Clough Divine institutions Lesson 12

Divine Institution #3, Maintaining a Family – Hebrews 12:5-13

Last time we covered the areas of beginning a family and we covered the five means that were available to the people of the ancient near east in Bible times for contraception. We covered the five methods; we covered the problem of abortion, sterilization, infanticide, continence and contraception. Now as always when one approaches a topic of this sort you’ll tend to get a lot of negative feedback, particularly in the area of abortion and particularly from women. And so therefore since we have had the usual we will turn to Luke 1 and go through the problem passages which I knew would be coming my way.

So Luke 1:41, remember the issue in handling the problem of abortion as far as the Word of God is concerned hinges on whether the fetus is considered to be a living soul. This is the issue; if it is then obviously abortion is murder. If it isn’t then abortion is not murder. It’s as simple as that. What is the status of the fetus? So therefore last time we took you to a passage in the Old Testament and showed that legally the infant was not considered a living soul by Hebrew law. And we said that this is significant because most of the time the Mosaic Law is more strict than the surrounding codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi and the Assyrian codes. Yet in this one instance these other ancient near eastern codes are far more strict than the Bible. Why is the Bible so liberal at this particular point, and we drew the deduction last time that legally the Old Testament does not consider the fetus to be a living soul.

Now the usual passage that is brought in rebuttal against this position is Luke 1:41, and this deals with Elisabeth, who at this point is pregnant with John the Baptist. “And it came to pass that when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” Again, verse 44, “For, lo,” Elisabeth is explaining, “as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.” And certainly people would say that this proves that the baby, therefore, the unborn infant, is a living soul.

There are two problems, however, with this, and that is that first with Luke 1:41 the explanation for it is found in the last clause of verse 41, notice, the baby is not filled with the Holy Spirit, the mother is. And therefore, as often with Luke’s writings, he will explain a physical phenomena by something that immediately precedes it, and therefore, and being a doctor, he is quite interested in these things. In fact you will find the account of the birth of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist and all the details of the pregnancy only covered in Luke’s Gospel. So scholars have been led to believe that Luke went back and interviewed these women as a doctor.

Well, in verse 41 it’s important to notice that the baby is not the one that is filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s Elisabeth that’s filled with the Holy Spirit. And the movement of the baby here is not necessarily a sign that this baby is a living soul; all it is is a sign that this baby obviously moved and reacted, as it’s obvious, anybody who knows a woman carrying a child, the child is active and this is one instance of it, but you cannot deduce that the baby is a living soul from verse 41 any more than you can deduce from the same terminology in Psalm 68:16 is one, Luke 19:4 another, where the word “leap” for joy and so on is used for mountains. Are you going to say the mountains are living souls because in Psalm 68:16 it says the mountains leaped? It also in Luke 19:40 Jesus said if you did not acknowledge My Messiahship then these stones would cry out. Now again, you can’t show that the stones are living souls because of Luke 19:40. So Luke 1:41 is not a really determinate passage; all it is reporting is that there was a reaction in the womb of Elisabeth to the announcement of Mary. And whether this is due to the fact that the baby himself is making the reaction or in response simply to the mother, and we would go along with Luke here in the last part and his explanation because at this point Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, which caused a bodily reaction as far as the child which she was carrying. And in verse 44 we have another verse that’s used along with this, “For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.” The problem with using this to show that the infant is a living soul is that you can’t tell whose joy it is; is this the joy of Elisabeth or is it the joy of the infant, so therefore this verse begs the question and it is not determinative. So these two verses, both verse 41 and 44 cannot be used to determinatively prove that the infant here is a living soul.

However, we will go back to Exodus 21:22 to another objection that has been raised that carries a lot more weight. For those of you who are wondering how objections are raised, the customary way of raising them is through the white cards in the pew, the so-called feedback cards that we have and if you have some questions, we try to allow as much interaction as possible. In Exodus 21:22 we have the key passage in the Old Testament which came under consideration last time. I’d like to return to that because of one objection, I didn’t have time to counter this but nevertheless it’s there and should be dealt with.

In verse 22, again, review of the Law. “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follows, he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. [23] And if any mischief follows, then thou shalt give life for life, [24] Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, [25] Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Now in verses 22-25 you have the key passage in the Mosaic Law. Last time we compared this with the Assyrian law code. People have said, however, that what verse 22 is teaching… I said last time verse 22 is teaching that if the men strive and they hurt a woman who is carrying an unborn infant, and as a result of the injury this “fruit depart,” she loses that fetus, “and yet no mischief follow,” in other words, she receives no lasting permanent injury in the sense that she’s killed and so on, “he shall be surely punished,” that is the man who assaulted her, “according as the woman’s will lay upon him.” Now, you can’t catch what verse 22 is saying until you compare it to what the rest of the world at that time was saying and then it becomes clear what verse 22 is saying.

So I’m going to read to you twice in a row, so you’ll have a chance to get the flavor of it, the Assyrian law code. Remember this is contemporary now with the law of Israel. Now listen to what the Assyrians, who by the way, were a lot less strict than the people in the Old Testament, in all these areas except this one. And this is why this is such a startling issue here. The Assyrian law code says this: “If a man strikes another man’s wife and causes her to have a miscarriage, they shall treat the wife of the accused as he treated her. He shall compensate her fetus with a life. However, if that woman died, they shall put the man to death; he shall compensate for her fetus with a life. But when the woman’s husband has no son, if someone struck her so that she had a miscarriage, they shall put the striker to death, even if her fetus is a girl he shall compensate with a life.” Now this last statement is interesting because in the Arabic cultures a man would have children plus girls, and the girls were not considered to be in the full status of children. Now this is not being sarcastic, this is just the way the culture was, and you can see this as you read the law. In other words, the fetus, the central issue is: was it a boy, would it be a man-child if it were born. But if it’s a girl you have to do the same thing too. And that’s just the way these codes were made up and by the way, that shows you, incidentally, what the Bible has done for the role of woman. You can’t appreciate the position that a woman has today unless you study ancient history and then you compare with how the Bible’s influenced the woman’s position in society and it’s fantastic.

