Lights in the World - PH46-01

Advanced Bible Doctrine - Philippians 2:14-15

© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1976)

This is segment number 15 in the study of what Philippians calls the believer being a light in the world. We are studying Philippians 2:14-16 via Exodus 20:1-17. We are now on the fifth moral principle or as it is commonly known, the Fifth Commandment. This principle, like all the others, is designed to protect human freedom. It is the principle that deals with honoring one's parents. When the Bible says, "Honor your father and your mother," it means to obey them in the days of your youth, and it means to respect them when you have come to the status of an adult.

The issue here is authority. The father, we have indicated, is the final authority in the family, while the mother is his representative. God constitutes the ultimate sovereign authority in the universe. God's divine authority leads a right man to a right woman. Out of the pool of men that God brings into existence through the process of birth, and out of the pool of women that He brings into existence, there is one man designed for one woman, and one woman designed for one particular man. The right man and the right woman are brought together under the divine institution of marriage. God, the father delegates His authority to the father within that marriage relationship.

The father actually exercises, therefore, God's authority. The father, in turn, delegates authority to the mother so that she is exercising her husband's authority. A woman has no authority in life except the authority that is delegated to her by her right man in the marriage relationship. This authority of a father and mother then, in turn, is exercised upon the children from age one through 19. Age 20 and up are the years of adulthood and of personal responsibility.

We may compare this in the order of human titles to calling the father the king, we have indicated, and the mother the Prime Minister, and the children are the subjects. Since we have our marine with us in the service today, perhaps we should call the father the C.O., the commanding officer. The mother is the executive officer, or the E.O., and the children are the troops. It all comes out to one thing. There is a line of authority. We could really call them the Marines. If you want to kind of keep this thing in order in your home, I would suggest that you establish a system of saluting one another according to your particular rank, and it'll keep everything straight.

So this is what God has put together. If you don't like it, that's all right with me. I'm the most relaxed person in the world. Don't discuss it with me or take me to task for it, because God came up with this plan, and it is a workable plan. But I'll tell you one thing, that if you do not function according to this plan, you will not function within a family group or within a marriage relationship, and it will be hell on earth for you from the word "go," as well as for your children.

This kind of a functioning relationship of a family unit between a man and a woman is something that Satan, of course, intensely despises. Therefore, he is constantly attacking the family, even before there are children within a family, seeking to disrupt these normative roles that God has assigned to the various members of the family group. It is the duty of both these parents to train their children; to provide for their spiritual and material needs; and, to clear all the decisions their children make while they are under their authority. It is your responsibility as fathers and mothers to OK the decisions your kids make. It is not right for you to tell your kids to make their own decisions. Nor is it right for you to let them make their own decisions without you clearing and approving what they have decided to do.

This is the point at which most parents are perhaps most negligent--in the fact that they do not assume the tedious responsibility of checking on their children. That's not too hard to do when they're little, but come the teenage years, and when they get older, that's when you begin to be too busy to check and clear their decisions, and that's when you begin to notice that the kids are no longer with their parents. The parents are showing up to church, but their kids are not there. The parents are showing up for events and their kids are not there. You begin to discover that there has come a separation of the ways because the children have been permitted to make decisions without parental confirmation. And that's wrong. You are to exercise your authority as a parent as one who knows that he is under divine observation. God is watching. If you neglect parental authority and the use of it, that's just as bad as if you abused your parental authority. We have too many cop-out fathers and mothers, and it's time that Christians especially were aware of that and did something about it.

Children

So let's look at the functioning of the home. We're thinking about this fifth commandment, "Honor your father and mother." This must be taught to children just like any other right thing to do. Your children do not automatically come into the world with the quality of honoring their parents. This is something that it is your business to teach them. They have to be taught this, and to be made responsible for it. God makes you responsible for your children coming to know this. Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." This means that God has made parents responsible for all the training of their children. This includes the total educating of their children. Whatever other agencies you may use, the parents are responsible for training and educating children. This is not the province of the state, though, as we showed you last week, the state is trying to muscle in on that responsibility, and to take the authority of education from the parents.

