Today I want to look at some verses, mostly from the Old Testament that speak, I believe, into what a family looks like that is devoted fully to God. Before I really begin, though, I want to acknowledge the situation in which one or more members of a family, perhaps the spouse, or perhaps a parent or a child, is not a believer. This is a terribly difficult situation, and I will talk about this in the second part of this message.When it comes to the topic of strengthening fellow Christians within a family, one of the passages I want to look at is Deuteronomy 11. Now it is important to put passages such as this into the context in which they were intended. This is part of a long speech made by Moses near the end of the 40-year passage of the Israelites through the desert. Recall that their being made to wander for 40 years was a punishment for rebelling against God. This punishment came as a result of them refusing to enter the land the Lord had promised to give to them. After they heard the sentence, they tried to take the land anyway, and were defeated.
After the 40 years were nearly up, and the generation of adults who had done these things had passed away, they were now directed by God to take the land of Heshbon, ruled by the Ammorite king Sihon. Because the Lord supported and directed this plan, Sihon was delivered up to the Israelites. They then took the land of Bashan, ruled by king Og, again at the Lord’s command. In a way these victories were preludes, or hints, of the real victories yet to come – the retaking of the Promised Land. Moses’ speech begins in Deut. 5 with the Ten Commandments, along with the history of how they were given. In part of the speech, Moses says this:
In the future, when your son asks you, "What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?" Tell him: "We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness." – Deut. 6:20-25
If we are to apply this verse it is important to understand this is not our righteousness. As the New Testament explains with absolute clarity, once we have broken the law, and we all have broken it, countless times, we become lawbreakers, criminals, in the eyes of God. Perfect adherence to the law, which could have been our righteousness, is no longer available to us. But we do not rely on this law for our righteousness. We rely on Christ. He is our righteousness. He has paid the penalty for our sin. Our righteousness is found in Him. So this is one reason we need to be careful applying Old Testament passages to our lives. We do not tell our sons that adherence to the law will be their righteousness. We tell them about the salvation that is found in Christ alone, about the redemption that is found in His finished work on the cross. All that being said, I do think there are some powerful things we can learn from Deut. 11, if we are appropriately careful.
From Chapters 7 through 10, Moses finds about a dozen ways to tell them that they need to not forget the Lord. Certainly, that message applies to us as well. And then, in Chapter 11, Moses says this:
Love the Lord your God and keep His requirements, His decrees, His laws and His commands always. Remember today that your children were not the ones who saw and experienced the discipline of the Lord your God: His majesty, His mighty hand, His outstretched arm; the signs He performed and the things He did in the heart of Egypt, both to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his whole country; what He did to the Egyptian army, to its horses and chariots, how He overwhelmed them with the waters of the Red Sea as they were pursuing you, and how the Lord brought lasting ruin on them. – Deut. 11:1-4
The older ones of them there had seen these things, although they were just children themselves at the time. But they had seen them. For their children, however, all they had known was a life of wandering in the desert. Moses is warning his people about this because it is important. The children have not seen firsthand the miracles that the parents have seen.
When I think about desiring to be an overcoming Christian family, I think this is an important truth that applies to us as well. By and large, our children have not gone through the salvation experiences we have gone through. This is especially true if they were very young or not even born when we became followers of Christ. But even if this is not the case, our children were not able to witness the internal struggles, the internal miracles that took place in our lives.
It was not your children who saw what He did for you in the desert until you arrived at this place, and what He did to Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab the Reubenite, when the earth opened its mouth right in the middle of all Israel and swallowed them up with their households, their tents and every living thing that belonged to them. But it was your own eyes that saw all these great things the Lord has done. – Deut 11:5-7
Parents, and future parents, we know exactly what the Lord has done in our hearts. We may not have the words to express it, but we know what the Lord has done in our hearts. But our children, and our future children, do not know. Any attempts we make to explain it will fall short of “being there” in our heads and hearts and experiencing it first-hand. And so, in a way, we are in the same boat as those Israelites in the desert. Our children’s experiences are not our own. This is a problem! We want our children have saving faith, to walk daily with Christ, to love Him even more than they love us. We want them to love Him even more than we love Him. We hope that they don’t have to go through some of the things we have gone through. We hope that their faith and love of God enables them to do things for Him that out-do anything we have done. Sometimes we may even feel like those folks in the desert who were told they could not enter the Promised Land. We desire that our children “take the land” and do what we have not done. We desire that our children be better able to resist sin than us, that they have greater faith than us, that they overcome more than we have overcome.
Observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, and so that you may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your forefathers to give to them and their descendants, a land flowing with milk and honey. The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end. – Deut. 11:8-12
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. – Deut. 11:13-15
What is Moses’ answer to this problem, the problem that our children’s experiences are not our own? It is that our faith and love of God and our obedience to Him will bring blessings even on our children. The hope that perhaps our children will go places we could not is not at all what these verses are saying; they say the opposite! We must enter the land; it is wrong to expect our children to enter without us, or to expect them to go deeper into the land than us. God by His grace can and does do things like this, but this is not what we are told to rely upon. We are wrong to identify ourselves as those who perished in the desert. If we have saving faith in Christ, we are those that enter the land. And if we want our children to have great faith, we need to have great faith. If we want them to do great things for God, we need to do great things for God.
Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord's anger will burn against you, and he will shut the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. – Deut. 11:16-17
Here we see the flip side of the coin. Our lack of faith and love of God and our disobedience to Him can bring misery even on our children. We know we have to be careful, or we too can be enticed to turn away and worship other “gods,” the gods of our age – especially materialism and self. But this doesn’t just affect us; it affects our entire family. Some people are bothered by this – they say it isn’t fair that God would punish a family for the parent’s sins. They are especially bothered by the verses that talk about curses going down for generations.
I have three things to say to this. First, if your sense of “fairness” is offended at the “curses,” it should be equally offended at the “blessings.” So often our sense of fairness is only provoked when we get the short side. If you give the “larger half” of a piece of cake to a child, you will never hear him say “Hey, that’s not fair!” You will always hear it from the one who got the “smaller half”.
Second, we know that God loves everyone and desires that everyone come to faith in Christ and repentance. Because of what Christ has done, the righteous anger reserved for us – or our families – is deflected to Him, and is satisfied by what He has done on the cross. It is never true that a parent’s sins could make God not want to see the parent’s children saved! God loves those children just as much as He loves every other sinner, which is all of us.
The third thing I would say is this: A parent’s sins can make life on earth a thousand times more difficult and painful for the children. It is not because God’s anger especially burns against them; it is more a law of cause and effect. We know this is true. Our own experiences growing up, we know, have effects on our relationship with God. People whose fathers were absent physically or emotionally when they were growing up tend to naturally view God as absent or not caring and have a harder time coming to see God as a loving Father, ever present and always answering prayer. People whose fathers, in effect, betrayed them through divorce or infidelity tend to have a harder time trusting God and believing that He is always faithful. These are just two examples – there are countless more. And it is not just fathers, but mothers too.
And so we need to be careful, or we may turn to other gods. We need to be careful not just for our sakes, but for those of our children.
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the Lord swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. – Deut. 11:18-21
Orthodox Jews take these instructions literally. They wear tefillin, small square boxes with parchment in them that has verses written in tiny print. They are attached with long straps to the forehead and the left arm. The verses include Deut. 6:4-9, (including “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”), Exodus 13:1-16 (including the 10 commandments), and Deut. 11:13-21. On a doorpost they place a mezuzah, a box with parchment in it that also contains Deut. 6:4-9 and Deut. 11:13-21.