Let’s go back through this code to see the point that the Assyrians had and then we’ll compare it with the Old Testament. The issue here is that if you have this couple, here’s the man and here’s the woman; the woman is pregnant with a child. Here you have a man and a woman, his wife, and they have a son; this son is born so he’s living, no question about him. The law code says that, “If a man strikes another man’s wife,” so he comes over here and strikes this woman who is bearing a child, and the wife of the accused, you will “treat the wife of the accused man as he treated her.” So watch the wording now. The way of justice was then to take this woman and treat her as this man had treated this man’s wife. And the way it was done was to take this woman’s son and kill him. Now you see what’s going on here and how different this is from the Old Testament. Here you have a woman who is bearing a child; the child has not yet been born. If this man strikes her so that she loses that child, the recompense under the Assyrian law code, as well as Hammurabi, I believe, but the Assyrian law code is much more clear, the resulting justice was to kill this woman’s son. So therefore the fetus, this fetus was redeemed by the sacrifice of a life or a nephesh. So therefore what we can say is that the Assyrian law code established the equivalency between a fetus and a nephesh. In other words, judicially the fetus was on equal par with a living person, so when the compensatory justice took over, then this living son was equal in value before the law to the fetus.

However, in verse 22, when you read Moses’ Law such is not the case. The fetus is not compensated for by another life. The fetus is merely compensated for by a fine. And this is unheard of in the Old Testament, to compensate a nephesh by money. Either a nephesh was compensated by another nephesh or it was never compensated, but you never compensate for loss of life in the Old Testament by giving money; you either never do it at all and say that this was a manslaughter type situation which was an accidental killing, or if the person was murdered then, in that situation, you compensated for that loss with another life. And so in verse 22 we have a radical departure from the whole context of the ancient near eastern law code, in that the Bible is far more liberal in this point than these other codes were. That in this situation, this woman is hurts, so that her “fruit depart,” and that doesn’t mean, incidentally like someone else said, and I’ll show you how that works out but somebody mentioned was that well, what this was saying is that the woman is injured but the baby is born prematurely but it’s okay and then no mischief follows and so on. Well, besides that the medical possibilities of this are pretty slim and the Law has to be designed for the average case, plus the fact, in this Assyrian law code in the same place where the “mischief follow,” you compare it over here and it says, “If a man strikes another man’s wife and causes her to have a miscarriage, they shall treat the wife of the accused,” and so on. And then where it says, “But if mischief follow,” that phrase in your Bible, the parallel to that in the Assyrian law code, “However, if that woman died,” then you have such and such. So the “mischief” here does not refer to the fetus, does not refer to the unborn child. The “mischief” here refers to the woman who was hit. That’s the issue there for “the mischief.”

Now, people have said that this represents an unorthodox interpretation of Exodus 21:22. As I said last time, although I’m making an application which I don’t think Dr. Waltke has made in this paper but I am using a paper written by Professor Bruce K. Waltke of Dallas Seminary in developing this concept from Exodus 21:22 and following. When this paper was published a man came back and said this is the most unorthodox presentation of this verse, nobody agrees with it, this is radical. So with his typical scholarly approach Dr. Waltke gives you the following evidences and I will read them, that this is the way in which the following people have taken this passage down through history.

The translation, first of all, translators who have agreed with this interpretation of verse 22: the Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, the Targum of Onkelos, the Targum of Jonathan. Of the English translations we have The Authorized Version, the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, [Sp?] on many of the following] the [sounds like: Ralpha or Rapha ham] Version, the JPS Version, the [sounds like: Maw phet or Maw fat] Version, the American Version, the [sounds like: Vay cee or Bay see] English Version, the RSV, the Jerusalem, Berkeley, [sounds like: Torah; Con fa ter nity] and Amplified. And Dr. Waltke went on to add that “to my knowledge the only translations that disagree are The Improved Translation of 1912 and Young’s Literal Translation. The commentators who agree with this stand are: Philo, [sounds like: Jark ey; Eb en ezra; Rash ee; My mon i des; Mon gie; Murphy S. R. Driver, H. McNeil, [sounds like: ?ill maw lough] Philip C. Johnson, J. Edgar [Parr or Park] and recently [sounds like: John Ways man.]”

So therefore the whole thrust of commentators and scholars who have studied this passage come to this interpretation. This is not a radical interpretation, this is the orthodox interpretation, and scholars of leading persuasions down through church history have held this view of Exodus 21.

I think we can go on now to the next area and finish the family, the divine institution of family tonight. We’ll go to Proverbs 22:6. We are concluding our study of the third divine institution; there are four divine institutions: the first one is volition. Divine institutions you remember are designed features in God’s creation for the spiritual benefit of man. The first one is human responsibility or volition. The second divine institution is marriage, the sexual difference and so on, and how that is consummated in the marriage relationship. The third divine institution is family and the fourth divine institution is national government which we will begin next week, the problem of national government. But these four divine institutions are not Christian; they are divine institutions because they are valid for both Christian and non-Christian alike. They are simply design features of God in society.

We said that the family relationship, which we’re finishing up tonight, is actually, as marriage, a type. This is important to see. When we’re talking about these institutions we’re not talking about some socially evolved set up. We’re talking about a design feature that typifies a spiritual truth. This makes the whole picture completely different here. We’re not talking about something in the ebb and flow of social dynamics or something; we’re talking about something that actually is typological of a spiritual truth, and we said that marriage takes its form from the relationship between Christ and the believer. This is important because as you saw when we dealt with the problem of divorce, when we dealt with they problem of the dynamics of maintaining marriage and so on, they all hinge on the fact that marriage is a typology, it is a type or a picture, a form, or a pattern of the same relations that exist between Christ and believers; Christ takes the male position, the believers take the female position in that relationship. And so in marriage you have a similar analogy.

Now in the family relationship we have a little different type typology; we have God the Father, and this by the way is where we get the whole concept of the Trinity. God the Father, under Him we have God the Son, also deity; however, in union with God the Son we have the Church, all born again believers in Jesus Christ. This together has the technical term “the Christ” in the New Testament. When you see that phrase oftentimes “the Christ” means Jesus Christ plus all believers together. Now God is said to be Father of both of these. Now this is not making Christ of equal deity with the Church or something, all it’s saying is that God is the Father in that God’s character and God’s wisdom and God’s plan is transmitted this way; not this way. It’s transmitted from the first personality of the Trinity to the second, and so God’s character is transmitted to His Son, and His Son, in turn, and us by our union with His Son, receive the character of God the Father; the love, the joy, the peace and so on in Galatians 5:22. So the family, then, is an earthly physical typology of this God relationship. We showed this from Ephesians where God is said to be the Father of all the family of the universe.