Stubbornness

This attitude of the honor of a child for his parents is a critical feature of this child's education. There is one basic hindrance to a child learning to honor his parents, and that is stubbornness. That is the soul and substance of honoring parents. It all begins with the key feature of stubbornness. This is a natural quality in every child. From his old sin nature, he is by nature a rebel, and there are no exceptions.

The key to dealing with this stubbornness is to be aware of the fact, first of all, that it's there. This stubbornness is not going to show up when the child is pleasant and when he is getting his own way. But you cross him, and suddenly you discover that stubbornness is there. Suddenly the lower lip starts pooching out. Suddenly the eyes begin to glint at you with vengeance. Pretty soon there is a scowl, and you discover that stubbornness is written all across the face. So when the little guy is a sweet patootie, you are tempted to think that he is not stubborn. You are tempted to think that he is really as nice as you are. That may be true, as a matter of fact. That may be just about as far as he goes. But stubbornness is an inherent quality of the old sin nature. Therefore, be aware of it. This is the first thing in the education of your children.

I'm sorry to say that there is a critical point in dealing with this factor. That happens to be around the age of 12. So you'll have to go from there as to where you stand with your children. If they are under that or close to the edge, you can breathe a sigh of relief. But if they're well beyond it, you're going to have some major troubles if this has not already been resolved.

Corporal Punishment

The Bible says that the key to breaking stubbornness is corporal punishment. Proverbs 22:15 says that "Foolishness (or stubbornness) is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him." The key to resolving stubbornness is the rod of correction--corporal punishment. Stubbornness has to be broken in this child, as we said, before age 12 or so, or it is very hard to eradicate it. Proverbs 19:18 says, "Chasten your son while there is hope, and let not your soul spare for his crying." How many times have you had a son or a daughter who has done something wrong, and then you have proceeded to threaten him with punishment and proceeded to start getting ready to do the punishment, and he just proceeded to break down and melt with tears all over the place, and you say, "Well, okay, if you promise not to do it again?" Then you don't use the rod. That's sinful. That's wrong.

What you don't understand is that the Bible says the rod is the key to breaking stubbornness. When he's breaking up in tears and shattered right before your eyes, that's the time to thank God that you've made such good progress; to ram the thing home; to win your point; and, to establish your ground. Instead, what you have done is taught him something. What you have taught him is that if he gets limpid eyed and cries and breaks all up in front of you, you're going to change your mind. Do you know what he's going to do the next time you threat to punish him? The next time you get the stick out, he's going to use the same technique, because he knew what worked once, and he'll use it again. Stubbornness has to be broken. It is wrong. It is heartless that you do not recognize that when a child is born, he is born with this streak in him, and this is the first thing that has to be corrected. This is step number one in his education.

You cannot reason with him. You cannot threaten him in order to break his willfulness. It takes the rod of correction. If you try to reason with him or you threaten him, you make the issue worse because you give him the impression that the issue is negotiable--that some wrongdoing is negotiable. Don't ever give your children the idea that wrongdoing is negotiable. Wrongdoing is punishable. Period. Over and out.

Stubbornness is the worst expression of rebellion against the authority that exists in human experience. That's why stubbornness is the key feature. If your children are going to learn the fifth moral principle of honoring their parents, then they must learn how to control stubbornness, and how to remove their willfulness. It is there, and it is up to you. It is your responsibility to do something about it.

Eli

We have a very sad historical account of this in the Bible of what happened to a man and his sons who did not eradicate their stubbornness before they reached the age of 12. In 1 Samuel 2:12, we read about the case of Eli: "Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They knew, not the Lord." Here's point number one that was said about the sons of Eli. Eli was a priest, and his sons do not know the Lord. They have not been confronted with the issue of salvation, or if they have, the sons at least have gone negative and rejected their father's instructions. In any case, one thing that was evident about these sons is that they were worthless men because they were stubborn men. They were rebels.

Drop down to 1 Samuel 2:22: "Eli was very old, and heard all that his sons did unto all Israel, and how they lay with the women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the church. He said unto them, 'Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings by all this people. Nay, my sons, for it is no good report that I hear. You make the Lord's people to transgress. If one man sins against another, the judge shall judge him. But if a man sins against the Lord, who shall mediate for him?' Notwithstanding, they hearkened not unto the voice of their father, because the Lord would slay them."