I’m not sure how much good they do, enclosed in boxes. But there is a principle here that I do think applies to us. We must discuss our faith with our children. So many families in America just rely on Sunday school, as if one hour a week taught by someone else is sufficient to mature children into fully devoted followers of Christ. Both the literal approach and the “let someone else do it” approach miss the point of the passage! Your children have not had the same faith-building experiences you have had. So you must tell them about them! To me this is more than just teaching them Bible stories or reading the Bible together and praying together. These things are very good things to do. But I think it is also telling them about what God has done in your life, in the past and in the present. We should tell them about our experiences.
We can also be a people saturated with Scripture. We should talk about scripture with our children, and not just the Bible stories. We can write out scriptures to memorize. We can put scriptures around the house. Thanks to Mimi, at our home we always have something within view of the dinner table. Even for me, it is amazing how walking by I may glance at it, and it suddenly changes whatever I was thinking about into something far more profitable.
If you carefully observe all these commands I am giving you to follow—to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways and to hold fast to him—then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and stronger than you. Every place where you set your foot will be yours: Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates River to the western sea. No man will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land, wherever you go. – Deut. 11:22-25
See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse—the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses. – Deut. 11:26-29
Isn’t that a curious picture? Shouting blessings from one mountain and curses from another! We could spend hours just talking about Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and about Shechem, the town at the foot of these mountains. They had multiple roles in the Bible, and it is fascinating to look at them all together. But let me just say that when Joshua got to these mountains in the process of taking the land, he did exactly this.
All Israel, aliens and citizens alike, with their elders, officials and judges, were standing on both sides of the ark of the covenant of the Lord, facing those who carried it—the priests, who were Levites. Half of the people stood in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses the servant of the Lord had formerly commanded when he gave instructions to bless the people of Israel. Afterward, Joshua read all the words of the law—the blessings and the curses—just as it is written in the Book of the Law. – Joshua 8:33-34
If you are wondering, as I was, about the logistics of this, look at the picture at the top of this blog entry to see what these mountains look like. It blew me away when I saw it, and perhaps it will blow you away too. Can you imagine the ark right at the base between the two mountains, and Joshua going to one side to shout out blessings and then the other to shout out curses? Or perhaps, Joshua saying a blessing and having the half of the people on Mount Gerizim shout it out in echo? And then Joshua saying a curse, and the other half of the people, on Mount Ebal, shouts it out also?
Does this apply to us? Not directly; I can just picture me working something out with my neighbor so that our children sit between our two houses and one of us shouts blessings out the window of one house and the other shouts curses out the window of the other. I don’t think that would go over real well!
But I do think there is a principle here to be gleaned: We should present our children with a balanced view of Scripture. What do I mean? I think that in the past there may have been an over-emphasis on the curses – I think of some of the teachings of the Puritans, for example. They had such an emphasis on avoiding evil that it could interfere with their ability to love one another. Compare the witch trials with the scriptural truths that “love believes the best” and “love always hopes.”
On the other hand, today there is often an overemphasis on the blessings, and in some circles, sin is not discussed at all. Polls have been taken among those who call themselves Christians and a surprisingly large percentage do not believe in the existence of hell. The result of ignoring the “curses” can be what some people call “easy believism” – characterized in part by people who profess faith but show absolutely no evidence of it in their lives.
A balanced view is one that presents both – the reality of sin, the tendency of the human heart to follow after other gods, on one hand, and the truths of our new position in Christ, our new birth and new ability to live for Him, on the other. Even in churches that present this balance, individual parents may have a different reality in their own minds, and this unbalanced view, intentionally or otherwise, becomes transmitted to their children. May we strive to present our children with the whole counsel of Scripture!
Let me now speak about what happens and what can be done if one or more members of a family, whether spouse, parent, child, or other close relation, is not a believer. There is no question that this is a terribly difficult situation. I would put the situation of an unbelieving spouse at the very top of the list in terms of the magnitude of the challenges. Jesus does not mince words on this topic. In Matthew 10, He says:
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. – Matthew 10:34-39
A family that is divided over their beliefs about Jesus Christ is horribly divided. The very things that, to a believer, are more important than even life itself are irrelevant nonsense to an unbeliever. I experience this most weeks on a small scale when I call my father and my sister, who both live in California. What do we talk about? For my sister, it is what I could call the three w’s: weather, work, and worry. These things are OK, but I am forced to discuss them, I feel, as if one hand is tied behind my back. Any movement into spiritual issues is quickly and totally rejected. How much more difficult is a marriage in this situation! Truly, Jesus Christ brings a sword!