Now we said there were three specific ways in which the family is the type. There are three specific things you can point to that are parallel to this relationship between God the Father and God the Son. The one thing that we said you can point to is that in a family the children that are the result of the marriage that produced the family and bring that family into existence share their nature with their parents. The children are the offspring of the parents and therefore you have a propagation of nature; in other words, the characteristics of the parents are transmitted into the next generation. So we have a flow of character and the character flows from the parents into the children, and so the character of God the Father flows, you might say, defined for His Son and for the Church.

We also said there is a second area in which the family is a type and that was that there is a transmission of wisdom. Wisdom is transmitted from the father to the son, because this is why for example in Hebrews 2 it says Christ learned even, learned obedience even as Son, even though He were a Son of God. And the point there is that Christ in His humanity, true, but nevertheless you have this concept of Son learning from the Father. And this sets up the archetype for the family, in that the family unit in Scripture is seen as that unit by which the parents not only transmit their character to their children but they transmit wisdom also. So you have two things transmitted, nature or characteristics plus wisdom.

The third thing that we said how the family typifies this relationship is legal responsibility. The parents set up and make their children responsible for things that they do, and of course the best illustration is Adam; we become and share the legal responsibility for his sin by our union with Him. And so what the parents do the children will share in it; we’ll give some illustrations of that tonight.

Let’s go back, however, to the first one; the parents transmit their characteristics to their children. Now the best exposition of Proverbs 22:6 that I’ve ever seen is Joe Temple’s book, “Know Your Child.” If you haven’t got that or the tape series I highly recommend it; it is an excellent series, and Joe Temple, Dr. Temple is an expert at it; he’s had to raise 7 or 8 of them so he speaks not only from theoretical knowledge, he speaks from practical experience. So he expounds this very well and I’m just going to touch on it tonight to show you the problem of the transmission of your nature as parents into your children. In Proverbs 22:6 it says, “Train up a child in the way in which he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Now I hate to shatter some illusions but this is not a promise. Proverbs are not promises; Proverbs are descriptions of what goes on as a general rule, although there are exceptions to this. So it’s not a violation of Scripture because you say well, so and so I know, their parents put everything into them and they grew up in a Christian home and so on, and God didn’t honor His promise. Well, you’ve misinterpreted it in the first place. This is not a promise; this is a description of normal mechanics in history.

First let’s look at the word “train.” “Train up a child in the way in which he should go,” the word “train” here has an interesting word picture behind it. In the Arabic from which this Hebrew word comes, this was used of the Arab women who would develop a taste in their infant children by taking dates, and they’d take this date off the tree and they’d rub it on the mouth of their infant to develop a taste for the date in their children’s mouth. And they would develop the taste by doing this and this is the picture behind this word “train up a child in the way in which he should go,” give him a taste, in other words. And this is more than just kind of hitting him over the head and channeling them in a certain direction, this is giving him a flavor, giving him a taste for it. “…in the way in which he should go,” now unfortunately this is not translated too correctly in the King James. Actually it means train up a child in his own way.

Train up a child in his own way—now what does that mean? That means that every child has an independent nature and a specific direction; he’s unique as an individual and what this is saying is you have to give him a taste toward his individuality; in other words, parents may have two children. Over here is number one and over here is number two. Number one just has a certain personality; it just seems to go in that one direction. The other child in the same family has an utterly different personality; he’s going in another direction. Now what the Bible is saying here in 22:6 is that you’re foolish to handle both of these children the same way. You’ve got to research it out and find out where their natural inclination is. They have inherited a certain set of characteristics from you as parents.

Therefore, you should look for those characteristics in your children and deal with it according, the idea being that you have had to beat your head against the wall for 25 or 30 years, maybe 40 years and you by now should be able to handle the quirks and idiosyncrasies of your own personality. All right, you begin to see these things emerging in your children; well if you’ve had 20 or 30 years of working with it yourself in your own being, then certainly you can help your children by teaching them how to compensate for that particular weakness that you have transmitted into them; you teach them how to compensate for it by the benefit of your experience. So when you see these kids instead of saying, well he’s your brat today, you will look at it perceptively and say well now, this child has a certain set of sin nature, an old sin nature, an area of strength, an area of weakness, and this area of strength, the child may take after your area of strength, you may have no inclination whatever towards, say stealing, and your children may not. But you may have a very strong inclination to gossip and malign about people, and so you begin to see this in your children, you notice how they talk to one another about each other and so on, and they can’t keep their mouth shut, or somebody is always tattle-tailing on somebody and spreading false rumors around. Well, you should be sensitive to that because if you are at all spiritually perceptive you know that’s been a problem with you, so you look and you see that, well my goodness, guess where he got that from? And you look and you see the area of weakness; oh-oh, I know where that came from. So you begin to teach the child how to work with this thing and you have the benefit because there’s a continuity between you and your children.

So Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in his own way” is the point being made, take careful note of the fact that this child is an individual and has some… you’ve got to study him and so on, and Dr. Temple, when he goes through this he makes an interesting point about adoption. He was saying how this becomes a difficulty in the case of adoption because in the case of adoption it takes very perceptive parents because things can go on in that adopted child and you won’t latch onto it quickly because it’s not part of your nature. It’s not that you can’t do it but you just have to be more skillful and you have to be more perceptive and more alert to latch onto the situation.

So Proverbs 22:6 has a lot to say about maintaining a family in this area of the derived nature. Then the last part of verse 6, “And, when he is old, he will not depart from it,” means that this kind of training, most of the time will be beneficial. Now obviously the child has his own volition and can go his own way, can drop by the wayside and so on. But there is, not a promise here but there is a revelation of a certain process that if parents would study their children as individuals, recognizing that these children have the idiosyncrasies, the strengths and the weaknesses you have, and then say how do I cope with these; all right, now I’m going to teach my children how to cope with these at an earlier age so they don’t have to bang their head against the same spot in the same wall that I’ve had to for the last 25 years. And so you can do this in fact even before the child reaches the age of accountability and trusts the Lord as Savior, before the child is even a Christian he can begin to cope, for example with problems of temper and so on. And you’ve set him up with a framework so that later on when he becomes a Christian it becomes a lot easier. So here we have one area of maintaining the family with the concept of our transmitted nature.