These men, even while their father warned them that what they were doing was evil, and that they should not pursue this course of rebellion against God's moral principles, they would not listen. They were negative toward the instructions of their parents. At least we must give Eli the credit for the fact that he was instructing his sons; that he was sounding off to them; and, that he was standing up to them, whatever he may have done before and whatever he may have failed to do in them before they were 12. He did let them know that they were out of line.

In 1 Samuel 3:11, the story continues. And the Lord said unto Samuel, "Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of everyone that hears it shall tingle. In that day, I will perform against Eli all things which I have spoken concerning his house. When I begin, I will also make an end. For I have told him that I will judge his house forever for the iniquity which he knows, because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not. He did not do this at the time when they were restrainable. When they were young enough for him to restrain them, he failed to do so. At least he failed to do so sufficiently. When they were older and grown, they were no longer restrainable.

1 Samuel 3:14: "Therefore I have sworn unto the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be purged with sacrifice nor offering forever." God says, "The judgment is set. There is no return for this house. I'm going to bring judgment upon this father and upon these sons." Why? Because they did not solve the innate stubbornness in these children when they were young enough for stubbornness to be weeded out with the rod of correction.

1 Samuel 4:11: "And the Ark of God was taken and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain. And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army and came to Shiloh the same day with his clothes torn and with earth upon his head. When he came in, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching, for his heart trembled before for the Ark of God. When the man came into the city and told it, all the city cried out. When Eli heard the noise of the crying, he said, 'What does the noise of this tumult mean?' And the man came in hastily and told Eli. Now, Eli was 98 years old, and his eyes were dim that he could not see. The man said unto Eli, 'I am he who came out of the army, and I fled today out of the army.' And he said, 'What is there done my son?' And the messenger answered and said, 'Israel has fled before the Philistines, and there has been also a great slaughter among the people, and your two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas are dead, and the Ark of God is taken.' It came to pass when he made mention of the Ark of God that he fell from the seat backward by the side of the gate. His neck was broken, and he died, for he was an old man and heavy. And he judged Israel 40 years."

So the judgment of God came upon this family. The sons died, and the father died. This was for the simple reason that this father did not perform his responsibility of breaking the back of stubbornness in his sons while they were young enough for that to be weeded out. So read this story over in its complete detail sometime before you find yourself inclined to be operating out of a soft heart toward your children who are young enough to have their stubbornness weeded out of them. It is better that you should perhaps go too far and be too harsh, if necessary, on them, rather than that you should be too soft. Sooner or later, parents who are doing their job might be a little too heavy-handed with their children. But I'll guarantee you that children in their maturity will forgive you and will not hold that against you as they will your failure to use the hand of restraint upon them when they needed it. The time will come when they will realize that there was something in them by nature that they could not control, and that God had placed parents above them to resolve for them the quality of stubbornness.

Parents frequently, of course, shrink from the divine responsibility to use the rod. Mothers are especially bad about this, which means that mothers often have a cause for making confession to the Lord that they should have whipped the tar out of sweet patootie when they did not. Instead, they let him outmaneuver them and to excuse himself. But God warns against this attitude because this is an attitude of emotional domination of the soul. You know that doctrine well enough to know that that is the kiss of death in anybody. Many a mother by nature is already emotional by her structure as a woman. But when she permits emotion rather than doctrine to dominate the soul, then she fails to exercise the corporal punishment that is needed at some point.

Proverbs 19:18 again reminds us, therefore, to, "Chasten your son while there is hope, and let not your soul spare for his crying." You are not to be dissuaded because of his tears. Human viewpoint, reasoning, and emotions will counter what God says. Your human viewpoint says you'll do it some other way. You're not going to use the stick on him. Your reasoning says you'll do it some other way. You're not going to use the stick. But that's dangerous business because the Bible says there is a corrupt quality in a child known as stubbornness (willfulness), and the Bible says there is a method and only one method for dealing with it and to root it out, and that's the use of the rod at the appropriate moments. God has so constructed a child that he has been designed to receive that kind of punishment. All you have to do is apply it to the right place.