What does one do in this situation? This passage provides some answers. The first is to love Jesus even more than your loved one. The temptation is to love Jesus less, so as to maybe make the problem go away. But that only creates deeper problems. For those in this situation, truly they should love Jesus with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
The second answer is to take up your cross and follow Him and lose your life for His sake. What do these words mean? Partly I think it means facing reality. If your spouse or child or parent or whatever the relation is showing no signs of being a Christian, of turning their lives over to Jesus, of agreeing with Him as to their sin and making an effort to turn away from sinful living into living for Him, then the person is probably unsaved and in immediate danger of an eternity in Hell separated from the love of Christ. Part of taking up your cross is confronting this reality and grieving the seriousness of the situation. It kills a part of us to come face to face with this horrible reality. I think that it is only when we really grasp this situation that we become people ready to lose our lives for Jesus’ sake. At this point we can really be earnest and persistent in prayer for our loved ones and we become able to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in taking action steps that may begin to draw our loved ones into His presence.
Although these are terribly difficult situations, God never meant for you to go through these situations alone. I encourage you to confide in someone, ideally someone here in this church, so that they can be in prayer for you, encourage you and simply be your friend though tough times. We, the church, are God’s gift to each other. Let us take full advantage of His precious gift!
As we come to a close, I want to mention that this week I have also been thinking about Genesis 22, in which God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his child of the promise of God, Isaac. I have to believe that Isaac, likely not a little boy but fully or nearly fully grown, had spent plenty of time with his father discussing who God is and how one follows Him.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. – Genesis 22:9-10
Isaac obeyed his father and God in doing this. He could have run away (Dad was over 100 years old!); he could have escaped. But he chose to trust his father and his God. We know that this test of Abraham was a shadow of things to come – God’s own Son would come to the same point of decision and obey His Father, although this time, God would not provide an alternative. Jesus was the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. But let us return our thoughts to Abraham and Isaac. The plain reading shows that Isaac was willing to lay down his life for God. And Abraham, in being willing to sacrifice his son, was equally willing to do anything, no matter how heart-rending, for the sake of God. Each was willing to take up their cross, follow God, and lose their lives for His sake. Ultimately, this is what we should desire for us, for our spouses, and even for our children. God is worth it!
In the future, when your son asks you, "What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?" Tell him: "We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness." – Deut. 6:20-25
If we are to apply this verse it is important to understand this is not our righteousness. As the New Testament explains with absolute clarity, once we have broken the law, and we all have broken it, countless times, we become lawbreakers, criminals, in the eyes of God. Perfect adherence to the law, which could have been our righteousness, is no longer available to us. But we do not rely on this law for our righteousness. We rely on Christ. He is our righteousness. He has paid the penalty for our sin. Our righteousness is found in Him. So this is one reason we need to be careful applying Old Testament passages to our lives. We do not tell our sons that adherence to the law will be their righteousness. We tell them about the salvation that is found in Christ alone, about the redemption that is found in His finished work on the cross. All that being said, I do think there are some powerful things we can learn from Deut. 11, if we are appropriately careful.
From Chapters 7 through 10, Moses finds about a dozen ways to tell them that they need to not forget the Lord. Certainly, that message applies to us as well. And then, in Chapter 11, Moses says this:
Love the Lord your God and keep His requirements, His decrees, His laws and His commands always. Remember today that your children were not the ones who saw and experienced the discipline of the Lord your God: His majesty, His mighty hand, His outstretched arm; the signs He performed and the things He did in the heart of Egypt, both to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his whole country; what He did to the Egyptian army, to its horses and chariots, how He overwhelmed them with the waters of the Red Sea as they were pursuing you, and how the Lord brought lasting ruin on them. – Deut. 11:1-4
The older ones of them there had seen these things, although they were just children themselves at the time. But they had seen them. For their children, however, all they had known was a life of wandering in the desert. Moses is warning his people about this because it is important. The children have not seen firsthand the miracles that the parents have seen.