The second characteristic of a family, we said, was the problem of transmitted wisdom, the idea that the children must learn from the parent’s wisdom; not from the school system and not from the Sunday school. We find this is sloppy thinking on a lot of Christian’s part. You realize that Sunday schools are not more than 200-300 years old in this country, in anywhere. The Sunday school movement, for your information, started in England and it wasn’t started to teach people Bible doctrine. Sunday school’s were started to teach people how to read. The children were working in the factories in England during the industrial revolution needed to know how to read. Now these churches obviously had an ulterior motive; they wanted to teach them how to read so they could teach them the Word of God. But the Sunday school began initially as a process to teach the underprivileged children of England to read. Now, at no point have the evangelicals or the Christians ever wanted Sunday school to deprive the family unit of its responsibility. The Sunday school can only act as a supplement but it cannot act as the main brunt, and so therefore we should recognize the Sunday school agency is not a babysitting thing and it’s not something for parents to just palm off the responsibility too.

Turn to Genesis 18:19 for a little observation on Abraham in this regard. When God looked at Abraham He made a character evaluation. One of those evaluations was that Abraham would command his children. So in Genesis 18:19 we read, “For I know him, that he will command his children,” and by the way, just look at the context here, verse 18 is the context, before we get too theoretical, the context is simply this, “Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” In other words, God is saying this Abrahamic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant is the promise that God gave to Abraham, the three-fold promise. God said I will give you eternal title to the land of Israel, I will also make you a worldwide blessing, and I will give you historical survival. So your people will be able to occupy the land forever, they will last, no matter who tries to destroy the Jew, the Jew will always survive; and worldwide blessing, the Jew will be the channel of the redemption of the world, obviously through Jesus Christ and so on.

So in Genesis 18:19 it’s obviously important that this be a man who in history is a man that’s going to be concerned for his children, one who’s going to transmit his faith into his children. So God says, “I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they will keep the way of the LORD,” so it was important in the Lord’s evaluation of Abraham that he do this. We have other passages in God’s Word: Ephesians 6:4, “Bring your children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” the word “nurture” is the positive, the “admonition” is the negative. There are always positive and negatives. We’ll skip over these and turn to Hebrews 12.

In Hebrews 12:5, again a reminder we are working with derived wisdom, the wisdom transmitted from the parents into the children. And this is not just talking about spanking here in verse 5 and following; discipline is a larger concept than just chastening. Chastening is included but this means training, and it means sometimes there is suffering in the training. But what this is saying in verses 5-13 is it’s giving the analogy, physical analogy between how parents at this time brought up their children and how the Lord was bringing up Israel or believers. Now the problem is that in our day we have been infiltrated by all sorts of pragmatic concepts on child raising and so on, and so we have to go back now to verse 5 a little different than the 1^st century could; they understood what’s going on here, but tonight we’re not going to draw the spiritual conclusion, we’re not even going to bother with that. We’re just going to go back to verse 5 and following and show you how physically, apart from the spiritual truths, just how normal everyday families were run at this time when the New Testament was written.

Hebrews 12:5, “For whom the Lord loves He chastens,” and this would have been understood because obviously it was an analogy between the Lord and the Father, “for whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives.” The word “scourge,” frankly it’s whip. And it means here that the Lord loves, and yet “whom the Lord loves He beats.” Now that sounds incongruous and obviously probably not able to be understood by a lot of people who think in today’s categories. But the point here is much like the military situation; when the military is interested in training soldiers; they’re interested in putting them through a rough period of training. The DI is not interested at that time in making friends of the boys that he’s training. The reason is that he has a further goal; he wants these young men to survive in the battlefield, and so therefore what does he do? He waves any personal feelings that he has at that point to instill discipline so that those boys will go out and fight and kill and not be killed. So the objective of the military training is to train these men.

Now one could therefore ask the question, if the DI felt sorry for some little sniveling brat and he says well, we’re going to let him off of training today and after all momma wrote two nasty letters to the commandant and so on, and she’s contacted the Congressman so we’ll let him off from drill, something like this. Does that kind of a military leader… is he really concerned for that kid? I don’t think so because where is the kid going? He’s going out there and he’s going to get shot. So who’s loving whom? You’re loving the person by taking a long-range perspective and you put them through the drill. And when he gets through then he’s in shape to fight. It is a tough period of training; now the trouble with us in our generation is that we’re always concentrating on the present, the heck with the future and the heck with the past, everything’s got to happen first, last and always right this moment. And that’s wrong. “For whom the Lord loves, He chastens,” and it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love the person at that moment, it means that He does love him then. But he also knows that if I’m going to express my love and it’s not going to be a mushy sentimental type operation, it’s got to have content to it and it’s got to be forceful.

Now I deal all the time with problems that come up. Usually, in several situations, I’m thinking of several in particular that are in trouble and have been with the police department and it’s inevitably tracked back to the fact, or at least after this problem gets developed, is that the parents feel like they should apologize for disciplining or they should not discipline or they should not maintain their standards because after all, they might lose the friendship of this particular child. And because they want to be a friend instead of a parent they actually hate that child because they’re trying to be friends. You don’t have to be friends. If you’re parents you make your friends with people your own age; you don’t make friends with your children. You love your children and you guide them into a process where God wants them but you don’t make friends with them. They may not like you but later on they will if you do your job. So the objective here is not to make friends with your children. The objective here is to love them like the Lord loves here, and he says, “Whom the Lord loves, He chastens.” Now this doesn’t mean a totally negative approach and I’ll give you balance on this in a moment but I’m just trying to emphasize that this love motivates a forceful training program.

And in Hebrews 12:7 he adds, “If ye endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son,” now this could not be asked today, but it could be asked in the first generation, “for what son is he whom the father does not chasten?” He says that would be a sign that this person isn’t even a son. He says if there would be a son in the Jewish ghettos to which this epistle was written, he says you people, you Jewish people in those ghettos all over the Mediterranean to whom this epistle is written, do you know of any son whom his father does not chasten. Of course not! We couldn’t say that today, but they could. Of course not, you don’t know one, and the fact is that when a child is not disciplined, he says, it’s just a sign that he doesn’t even belong in the family, that’s all; that’s all that’s a sign of. It’s a sign that this child is unloved and uncared for.