As a matter of fact, God very strictly forbids a parent to withhold corporal punishment from a child. In Proverbs 23:13-14, the Bible says, "Withhold not correction from the child, for if you beat him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from Sheol." You will deliver his soul from the consequences of the lake of fire. He will not die because you whip him and perhaps even bruise him. But you will save his soul, which is infinitely more important, from the destruction of the lake of fire. Actually, if you genuinely love the child, the Bible indicates that that's exactly what you will do. You will indeed apply the rod to him. Proverbs 13:24 says, "He that spares his rod hates his son, but he that loves him chastens him early."

I once heard one youngster in vacation bible school talking about the children in another family. This youngster was talking to another youngster. The kid said, "The parents don't love their children in that house." The other boy said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Because they never spank them." That was a kid, and I thought, "What an intelligent youngster." He should be an adult. He shouldn't have even been born a child with that much brains, to know that much. That's what Proverbs, the greatest wisdom book that was ever written, says: "If you love your children, you'll apply the rod." To withhold it is forbidden from the Word of God.

Actually, the child's soul is crying out for guidelines. He wants to know what the limitations are of the coral. I heard of a teacher recently in the classroom who followed the system of threats. She told the children to stop doing something. The kids would get noisy, and she would yell at them and tell them to get quiet, and then threaten them. Then they would stop for a moment, and she'd go back to what she was doing, and they'd go back to what they were doing. The crescendo of noise would rise. Finally, the principal observed this, and he saw her get up on top of her desk and say, "Now I'm going to beat anybody that yells again. Quiet!" And then, sure enough, she got down and she whipped a kid.

So the principal said from then on, the children all knew that when she got up on her desk and started screaming, that was it. If you pushed beyond that, you were going to get it. But up to then, you were home free. So sure enough, she said, "Stop it, children," and they went on. She'd yell at them, and they'd go on. She'd threaten them, and they'd go on. But when she got on top of the desk, that was it. Silence reigned supreme, and nobody dared step out of line because he had learned that the boundary line was when they see her up on the desk. What's more, that was probably very frightening because the principal said that she was a very heavyset lady. That is terrible to see an image towering over you like that.

So parents are commanded by God to lay out the limits. Your children have to know the limits of the actions that they are permitted to take. They need the guidelines. That's why we say that you must make decisions for your children. You must tell them when they must go to bed. You must tell them what they can watch on television. You must tell them what time they get up in the morning. You must tell them to brush their teeth. You must tell them that they have to attend youth clubs. You must tell them that they have to turn out for Sunday school. You must tell them all of this from age one to 19. You don't go asking them and inquiring what they'd like.

The problem is when the kids get older, their body gets bigger. Pretty soon, this child looks like he's an adult. You'd be surprised how many dumb stupid parents there are around who equate a grown body with a grown capacity (an adult capacity) within that body. They don't know that that grown body is also screaming out for guidelines; for help; and, for restraints. It is appalling what people will allow their children to do just because the body gets big.

You have heard me say for many years that one of the most devastating things you can do is to allow your son or your daughter to start solo dating. That is the kiss of death. I warn you again about that practice. Any solo dating is the kiss of death before a kid has reached past high school years. He has no restraints. He has no capacities for dealing with that kind of human relationship. Dating is for mating. If you haven't learned that, you better learn it. I don't care what other excuses you may have heard, that is the basic reason. If you want to turn your precious kids loose for that kind of a game, you just go ahead and do it. But I'm warning you, that the Word of God says that children need guidelines; they need restraints; and, they need you to show them how far they can go. The time will come when they will rise up and call you blessed for the fact that you had the judgment and the insight to restrain them when they needed to be restrained. When they are mature, hopefully, they can begin to handle adult games.

So there is a condition in the child that requires, first of all, the breaking of his willful stubbornness. That takes the rod, and it takes early training to do it. The problem with using the rod is that some of you don't object to it, but you object to using it first. You feel that the thing to do is to use it as a last resort. I've read these books on child rearing that speak about the rod as being the last resort. But you don't find this in the Bible. I want to be sure to call that to your attention. The Bible says that the rod is the first thing you use. And after you have used the rod, then you do the talking; then you do the reassuring; and, then you do anything else. First comes the rod. But most parents want to use that as the last thing, and that is setting your human wisdom above God's.

