Deuteronomy 6:5 - 9: "The commandments I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."
Parents, obviously, are responsible to rear their children to share with them their own answerability to God. I repeat ... to share with them their own answerability to God. That is clearly what the verse means. You take God and His will for you seriously, yourself, first. And you make it your diligent business to see that your children do it with you. You do not send them to someone else for their religious education; you are to do it yourself. That is what the Bible says.
I have three comments to make about it.
First, it is father's business as well as mother's. There are fathers who'd choke if they had to speak about the Lord to their children, as they would if they had to about sex. The attitude, "I bring home the bacon; the wife sees to the children" simply means they are not fit to be fathers ... not as God intended fathers to be. A father's first task is to "model God" to his children, so the sense of God they grow up with is not distorted ... so they do not say, when they're taught that God is our Father, "What, like my father?"
Second, you do not leave it to the Sunday School and the Christian Endeavour Society to do it for you, either. As supplements to home influence, they're splendid; as substitutes for it, they'll never succeed. One hour (or two) out of the week to counterbalance the other 166 in which TV, pagan society ... and you! ... have them to themselves? Failure to spend quality time with children acquainting them with the God you say you serve and worship is sheer dereliction of Christian duty.
Third, this word of God in Deuteronomy means the religious education you give your children is to be a spontaneous thing, woven into the very texture of daily family converse. not a formal thing.
Next, I commend to you two models of good parenthood in the Old Testament, and two bad ones.
"There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. His sons used to take turns holding feasts in their homes, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would send and sanctify them. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, 'Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.' This was Job's regular custom." Job 1:3, 5
How many of us have that sort of care for our children's spiritual welfare?
The mother of Samuel said to Eli the priest, "I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord."
Have you done that? That is where training them up to leave you begins. My mother did that, and I honour her for it.
And the bad ones?
First Eli, the very priest to whom Hannah spoke.
I Samuel 2:22: "Now Eli, who was very old, heard what his sons were doing, how they slept with the women who served at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. So he said to them, "Why do you do such things? I hear from all the people about these wicked deeds of yours. No, my sons; it is not a good report that I hear spreading among the Lord's people. If a man sins against another man, God may mediate for him; but if a man sins against the Lord, who will intercede for him?"
His sons, however, did not heed their father's rebuke ..."
Later (I Samuel 3:13) God says of Eli to Samuel, "I told him I would judge his family ... because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them."
Ponder that. The sons of Eli were grown men, remember, not children or teenagers. And it isn't as though Eli said nothing. He registered a godly protest. But in God's eyes that wasn't good enough. He should have stopped it.
In his last years, when David grew feeble, his son Adonijah plotted to supplant him on the kingdom's throne. Says I Kings 1:5, "Adonijah put himself forward and said, "I will be king." So he got ready chariots and horses, with fifty men to run ahead of him." Then the Bible writer observes, "His father had never interfered with him by asking, "Why do you behave as you do?"
For all David's splendid qualities, he was seriously lacking in one - the discipline of his children. Like Eli, he indulged them. He reared a house-full of spoiled brats. He did. And he paid for it.
Here I have to share with you something that has come as a complete surprise to me, and I know some of you are not going to thank me for it. God appoints His servants, as He did Jeremiah long ago, to tear down as well as build up ... and I have to tear down an old shibboleth.
Says Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it," and we take it to mean the sort of thing a Jesuit priest once said, "Give me a child till he is eight years old, and I care not who has him after." Generations of Christian parents have clung to this verse as a promise that their children will turn out well in the end because they gave them a Christian upbringing.
What the Hebrew actually says is, "Train up a boy on the mouth of his way, and when he is old he will not turn aside from it."
It means ...
either "Adapt your teaching to his nature, his capacity and the stage of development he is at" - suit it to the particular characteristics of each; do not demand an old head on young shoulders, sort of thing,
or it means "Rear a child to have his own way, and when he is old he won't change" - he'll be selfish to the end. In which case it is a warning, not a promise. And I'm afraid the balance of linguistic evidence is in favour of the second. Rear a spoiled brat, and a spoiled brat he'll be till the day he dies. David lived to learn the truth of it. The balancing proverb to this one is 19:18: "Discipline your son while there is hope; do not be a willing party to his death."
And that leads us to the plentiful parental guidance given in the book of Proverbs.
Be aware when you read the counsel given to sons in Proverbs that for the most part it is not young children, up to say Primary School age, Solomon had in mind, but young people up to 30. However, young children are in mind in some of them.
22:15 "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him."
"Spare the rod and spoil the child," we say. The Bible says it too. It is not the least bit mealy-mouthed about commending corporal punishment. The notion that parents and school teachers may be sued for caning the children in their care is a notion inspired Bible writers would treat with sturdy contempt.
23:13 "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death." A moderate caning and a controlled one, of course, not a brutal thrashing.