And it’s very interesting, in reading through some of the radical literature again and again it comes out, at Berkley, at Boulder, at Wisconsin, at many of these radical campuses time and time again the radicals themselves have said if the administration had cracked down hard the first time we wouldn’t have had any problems, it would have folded right there. But no, the administration is too busy kissing the feet of every little long-haired brat that comes to the college, with the result that they are gypping thousands of students who have come to the campus to learn, who have earned their money on summer jobs, and have poured their money in, hoping for an education, and these kids are getting their education stolen from them because of sentimental administrators who are afraid to stand up to a few thugs. Now the only process in the college campus as far as this academic freedom…this is not an issue of academic freedom, this is an issue of whether you are going to destroy property or you’re not going to destroy property, and the college campus is a place where learning is number one and all the rest of the Mickey Mouse is number two. And if the kids aren’t there to learn they shouldn’t be there, and the only reason, as one man pointed out, the only reason why a lot of them are there, they’re there to avoid the draft. You who think that there’s a Biblical reason to avoid the draft, you come next week and we’ll deal with the draft situation from the Bible. We’ll probably have a draft right out the front door, but it’s Biblical controls on the draft, and Christianity has been interpreted as pacifists, conscientious objector type operation and we’ll correct that little image next week.

So in Hebrews 12 we have the norm of a forceful discipline program. Now again, this is in love, this is not a hatred for, this is not frustration. I want to correct this lest you walk out of here and you say, well, the Bible is cruel, the Bible teaches that parents are to clobber their kids with no love. I want to correct this by turning back to Matthew 18; there’s a balance here. Sometimes the balance is awfully hard to see in the 20^th century for some reason, that love can coexist with this kind of thing. I remember at Dallas Seminary we had a similar situation; we had a professor there who was rough on his students, absolutely fantastic. You walked into his class, and the class before me, that had him the year before for this particular class walked in there and they got their first assignment the first class period. And they looked at it and they thought that was the assignment sheet for the whole semester and it turned out that that was the assignment sheet for next week, a thousand pages of reading. Well, obviously things have been trimmed down in that course since that time.

But the point was that many of the students interpreted this man’s actions as that he just liked to hurt students, this guy got kind of…he was a sadist, he just loved to watch people suffer so he’d just try to destroy his students, he’d give an exam and the average would be 20 and this kind of thing; and he would just deliberately stomp all over students to build him up, and that was not the thing. And often times I have talked with him and you see across his face this horrible expression after he realizes that the students aren’t making it. He’s not doing it to destroy his students; he’s doing it because he’s trying to teach these students that when they get out in the pulpits they are going to need the tools that he’s trying to give them, which means that they have to have some tough training and it means you have to sweat a little bit to get it. But, the reason why he did it was love and concern for the students. He once told me, he said you men are the ones that are going to go out of this classroom and you’re the ones that the Lord is going to put on the front lines. I stay back here and if you men are not effective in your ministry, he says I have no outreach whatever. My outreach is limited totally through you men and therefore I am going to train you to the best of my ability so that when you’re out on the frontlines you can produce. Now that was his concept, because he was limited in the classroom. I doubt he saw more than two or three unbelievers a week; I doubt he had a chance to sit down and discuss issues with other Christians, very rarely during the course of a week. So his whole ministry depending on reaching the world through his students. Now he did it out of love, out of a [can’t understand word] leading of the Lord.

In Matthew 18:6 we have Jesus’ attitude toward children. And I think if you’ll catch onto this you’ll see the balance there between the love and the force. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hung about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Now there are problems in Matthew 18 between the literal children and the figurative illustration. However, I am only using now the illustration from the children; I’m not talking about the spiritual problem here of who they are, whether these are believers and so on. I’m just pointing out that the attitude, or the picture, the illustration that Jesus is using in Matthew 18 is one of children and it angers Jesus Christ when people lead children astray. “Whoever offends” means to lead them astray, into false areas of truth. And He says you do that, it’s better that a millstone was hung around your neck. Now this expresses the attitude of God to people who manipulate children. So therefore the Lord is far from one who hates children; He loves them. This is precisely why He wants them trained; because He does love them.

In Matthew 18:10, “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father, who is in heaven.” And then in Matthew 18:14, “Even so it is not the will of your Father, who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” Now again obviously he is referring to believers in the context, but He is using as His teaching aid a child, and this reveals His character.

One further note in Matthew 19:14 you have His statement, “Allow these children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me;” now what was happening there was that in verse 13 there were some little children and the disciples were kind of impatient, they had some great questions that needed answering and they said who allowed these little brats in here, so they were about to throw them out and Jesus said never mind, you just let them stay here. And evidently there was no discipline problem here, it was just a case that Jesus wanted these children here and He used them for teaching aids and so on. Here you have the attitude.

Now I want to make on comment on a card that was handed in asking what my position was on teaching children about Jesus. We had one of the feedback cards where I was quoted as saying that children ought not to be taught about Jesus. Now in context what I was discussing there was teaching in the order the Bible teaches about Jesus Christ. You don’t walk up to a three year old and start talking about Jesus; the kid doesn’t have any categories in his mind to understand what you’re talking about. Historically in the Bible what is revealed first in history? Creation! So you start teaching kids, not Jesus, you teach them Creator. If they don’t get the concept of Creator/ creature difference they’re sunk and you can talk about Jesus from now until the rapture and you’re not going to communicate them too much to them. You’ve got to establish the category of creation. You take them outdoors and you identify patterns in nature with God’s design, at an early age so immediately they make the link. This is this God-consciousness in Romans 1 again operating. You establish the objective in children, young children of primary age, the objective as Christians is to develop their God-consciousness, and to particularly focus it down on the doctrine of Creator/creature, constantly bringing out before them, this is what God has made, that this universe is controlled by God Himself. Use prayer with children; pray in front of them and let them see the answers to the prayer. Pray something specifically, and then when the answer to prayer comes point it out to the child and say look, don’t you see, we made a prayer and don’t you see how God answered that prayer, so early in their life they get the concept that we have a Creator who not only made the universe but He’s actively moment by moment involved in it.

Now once you’ve established this you come to the next thing. What’s the next big topic in God’s Word, logically? After you have Genesis that deals with beginning, what was the next thing? The Law, so then that’s the second step you work with, the concept of Law or right and wrong. You see how logically this flows; you establish the Creator/creature, then you take your rights and your wrongs and you ground them on the character of the Creator. They’re not your right and wrongs; too many parents make the mistake of saying you do that; and they say why? Because I told you! And as I said earlier this morning, obviously there’s a time and a place to cut off the Mickey Mouse and just do it! Now obviously I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. My point, however, is in thinking through why you say something ground their right and their wrong on God’s character. If you can do this then you break the standard and it’s still saved. But if you identify the standard with yourself, look what happens? They may be snowed for four or five years in their life as to how wonderful a person you are but sooner or later they are going to see you stumble and when they see you stumble, what goes? The whole thing goes. If the standard hangs on your character you’re lost; you can’t live a perfect life. And so you discredit your standard if you’ve hung it on yourself.