Once the spanking has been administered, then, of course, there should be no grudge. The issue should be closed. There should immediately be the restoration of fellowship and the restoration of camaraderie. That's it. There is nothing more to be remembered about it. But rebellion has always been viewed with the utmost severity in the Word of God. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 gives you the procedure which was used in Israel for a rebellious teenager. Sometimes a teenager is a rebel; the parents have done their best before age 12 to break the willfulness; and, the rebel will not respond.

There are some children which, in spite of the parents' best efforts and proper training, have a negative quality, and they will not break their willfulness. Then Deuteronomy 21:18-21 gives us the pattern for a parent in the Old Testament of bringing that son or that daughter to the elders for execution. That's exactly what they did. Parents were advised at a certain point. This child is incorrigible. They didn't talk about rehabilitation. They didn't have any prisons. They had no prison system in Israel. You paid the punishment and you paid the fine, or you paid with your life. And that was it. Either you did straighten up, or you were removed from the social system of the nation of Israel.

Now, when a child is simply blundering--that which is his honest mistake, that's a different situation. That doesn't necessarily merit corporal punishment. I'm not suggesting that you go home and get yourself a big stick and then sit there watching around the corner and listening. Every time you hear something wrong, you come storming out and lay the stick on him. There are honest mistakes in the juvenility and the ignorance of children. That is something else. You take that into account. I'm talking about stubbornness, which is willful rebellion. That is the issue at hand. That, God says, is dealt with only with the rod, and with the rod first.

You recognize that modern child rearing techniques, of course, are counter to all this because they begin with an entirely different premise. They begin with the premise that all children are good and that all human beings are basically good and not evil. So what modern child-rearing books will tell you will be something like this. They will suggest that you find action pathways for these rebellious expressions of your child, and that you should find other substitutes by which your child can express his meanness. So what you do is when your child wants to beat up on his little sister, you say, "No, we're not going to beat up on our little sister. We have this pillow here. As a matter of fact, I have made a doll of your little sister, and I have stuffed it full of cotton. You just beat away at this little image of your sister." So he pounds away and takes all of his meanness out on this image of his little sister.

Or they may tell you to give him some clay and say, "You're mad at mommy and daddy, aren't you?" Make a little image of mother and father here, and then you can tear their heads off and pull their arms out and just shred them."

Now, you're smiling because you think I'm making this up, don't you? But if you will read the modern Freudian viewpoint child-rearing books, you will find exactly those suggestions made, to the letter. That's where I read them. Give the child a pillow to pound away instead of his brother or sister. Give the child some clay images. In other words, this is your basic voodoo kit that you give your child to make his images to exercise his aggressions on.

The problem with that is that after he gets older, these action pathways have actually trained him to exercise his hostility. So if he wants to punch somebody in the mouth, he will do it. But he does it on a substitute. The trouble is that later on, when you're not there to control, he punches an actual mouth. He lays into an actual human being, and maybe he even takes somebodies life. He uses muscle directly. The action pathways do not stop the rebelliousness and the aggression. It only trains it more specifically to focus in on the object that he despises. It is not the Word of God solution which would just declare that that is wrong; that it is to be stopped; and, it is not to be tolerated. Eventually, he will exercise his hostility on people. If you want to teach children respect for parents, you better not fall into the trap of giving him other action pathways to exercise his aggression.

Of course, children are to obey both parents. Ephesians 6:1-3 Colossians 3:20 make this very clear that you are to obey your father and your mother. Therefore, disobedience to either parent is equally heinous in the sight of God and should be dealt with equally severely. It isn't just bad when you disobey your father; but, it's equally bad when you disobey his prime minister, your mother.

If parents are to instill this kind of respect for authority, then they must exercise that authority. If you do not exercise authority over your children, your children will exercise authority over you. This is axiomatic in the military service. Anybody who is ever placed in a position of leadership in the military service is taught that if he does not take charge, the troops under him will take charge of him. That is true in every area of life. So don't try to reason; to persuade; to coax; to bribe; or, to trick your children into doing right. Simply command them with the authority that God has given you, and do it with dignity, not by screaming, and not by standing on your desk. Command them with dignity. And command them once. Don't stand around and repeat.

