Spare the Rod, Part 1 (of 2)

 

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward, Psalm 127:3.

 

I understand that Christmas tends to be the season when most people want to give sermons about Christ’s birth, and I certainly enjoy being reminded of it. But this Christmas I wanted to switch our focus from the Christ’s advent to our own children’s. As in the verse cited above, children are a heritage and reward from God. Later in that Psalm, which is penned by Solomon, we learn that happy is the man whose quiver is filled with children. Children are likened to the arrows of a warrior, and this invites a comparison. What did Solomon mean when he said this?

Solomon’s father David was a man of war, and Solomon was raised among mighty men of war that subdued Israel’s enemies all around him. He knew well the purpose of an arrow. Again, arrows have purpose. When a warrior fires one, he has intention; there is a target, a goal in sight. So it is, or should be, with one’s children. Children ought to be raised by their parents with the same deliberation as a warrior taking aim at his target. The warrior firing randomly will soon find that his careless behavior on the battlefield will cost him dearly. And the parents that refuse to direct, guide or mold their children will suffer a similar fate. We will watch our little ones learn from myriad places about religion, philosophy, sexuality, morality and so much more from every source they come across. God’s reward to us as we fulfill His will to, “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth,” Genesis 1:28, is children. How shabbily must we treat this immense privilege and responsibility if we opt to take our hands off the reins of our children’s upbringing!

 

In the days of Israel, before the kingdom was founded or the people had even been brought in under Joshua, Moses told them, “you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up,” Deuteronomy 11:18, 19. Moses’ model for rearing one’s children places the burden of their intellectual and moral development on the parents’ shoulders. While the modern parental technique mistakes apathy for love, Moses commands parents to lead the charge in our children’s education, especially when it comes to spiritual matters. Since we read, “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” 2 Timothy 3:16, we as Christians can rely on this wisdom from God when it comes to rearing our children. The Bible never suggests a “hands off” approach. Imagine life like a library, and the older we become the more books we acquire on a variety of topics. When our children arrive they have no library as of yet; they need to acquire knowledge about life and its many facets. They have questions about ultimate purpose and causality. They are curious about who they are, what they are, and why they are. We, the older generation, have much knowledge, and when they want to borrow a book from us, as it were, would any good parent refuse them? Yet there seems to be this alarming trend amongst our culture that celebrates the notion that children should learn for themselves, sans our influence. Step aside parents! Let your children be their own people!

 

If it were so simple humanity would be born hardwired, knowing what they needed already for the course of their lives. Such is not the case. Rather, God has seen fit to endow parents with the awesome responsibility of raising children and helping them fill that library with a reservoir of knowledge, both theoretical and applicable. This new type of thinking is, in my own estimation, a sort of anti-thinking; an effort to permit intuition to lead where logic and reason should have the reins. Children must learn. But if parents wash their hands of this necessity, they WILL learn from another source. All this ideology amounts to is moral absolution for parents. They can, under the pretense of this justified and enlightened thinking, let their kids run riot, learning piecemeal in a hundred places from neutral and antagonistic sources. Perhaps this narrative sounds appealing to some simply because we have, as a culture (Christian or otherwise) been hoodwinked into surrendering a unified worldview that accepts and acknowledges a universal moral order. Instead right and wrong are relegated to subjective (read: opinionated) terms defined not by an outside authority but by our internal biases.

 

But morality is not subject to its beholder. No, the moral order is objective and creates a framework of absolutes that provide groundwork for what is and is not permissible in our lives, and in the lives of our children. Romans chapter 2 deals with this rule of conscience, which is another aspect or way of describing the revelation of a moral order. We as parents must be selfless enough and loving enough to take the hard road and teach. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” Proverbs 22:6. Solomon, the wisest man of his time, shared this with us. It was true then; it is no less so now. How many parents would permit their child to rush headlong into immediate physical danger? Wisdom, refined by love dictates that we would save them, and having done so teach them through our actions. We are the frontline in what our children know and will emulate in childhood and beyond. Not school. Not the church or their friends or the internet. But if we would pull them away from a moving car, or pluck them out of a lake if they began to drown, why let them run freely into intellectual traffic or deep spiritual waters without preparing them? Alison Thomas writes of today’s youth, “passively refusing to prepare [children] to make wise choices is, in fact, actively arranging for them to sin.” It is that simple, and that deadly. We are setting up our own children for a life of mistrial and grief.