Right and wrong are real. Right makes life rich and enjoyable, wrong makes it wretched and unbearable, and children must learn the difference. If in their stubbornness they won't be told where the lines are drawn, then you put them to an early mild discomfort so as to head them off from later crippling distress. You owe it to them.
Anyone who says otherwise hasn't read his Bible, and treats the Bible's God with disdain. God did not hesitate to take the rod to Israel.
What is more, He'll take it to you and me, and there isn't a court in the land can stop him. He rules by judgments as well as mercies.
Says Hebrews 12:5, "My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone is), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. We have all had human fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Earthly fathers may discipline us to suit their own whims; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may grow into His likeness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."
We'd better teach our children that, or spoiled brats they'll be even after they're Christians. We'd better learn it too ourselves, and for the same reason.
And that brings us to the New Testament.
There are just three passages I'd like us to consider.
i. Ephesians 6:1 - 4
:
"Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger (the word means
'exasperate' them), but bring them up in the discipline and
instruction of the Lord."
As we have seen before, that stands under the general heading of 5:21 - "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ."
The submissiveness all Christians are to show to all other Christians, their children included, is that attitude of mind and heart toward them which sets their interests above our own. We are to behave toward others in such a way that we serve God's best interests in them. Parents are to serve their children's best interests before their own.
Note the balance in the things Scripture says here.
Children are to obey. But note Paul's phrase "in the Lord" - Paul has in mind, does he not, the situation where a parent's demands are contrary to the Law of Christ. Children are to obey their parents in the Lord - not any other way. Paul's matching concern is that fathers should not exasperate their children. Obedience is indeed required ... but not to unnecessary and unreasonable rules and regulations and endless petty corrections. Parents are so to rule them that it is God they're encouraged thereby to obey.
'Nurture' and 'admonition' mean caring instruction and the kind of guidance best described as correction - admonishing. Both words are used to describe the ministry of the Scriptures to believers. (II Tim. 3:16)
There is a clear understanding in this passage that both sides - parents and children alike - stand together under a higher obligation to Christ. You do not require of your children what you are not willing to give yourself. Parents are not the final authority - Christ is. Dr Dale: "Parents are to care more for their children's attachment and loyalty to Christ than to anything else ... more than for their health, their intellectual vigour and brilliance, their material prosperity, their social position, or their exemption from great sorrows and misfortunes."
Children, obey - yes: but fathers, do not provoke.
Here let me couple up with this verse in Ephesians the second passage ...
ii. Colossians
3:20:
"Fathers, do not provoke your children, (the word means 'embitter'
them) lest they become discouraged."
Coupling them up fathers can exasperate, embitter and discourage their children.
How?
• By abusing them physically.
In these days of child abuse, that hardly needs elaboration. A
spanking yes, but brutal discipline, no.
• By abusing them psychologically.
There are parents who would never raise a hand to their child but
have destroyed them with harsh and humiliating words. The effects are
far more lethal and long-range.
• By neglecting them.
Preoccupation with anything, from drink and gambling to hobbies,
career ... and church can lead you to neglect them! Let
'serving the Lord' take you from them and it is the Lord they'll hate
for it.
• By not understanding them.
Children, when they're misunderstood, resent it as much as we do.
When we jump in with quick answers before we have given them a chance
to spell out the problem, they are as offended by it we
are.
• By demanding too much of them.
To try and satisfy your own ego needs by driving your children to
achievements in which you've failed is devastating to their
self-esteem and they'll resent you for it. The possessive parent is
setting his children up to need marriage counselling in later
life.
• By making acceptance conditional on
performance.
If your child feels, "When I measure up I'm accepted, when I don't
I'm rejected," you've immunised them against ever hearing the
Gospel.
• By forcing our own goals on them.
Not an easy one ... we always know best!
But even when we do, our task is not to stuff it down their throat,
but help them find their own way to it. The ambitious parent will
make the child's life a misery by setting a standard too high - or
too alien to them - for them to reach. It cripples them in the
end.
• By not admitting our own faults and
failures.
A parent who can never bring himself or herself to say to their
child, "I'm sorry; I was wrong," has put himself in the place of God.
They won't worship you! They must understand that we all stand
together under the Lordship of Christ.
We are to rear our children to be free spirits, not cripple them by making them dependent on us, or keeping them ruthlessly under our thumb. We are to train them to be, not our children, but God's children.
Finally,
iii. I Thess. 2:11, 12 :
"You know how, like a father with his children, we encouraged,
comforted and urged each one of you to lead a life worthy of God
..."
Here the apostle encapsulates what a good father should do.
• Encourage. No child will love you for putting them down. Build them up.
• Comfort. It is a need we all have. There are things we cannot cope with, and our most desperate need is for someone just to understand, share our grief with us, while demanding nothing of us.
• Urge. Don't drive ... urge!
It is the devil's way to drive us; Christ's way is to urge us ... to prompt us, to awaken desire in us, to point the way forward while standing beside us, and holding out His hand to us ... until we grasp it.
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