Don't you realize that if you ever repeat an order to a child, he immediately interprets that as indicating that it's a negotiable item? Therefore, he starts debating back with you. But if you tell him to do something, and then he says something back to you, and you stand and look at him and you have no further response, you will gradually see him begin to melt like a bowl full of jelly on a hot day. His resistance will collapse, and he will have learned his lesson to respect authority. But if you have to give it twice, you have invited rebellion. It is amazing how many parents do not learn a simple little thing like that. They find themselves reduced to one kid sitting across from another kid having an argument in the classroom as if you were on the level of your child. Remember the dignity of your position, and exercise it accordingly.

There has been a great change from this kind of thinking, of course, since World War II. The pattern of rearing children, according to modern psychology, is sick and destructive because it is human viewpoint. It has a lot of intellectual sophistication, and that fools people into thinking that these are proper techniques of rearing children. But any child who is above God is in the same condition that the sons of Eli were.

Education

So you as a parent are to provide your child with a godly education. Again, we go to the book of Proverbs for some guidelines on that. Proverbs 1:7 says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." So the first thing that you have to teach your children is to fear God. Proverbs 9:10 says again, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy one is understanding." Fear of God means just exactly that--to be afraid to do wrong because God observes. This is just like you should be afraid of violating these principles of child rearing relative to teaching your children the fifth moral absolute. You should be afraid before God to fail to do this, because you are doing it before God's observation, and God brings judgment just as He did upon the house of Eli, so you'll bring it upon your house if you do not teach this to your sons and your daughters.

This responsibility of providing a godly education requires, I think, a Christian day school education. No child can fully enter into a godly education without going to a Christian day school in our day. It is basically impossible for him to go through the years, particularly from first grade on through age 12, and then through those critical junior high years unless he is in a Christian school. Otherwise, he is going to be filled with a pathetic amount of disorientation. This is a kind of a poison. There are some poisons that a person can carry in his body for a long time, and he doesn't know it's there. It has a cumulative effect, and then suddenly one day the thing hits. The person wakes up dead.

That's the thing with a secular school education. You are constantly seeping poison into the mentality of your children, and yet you don't think that it's affecting them. You don't see that there's any destructive effect upon the fact that they're going to a public school. Then the day will come when suddenly you will begin to see and begin to suspect that something is wrong, and then it'll be too late to make correction. I don't think you can send a child, by and large, to a public school education today, in the context of our culture today, and be able to fulfill the scriptural responsibility of a godly education.

There is no religious neutrality in education. Education today is purely human viewpoint, and purely man-oriented. Secular education by the state has in it, as a matter of fact, the seeds for dishonoring parents. There is by nature, within secular education, the quality of teaching a child to dishonor his parents. We have divine viewpoint; civic responsibilities; moral responsibilities; and, self-reliance. All of these things should be taught, and these are the things that are being ignored by and large in secular education. But a Christian school specializes in them. Bible doctrine has to be taught at home and by associated agencies for a godly education.

One of the things in the educating of your children is to teach males to be males and females to be females. This used to be a lot easier than it is today. Today the in thing is unisex, and even the psychologists are going crazy over the problem of what to do with children who grow up in a home where they can't tell the difference between their father and their mother. The style is of dressing alike. I hope you don't include the custom of dressing alike so that your children can't tell the difference. Both you and your husband walk around the house wearing robes, and the next day you both walk around wearing pants. At least alternate so they can tell the difference--that one is one and one is the other. A child needs a clear concept of what is male and what is female. This is critical to his own maturing and in his own development.

However, secular viewpoint today is training women to be men so that women are disoriented as to who they really are by God's natural order. In order for a woman to be really free, feminists tell us she has to become a man. She has to deny the precious thing that God made her. That's pathetic. Men are being taught not to be the commander in their home and not to be the C.O. They're being taught to be one member of a committee that has one vote. You can go ahead and play that game. If you had the misfortune of being reared in a home like that, you'll suffer the consequences, and you can tear up and scar up your life. But I'll guarantee you will not get away with it. God does not work in that fashion.