So therefore the second step in teaching children after the Creator/creature is to go and hang the standard on the character of God and make it clear to them that you yourself sometimes violate these standards. These standards are over and above you, and so when you sit down with a child you can reason with him, and you say now look, it’s not because I say this, this is the standard that God the Creator has laid down. We both are in the same both in this regard, we both have to adhere to this standard and it just so happens that God has put me in the position or responsibility in this family to enforce these standards on you, and that’s the way it is. But you see, there’s a logical progression here and then after this, of course you develop then the concept of guilt, the child will sense guilt, and once that guilt develops and it’s a true guilt, not just guilt feelings but the guilt is related to these standards, now you come to the gospel, and now you’ve got it. And that’s when you talk to them about Jesus. But my point is you don’t start out with a child talking about Jesus; they’re not going to get it. You’ve got to follow the logical theological order that God has done in His Word: first creation, then the Law, then the gospel, and now the child will be ready for it. But you’ve got to go through this process, otherwise I don’t think they’re going to trust the Lord, they’re going to have an experience and raise their hand or something but they’re not going to really understand.

So this, then, is the second great principle of the family; the derived wisdom principle that we as parents must transmit wisdom into our children. We cannot expect the school system…the school system can take care of the technicalities but they cannot transmit the wisdom, that is up to the parents.

And finally the third area is the problem of legal responsibility. What I do sets up and determines the life of my children. Now here we have two main areas; we have our area as a nation and we’ll develop this further when we get into the fourth divine institution, but we have concepts like economics, and like the politics, and the military, the policies that you personally as a parent vote for. Remember, you’re voting for your children and you are setting in motion policies that will influence their lives for generations, just like our lives in this generation have already to a large degree been determined by the generation who went before that started the concept of deficit spending, which is anti-Biblical and it’s declared so in Isaiah 1, mixing dross with silver is inflationary policies and God’s Word condemns this as theft, the violation of one of the Ten Commandments. So deficit spending and fractional banking is anti-scriptural; this was an anti-scriptural concept that was introduced back through [can’t understand word] and so on, and as a result we are going to suffer in this nation. We are already suffering, the poor people are suffering because they have fixed incomes and if the dollar cheapens in value you have a progressive suffering on the part of the elderly who can no longer pay. They saved back in the days with expensive dollars, the dollars have cheapened and now they’re stuck; now they’re retired, they’re out of work, they have no possibility of earning money and they’re stuck with a fixed pension while the government has fostered an attitude of destroying the dollar in front of them.

And so you see, people who voted for this, people who influenced this, people who had the materialism lust to bring more into the system and keep making more money and more money and more money and more money, whether it had backing or not, bring it all into the system, well now look what’s happened. Who suffers? Their children, and God holds their responsible for it; you can see it throughout history, throughout the Bible, that children in this sense bear the results of the wrongs of their parents. The children, the young men who have fought and died in Vietnam, are the victims of policies of this country since World War II. If we had contained the communists we would have the thirty or forty thousand young men who have lost their lives in Vietnam. Why? Because these men have gone on a chopping block, a meat machine as Chiang Kai-shek called it because the policies were not straightened out, and policies that were set in motions generations ago are still influencing us. These are illustrations of this.

But I think the greatest thing is this, spiritually as Christians. What we do in our generation over the issue of evangelization, what we do in our generation will set in motion forces that will reflect in our children’s life. You can go back in American history to the times of the Puritans to see this. The Puritans were a fantastic group of people; they are maligned in history books, they are discredited because of certain idiosyncrasies, because of misinformation and so on. However a lot of this, like the Salem witch trials, if you have some professor that’s talking about the Salem witch trials refer him to Chadwick Hansen’s book, Witchcraft at Salem; that concept has been modified quite a bit. But the Puritans were people who invested in the future, and contrary to what you may have learned the Puritans had one of the finest systems of voting. Do you realize that in the early days of America you could not vote until you had a certain amount of Bible doctrine? Now the way this is interpreted in history books is this is religious bigotry. It wasn’t religious bigotry, they realized that you had to have a common base and a certain set of standards and you just didn’t get your right to vote until you adhered to Biblical standards. And so they set in motion such a powerful influence in this country we are still feeling the effects of it; a fantastic group of people.

Now what happened? They were people who developed the divine viewpoint framework; the idea that God is at the center; Bible doctrine around God, we know God through Bible doctrine and all into the areas of life, science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature and all these fields, relationship with believers, loved ones, friends, society, job, sex, possessions and health, all these details of life, Bible doctrine flowing out and establishing a Biblical understanding in every area. Now this was what the Puritans excelled at, they considered this holy war, that they would conquer the world by their divine viewpoint framework and they very nearly did because their influence has been lasting and very effective in this country. We, as parents, invest and can determine our responsibility for our children by developing in our generation a similar back to the Bible movement. And it doesn’t mean just quiet times, it means that but it means more than that; it means taking the Word of God so seriously that it becomes the criteria of judgment in every field, physics, history, art, music, every endeavor that you could possibly think, labor management relationships from Ephesians 6 and so on, every imaginable area of life is brought into submission to the Word of God. Now if we did that and started working at that in our generation we could, even though we may have disaster as an immediate result we would have in the long term something fantastic invested for the coming generations. But that’s how history works and these are ways in which we can maintain a family.

I would like to close by turning to the Old Testament to have a brief illustration of how this worked out historically in one very famous family—David; David, Solomon, and Rehoboam, two of these men you know, the third one was an idiot and you probably don’t know too much about him. Turn to 1 Samuel 16, in 1 Samuel 16:1 we have God picking out a king for Israel. This was a teenager by the name of David and the remarkable thing about David, something that his parents evidently did with him, and some things his parents didn’t do with him that had a tremendous bearing on why God picked this young man for the king of Israel.

In 1 Samuel 16:1 and following God sends Samuel to pick out David. This is the chapter where God makes the famous statement later on about the Lord looks not on the outward appearance and so on. The idea is that Samuel is to go to this man Jesse, Jesse is the man’s name, and he has a lot of sons; some of these sons are strong guys, really sharp looking fellows, and Samuel goes down through and God says no, that’s not the one; and he goes to the next one and God says no, that’s not the one, and so finally we come down to 1 Samuel 16:7, “But the LORD said unto Samuel, I don’t want you to look on the countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have reused him; for the LORD sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” And so they go through the sons and so on, and then in verse 11 Samuel is a little puzzled, he says now just a minute here, I came to this Jesse and God said I was led here, and I go through this man sons and I get a negative; every time I hit one of these sons I get a negative, God doesn’t want him, God doesn’t want him, God doesn’t want him, God doesn’t want him.