When I think about desiring to be an overcoming Christian family, I think this is an important truth that applies to us as well. By and large, our children have not gone through the salvation experiences we have gone through. This is especially true if they were very young or not even born when we became followers of Christ. But even if this is not the case, our children were not able to witness the internal struggles, the internal miracles that took place in our lives.
It was not your children who saw what He did for you in the desert until you arrived at this place, and what He did to Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab the Reubenite, when the earth opened its mouth right in the middle of all Israel and swallowed them up with their households, their tents and every living thing that belonged to them. But it was your own eyes that saw all these great things the Lord has done. – Deut 11:5-7
Parents, and future parents, we know exactly what the Lord has done in our hearts. We may not have the words to express it, but we know what the Lord has done in our hearts. But our children, and our future children, do not know. Any attempts we make to explain it will fall short of “being there” in our heads and hearts and experiencing it first-hand. And so, in a way, we are in the same boat as those Israelites in the desert. Our children’s experiences are not our own. This is a problem! We want our children have saving faith, to walk daily with Christ, to love Him even more than they love us. We want them to love Him even more than we love Him. We hope that they don’t have to go through some of the things we have gone through. We hope that their faith and love of God enables them to do things for Him that out-do anything we have done. Sometimes we may even feel like those folks in the desert who were told they could not enter the Promised Land. We desire that our children “take the land” and do what we have not done. We desire that our children be better able to resist sin than us, that they have greater faith than us, that they overcome more than we have overcome.
Observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, and so that you may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your forefathers to give to them and their descendants, a land flowing with milk and honey. The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end. – Deut. 11:8-12
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. – Deut. 11:13-15
What is Moses’ answer to this problem, the problem that our children’s experiences are not our own? It is that our faith and love of God and our obedience to Him will bring blessings even on our children. The hope that perhaps our children will go places we could not is not at all what these verses are saying; they say the opposite! We must enter the land; it is wrong to expect our children to enter without us, or to expect them to go deeper into the land than us. God by His grace can and does do things like this, but this is not what we are told to rely upon. We are wrong to identify ourselves as those who perished in the desert. If we have saving faith in Christ, we are those that enter the land. And if we want our children to have great faith, we need to have great faith. If we want them to do great things for God, we need to do great things for God.
Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord's anger will burn against you, and he will shut the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. – Deut. 11:16-17
Here we see the flip side of the coin. Our lack of faith and love of God and our disobedience to Him can bring misery even on our children. We know we have to be careful, or we too can be enticed to turn away and worship other “gods,” the gods of our age – especially materialism and self. But this doesn’t just affect us; it affects our entire family. Some people are bothered by this – they say it isn’t fair that God would punish a family for the parent’s sins. They are especially bothered by the verses that talk about curses going down for generations.
I have three things to say to this. First, if your sense of “fairness” is offended at the “curses,” it should be equally offended at the “blessings.” So often our sense of fairness is only provoked when we get the short side. If you give the “larger half” of a piece of cake to a child, you will never hear him say “Hey, that’s not fair!” You will always hear it from the one who got the “smaller half”.
Second, we know that God loves everyone and desires that everyone come to faith in Christ and repentance. Because of what Christ has done, the righteous anger reserved for us – or our families – is deflected to Him, and is satisfied by what He has done on the cross. It is never true that a parent’s sins could make God not want to see the parent’s children saved! God loves those children just as much as He loves every other sinner, which is all of us.