Children are to respond to the instruction of their parents rather than to be encouraged to be negative. Respond to the instruction of your parents. I noticed that a lot of college students feel that they demonstrate their independence by a lot of badmouthing of their attitudes toward listening to their parents. If they can demonstrate that they are not listening to their parents, they feel that they have made great progress. Proverbs 4:1 says, "Hear you children the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding." Proverbs 13:1 says, "A wise son hears his father's instruction, but a scoffer does not hear rebuke."

So don't kid yourself. It is not an honor to say that your parents are not going to be an influence on you. As a matter of fact, you don't have much choice in it. It is not possible for a child to grow up and not, in some degree, relive the home in which he was raised. The home reflects itself in his conversation; in his attitudes; and, in his outlooks. Anything that may have been a small, undesirable thing that he found in his home, he may have a temperament that magnifies it into a maximum undesirable quality.

Also, remember that God chooses your parents. No birth is accidental. All births are the result of divine decisions. God gives children. Every conception in the womb is an act of God. That's one reason that abortion is murder. There is no question about it. The Bible makes it very clear that children are the heritage of the Lord. They are something that God gives. They're not just natural accidental processes at all. Consequently, when you come into the world with a certain set of parents, it was because in the plan and design of God for your particular life, those were the parents that He wanted you to have.

Many a youngster has to learn that, and you would do well to teach your children that. Your children may grow up and find some things they don't particularly care about in your experience, or about you, As a matter of fact, a youngster may so outstrip his parents spiritually that he will look upon his parents who are spiritual non-entities (spiritual morons), and he will be tending to have an attitude of contempt for them. He will actually be looking to other adults and viewing them as his parents. And that's wrong. God has giving you parents specifically by His choice. You were not accidentally related to people with no reason at all.

Family

So what we are looking at is this whole divine institution of the family. This institution is basic to a society. It's the basic unit of authority. It's to be the center of all of social organization. Every member of the family is responsible for functioning according to a certain place of authority and a certain role. Man's sin is to attempt to usurp God's authority. A woman's sin is an attempt to usurp her husband's authority. Both attempts are futile. Both attempts are the basis for conflicts and misery in marriage and in a home. Both attempts are going to violate God's natural order of things. The whole problem in Eden was this--where a woman wanted to usurp her husband's authority.

Seemingly getting away with violating this arrangement is really a delusion. You can get away with this for a while, but you're living on a time bomb. If a wife does not respect her husband's final decision-making authority, she's sitting on a time bomb that she has created for herself. If a husband does not exercise with dignity; with restraint; and, with love, his position of command in the home, he has built a time bomb for himself.

Remember that the Bible never tells a woman to love her husband. The Bible only tells a man to love his wife. It happens to be "agape" love, and it means no mental attitude or bitterness. A woman is only told to respect her husband and to be in subjection to him. If he does his job of "agape" love, she will be able to do her job of responding, which is the only thing she can do. That's the only way she's made. Anytime she tries to be an initiator, she collapses. She cannot be an initiator.

The family unit is the core of the whole thing. The husband is to love his wife. The wife is to reverence in subjection her husband. The children are to obey their parents. That's the family order. So parents are to seek to bring their children in subjection to their authority. You should not seek your children's love. You should seek only subjection of your children to your authority. Their love will then come. If you seek their love, you will be tempted to violate these principles that Proverbs lays out so clearly for us. Love in the home is demonstrated by what you provide for your children as well as what you teach them--the whole gamut of your relationship to them in rearing them into divine viewpoint orientation. Children express love for their parents by honoring them, obeying them, and later honoring them with respect, and ultimately in their old age to care for them as per their need.

The modern view of the family is a nightmare, and we would not have this segment complete if I did not go into some exploration with you on what Freudian psychology has done to the modern concept of the family. Most of the people on your block and in your neighborhood who have been influenced through literature and through education (and particularly young people), have a Freudian viewpoint of a family. It is totally and radically different from what the Word of God has presented as we have described it for you here. This is the reason why children, by and large, do not honor their parents today. It is because the modern concept of the family, which is Freudian and humanistic, so dominates the thinking of people. We'll take that up next time.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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