So finally in verse 11 he says, Say, you got some other sons around, I’ve run out, and I’ve drawn a red card on all these things, there must be some son around, where you hiding him? So in verse 11, “There remains yet there one young man,” this is Jessie, “and he keeps the sheep,” and the implication is, and you get this as you study David’s life, is that he was not considered very much by either his brothers or his parents. David was almost kind of the black sheep of the family, he was a kid, a little brat evidently, his brothers looked upon him as a little brat by certain remarks they make in the 17^th chapter. Now this is significant; this you’re going to see David’s got an area of weakness just as a result of this and you’re going to see him transmit this area of weakness to his children. But he starts out with a certain area of, you might say independence, a kind of bad kind of independence because David is the kind of guy that got it all on his own.

He was a man who, as far as we can tell in 1 Samuel 16:18 where he’s evaluated by the employment office of Saul, they put out an evaluation of him and they make four points in their recommendation. They say we recommend David be employed by King Saul for the following reasons: he’s cunning in playing, this means he’s skillful in playing the harp, and from what we can study in the life of David, David learned this all by himself, he was a self-taught man and he taught himself the harp, it was his hobby evidently, and he just liked to get out and get…he didn’t have the electronic things out in the field with the sheep but he had his harp and he probably took that out in the pasture and played with it a little bit; this was his hobby and he became very skillful at it. Of course, out of this we get the book of Psalms; the musical talent of David was responsible for one of the greatest books in the Bible.

The second point in the employment recommendation is that he is a mighty valiant man and a man of war. This means that David had a second characteristic and that means that he was tough physically and mentally. We’re going to see a little bit how he got tough in a moment. So that’s the second thing about David; again he developed this largely independent of his family. Now you’re going to see mistakes these men make but I’m pointing out to you that God uses us even though we have mistakes and David’s getting all of this very independently. “…prudent in matters,” this is the word for discernment, and “he is a comely person,” this means he was a handsome man. David is said by the adjectives in the Hebrew to probably, I’ve never met any other character in the Bible in studying the original languages that has the high quality of beauty that the Bible ascribes to him. So David probably was a very handsome individual. We’re going to see this gets him in trouble later on. But David is a very handsome man, he’s strong, he’s strong in mind, and he has a lot of talent.

Now turn to 1 Samuel 17:34 you’ll see how he was trained. He explains to Saul why he can go out there and lick Goliath, and oftentimes people are left with the impression that David just saw Goliath and on the spur of the moment he said oh, that looks like a pretty juicy target for my slingshot and I’ll just go out there. Now David did not just on the moment decide he was going to go out and clobber Goliath. David had been trained for years and years and years and years by God with a certain mental attitude so that when that crisis came David was ready. Here’s how he was trained. Saul says hey, little kid, what’s the idea, you can’t… David was small enough here that he couldn’t even have the armor fit on him; they put the armor on David and said hey, if you’re going to go out there and fight this giant you’d better get some armor on and so they put the armor on and it’s too big for him. And he falls and trips all over and he says look, you just take the armor off, forget it. And so he takes the armor off and goes out there with no defense at all, except a slingshot and his legs. And that’s all he uses, high mobility type system. So he goes out and in verse 34 he explains to Saul how he got this; “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock; [35] And I went out after him, and I smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth. And when he arose against me I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him. [36] Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he defies the armies of the living God.”

This gives you a little insight into David; David learned this all alone out in the field. From what we can gather from the Psalms and everything else, David was a loner; David picked this all up by himself, independent. Now watch what happens; we come to his later life in 1 Samuel 11. Remember by now he has sons, and I want you to watch how the dynamics of the family operate. In 2 Samuel 11 we come to an incident in David’s life. David had an area of weakness and you guessed it, it was sex. He couldn’t leave the ladies alone; he had ten concubines and eight plus wives. Now you’re going to see this as amplified when he gets his son; his son gets the idea, well if dad can have eight, I can have some more, so Solomon decides he’s going to outdo his father. But David starts out in this area and in 2 Samuel he gets in trouble, and he gets in trouble in this area of weakness and this leads to the famous adultery incident with Bathsheba and he murders her husband.

Now in 2 Samuel 12:10 we have pronounced one of the principles of family life, that the sins of the fathers will affect the children, and in 12:10 Nathan says to him, “Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from thine house, because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah; the Hittite, to be thy wife.” And so now what has happened is that David brings down upon himself a tremendous amount of discipline, and unto his children.

Turn to 2 Samuel 14:25, here you have the first long-hair, Absalom. Talk about the long-hair today, none of them are like this fellow, he went to the barber once a year. “In all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty,” see here’s the father now, watch what’s happening; you’re having a physical trait transmitted to the son; see the father was a handsome man and he lived it up with his ladies and so on, and now he has sons but here’s the problem. He’s got eight plus wives and he’s got sons from different women, and so now he doesn’t have a unified family, and so he has children from this marriage, this marriage, this marriage, this marriage, this marriage, all at the same time. This isn’t a situation where you have a divorce or a death or something; this is all together. And so he has one son, Absalom, and he has another one called Amnon, and Absalom has a sister called Tamar, and sooner or later.… Tamar is Absalom’s sister and Amnon starts making eyes at Tamar and he falls in love with her and he rapes Tamar and then dumps here, love ‘em and leave ‘em; and that leaves Tamar out here and so Absalom decides he’s going to cause some more trouble; that was his sister that got assaulted and so he goes out and he kills Amnon. Now isn’t this ironic? What have you had in the exact sequence of David? David committed adultery and he murdered the man’s husband. In his own family one of his sons kills the other one after that son sexually assaulted one of the women in his family. And so you see how the wheels of justice operate in this situation, how God’s discipline comes down upon the children because of David. David confessed his sin but nevertheless the discipline remained. And Absalom, true to style, was the man that the revolt against his father; you see the long-hair and the revolt goes together. So this is the life then, of David and his clan.

Now out of all this mess comes one man by the name of Solomon. Solomon was the son of Bathsheba; Bathsheba had four or five children eventually, one of whom died, and Solomon was one of these sons. Well, Bathsheba was a pretty shrewd woman; she had to be to survive in that day and she got going with Nathan and it worked out that the Lord picked out Solomon for a son but there was problems because in the court a lot of the men wanted one of David’s other sons on the throne, and so Bathsheba has a midnight call on Nathan and they work it out so that her son is going to sit on the throne.