The third thing I would say is this: A parent’s sins can make life on earth a thousand times more difficult and painful for the children. It is not because God’s anger especially burns against them; it is more a law of cause and effect. We know this is true. Our own experiences growing up, we know, have effects on our relationship with God. People whose fathers were absent physically or emotionally when they were growing up tend to naturally view God as absent or not caring and have a harder time coming to see God as a loving Father, ever present and always answering prayer. People whose fathers, in effect, betrayed them through divorce or infidelity tend to have a harder time trusting God and believing that He is always faithful. These are just two examples – there are countless more. And it is not just fathers, but mothers too.
And so we need to be careful, or we may turn to other gods. We need to be careful not just for our sakes, but for those of our children.
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the Lord swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. – Deut. 11:18-21
Orthodox Jews take these instructions literally. They wear tefillin, small square boxes with parchment in them that has verses written in tiny print. They are attached with long straps to the forehead and the left arm. The verses include Deut. 6:4-9, (including “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”), Exodus 13:1-16 (including the 10 commandments), and Deut. 11:13-21. On a doorpost they place a mezuzah, a box with parchment in it that also contains Deut. 6:4-9 and Deut. 11:13-21.
I’m not sure how much good they do, enclosed in boxes. But there is a principle here that I do think applies to us. We must discuss our faith with our children. So many families in America just rely on Sunday school, as if one hour a week taught by someone else is sufficient to mature children into fully devoted followers of Christ. Both the literal approach and the “let someone else do it” approach miss the point of the passage! Your children have not had the same faith-building experiences you have had. So you must tell them about them! To me this is more than just teaching them Bible stories or reading the Bible together and praying together. These things are very good things to do. But I think it is also telling them about what God has done in your life, in the past and in the present. We should tell them about our experiences.
We can also be a people saturated with Scripture. We should talk about scripture with our children, and not just the Bible stories. We can write out scriptures to memorize. We can put scriptures around the house. Thanks to Mimi, at our home we always have something within view of the dinner table. Even for me, it is amazing how walking by I may glance at it, and it suddenly changes whatever I was thinking about into something far more profitable.
If you carefully observe all these commands I am giving you to follow—to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways and to hold fast to him—then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and stronger than you. Every place where you set your foot will be yours: Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates River to the western sea. No man will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land, wherever you go. – Deut. 11:22-25
See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse—the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses. – Deut. 11:26-29
Isn’t that a curious picture? Shouting blessings from one mountain and curses from another! We could spend hours just talking about Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and about Shechem, the town at the foot of these mountains. They had multiple roles in the Bible, and it is fascinating to look at them all together. But let me just say that when Joshua got to these mountains in the process of taking the land, he did exactly this.
All Israel, aliens and citizens alike, with their elders, officials and judges, were standing on both sides of the ark of the covenant of the Lord, facing those who carried it—the priests, who were Levites. Half of the people stood in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses the servant of the Lord had formerly commanded when he gave instructions to bless the people of Israel. Afterward, Joshua read all the words of the law—the blessings and the curses—just as it is written in the Book of the Law. – Joshua 8:33-34
If you are wondering, as I was, about the logistics of this, look at the picture at the top of this blog entry to see what these mountains look like. It blew me away when I saw it, and perhaps it will blow you away too. Can you imagine the ark right at the base between the two mountains, and Joshua going to one side to shout out blessings and then the other to shout out curses? Or perhaps, Joshua saying a blessing and having the half of the people on Mount Gerizim shout it out in echo? And then Joshua saying a curse, and the other half of the people, on Mount Ebal, shouts it out also?
Does this apply to us? Not directly; I can just picture me working something out with my neighbor so that our children sit between our two houses and one of us shouts blessings out the window of one house and the other shouts curses out the window of the other. I don’t think that would go over real well!
But I do think there is a principle here to be gleaned: We should present our children with a balanced view of Scripture. What do I mean? I think that in the past there may have been an over-emphasis on the curses – I think of some of the teachings of the Puritans, for example. They had such an emphasis on avoiding evil that it could interfere with their ability to love one another. Compare the witch trials with the scriptural truths that “love believes the best” and “love always hopes.”
On the other hand, today there is often an overemphasis on the blessings, and in some circles, sin is not discussed at all. Polls have been taken among those who call themselves Christians and a surprisingly large percentage do not believe in the existence of hell. The result of ignoring the “curses” can be what some people call “easy believism” – characterized in part by people who profess faith but show absolutely no evidence of it in their lives.
A balanced view is one that presents both – the reality of sin, the tendency of the human heart to follow after other gods, on one hand, and the truths of our new position in Christ, our new birth and new ability to live for Him, on the other. Even in churches that present this balance, individual parents may have a different reality in their own minds, and this unbalanced view, intentionally or otherwise, becomes transmitted to their children. May we strive to present our children with the whole counsel of Scripture!
Let me now speak about what happens and what can be done if one or more members of a family, whether spouse, parent, child, or other close relation, is not a believer. There is no question that this is a terribly difficult situation. I would put the situation of an unbelieving spouse at the very top of the list in terms of the magnitude of the challenges. Jesus does not mince words on this topic. In Matthew 10, He says:
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. – Matthew 10:34-39
A family that is divided over their beliefs about Jesus Christ is horribly divided. The very things that, to a believer, are more important than even life itself are irrelevant nonsense to an unbeliever. I experience this most weeks on a small scale when I call my father and my sister, who both live in California. What do we talk about? For my sister, it is what I could call the three w’s: weather, work, and worry. These things are OK, but I am forced to discuss them, I feel, as if one hand is tied behind my back. Any movement into spiritual issues is quickly and totally rejected. How much more difficult is a marriage in this situation! Truly, Jesus Christ brings a sword!
What does one do in this situation? This passage provides some answers. The first is to love Jesus even more than your loved one. The temptation is to love Jesus less, so as to maybe make the problem go away. But that only creates deeper problems. For those in this situation, truly they should love Jesus with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
The second answer is to take up your cross and follow Him and lose your life for His sake. What do these words mean? Partly I think it means facing reality. If your spouse or child or parent or whatever the relation is showing no signs of being a Christian, of turning their lives over to Jesus, of agreeing with Him as to their sin and making an effort to turn away from sinful living into living for Him, then the person is probably unsaved and in immediate danger of an eternity in Hell separated from the love of Christ. Part of taking up your cross is confronting this reality and grieving the seriousness of the situation. It kills a part of us to come face to face with this horrible reality. I think that it is only when we really grasp this situation that we become people ready to lose our lives for Jesus’ sake. At this point we can really be earnest and persistent in prayer for our loved ones and we become able to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in taking action steps that may begin to draw our loved ones into His presence.
Although these are terribly difficult situations, God never meant for you to go through these situations alone. I encourage you to confide in someone, ideally someone here in this church, so that they can be in prayer for you, encourage you and simply be your friend though tough times. We, the church, are God’s gift to each other. Let us take full advantage of His precious gift!
As we come to a close, I want to mention that this week I have also been thinking about Genesis 22, in which God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his child of the promise of God, Isaac. I have to believe that Isaac, likely not a little boy but fully or nearly fully grown, had spent plenty of time with his father discussing who God is and how one follows Him.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. – Genesis 22:9-10
Isaac obeyed his father and God in doing this. He could have run away (Dad was over 100 years old!); he could have escaped. But he chose to trust his father and his God. We know that this test of Abraham was a shadow of things to come – God’s own Son would come to the same point of decision and obey His Father, although this time, God would not provide an alternative. Jesus was the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. But let us return our thoughts to Abraham and Isaac. The plain reading shows that Isaac was willing to lay down his life for God. And Abraham, in being willing to sacrifice his son, was equally willing to do anything, no matter how heart-rending, for the sake of God. Each was willing to take up their cross, follow God, and lose their lives for His sake. Ultimately, this is what we should desire for us, for our spouses, and even for our children. God is worth it!
No comments:
Post a Comment