In 1 Kings 3 we have Solomon. This is the second generation, watch what has happened. Keep in mind David’s behavior pattern and his general style of life. Now in 1 Kings 3:1 you have the son from that marriage, Solomon. “And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh,” here’s your first description of Solomon’s character; what’s he doing? He “made affinity with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh’s daughter, and brought her into the city of David, until he made an end of building his own house, and the house of the LORD, and the wall of Jerusalem round about.” Watch, [2] “Only the people sacrificed in high places, because there was no house [built unto the name of the LORD, until those days.] [3] “And Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of David, his father, except,” and here’s his area of weakness, “he sacrificed and burnt incense in high places.” Now unless you know Hebrew history you won’t catch what that means. What has happened is that Solomon has married a Gentile girl; the Gentile girl brought her gods into the family. Now we have Solomon inheriting the weakness of his father for sex, and added to that now is another area of weakness and that is religion. So now Solomon is worse off than his father; he has picked up sex and evidently David should have, as a father realized that he would transmit this trait to his son and taught his son what to do about it.

Now we gather from Scripture that David did not teach very much and Solomon felt this all his life. And when Solomon got on the throne he asked for the gift of wisdom; he said I don’t know how to run this show, my father never taught me, I haven’t got any background from my father, and so he asked the Lord, Lord would you provide me with the wisdom that my father never did. And so Solomon gets this wisdom and he goes out and he makes a lifelong crusade down to the latter years of his life to make sure that his sons are going to learn something, and so he writes the book that we have in your Bible called Proverbs. So Solomon was concerned about transmitting wisdom to his son because evidently he didn’t get it. So what David failed as a father in this situation; though he raised one of the most brilliant men who ever lived, he failed in this sense: he had an area of weakness which reappears in Solomon’s life; Solomon does not know how to grapple with it; he has never been taught to grapple with his father’s area of weakness. His father should have taught him this but he didn’t, so Solomon goes down in life and he picks up another one, religion.

And so we come now to 1 Kings 11 and you’ll see where Solomon wound up. Solomon was always trying to outdo somebody. He figured that if you can have two Cadillac’s I’ll have five, and so he figured if his old man had eight and a half wives he could have a few more, so he decided he was going to try for multi digit numbers and he got up into the hundreds of women for wives and so in 1 Kings 11:1, “But King Solomon loved many strange [foreign] women; together with the daughter of Pharaoh,” see how it’s connected with the daughter of Pharaoh, so you don’t make any mistake, the author of 1 Kings is trying to point this are out in his life, [“women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites, [2] “Of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel,” don’t go to them. Verse 3, “And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines,” now you figure out how he arranged the dates, I don’t know but if he had 700 wives and 300 concubines it must have been something fantastic, he must have had to have several secretaries just to handle the problem. But he got around and he had these thousand women that followed him all over Israel.

So now we have Solomon outdoing his father, inheriting these same traits. Now out of all of this mess, he’s got a thousand women now, and the Bible doesn’t even bother to record the sons and the daughters, it just gives up; you have sons and daughters in most cases but even the Bible doesn’t give you the genealogy of Solomon, it gets too messy. So out of this union comes a man by the name of Rehoboam. Now Rehoboam is a nut and Rehoboam evidently spent hours and hours listening to his father teach, but along toward the end of his life these areas of weakness got the better of Solomon and he began to produce more and more human viewpoint until instead of the book of Proverbs, which was an early product, he now comes out with Ecclesiastes, which we’ve dealt with in the morning service and there you have sheer human viewpoint. So now watch what’s happened.

Now you’ve got the third generation, here’s the grandson of David. David did not transmit wisdom to his son; Solomon turns around and tries to do it, but evidently does a lousy job; of course, you can imagine trying to teach the children of a thousand women; he would have a college campus to handle the problem. So he did not have a very good teaching program for his kids. So out of this comes Rehoboam, and in 1 Kings 12 you see what happens to him. He adds to his father’s area of weakness. See, David had the area of weakness in sex; Solomon adds to that religion, and now Rehoboam adds one more to that and that’s plain insensitivity of conscience; a brutality and an insensitivity and just plain stupidity. So here you have a tragedy. Here you have two of the greatest men of the Bible, men whose names you could mention anywhere, but watch what happens to their children.

1 Kings 12:1, “And Rehoboam went to Shechem; for all Israel was come to Shechem to make him king. [2] And it came to pass, when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who was yet in Egypt, heard of it,” he’s an agent for the north, and they sent and they called him, and they make a proposal to Rehoboam. And they say look Rehoboam, your father was hard; your father established a strong centralized government that deprived the individual of his freedom in our society. We would request, Rehoboam, and we advise you very strongly that when you get on that throne loosen up, start chipping away at central government and restore the freedom to the individual because if you don’t you are going to have a bloody revolution. And they weren’t trying to be brutal about it, they just warned him and they were willing at this point to submit to a reformation of the government.

However, Rehoboam goes to the people that counseled his father in verse 6, he “consulted with the old men who stood before Solomon, his father,” and he said how do you advise me. And the men said you go ahead and you make the reformation. And then verse 8, “But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given him, and consulted with the young me who were grown up with him,” see here you have the hippies on the throne, and now they are in complete charge of the show and you’re going to see something fantastic. He goes deliberately against the age-old wisdom of Solomon. Solomon was bad, yes, but Solomon at least had a perspective of history.

So he comes in with these young guys who stood up before him, and verse 9, “And he said unto them, What counsel give ye that we may answer this people, who have spoken to me,” and they say, verse 10, “The young men who were grown up with him spoke unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou speak unto this people who spoke unto thee, saying, Thy father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt you say to them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. [11] And, now, whereas my father did lay upon you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke; my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” The word “scorpion” here is a whip that has glass in it, and he says you didn’t like the beatings my father gave you, I’m going to put glass in my whips and come along and beat you with them and see how you like it.

So here you have him taking the counsel of the young men and off we go to revolution. And so in 930 BC we have the destruction of the kingdom; from this point on its ruptured and will never be returned again to unity until the return of Christ.

So I think from this one example at least you can see the progress of mistakes and errors that could have been corrected at each point, had David, for example, realized the principle that he transmits his nature to his sons, he would have realized that he must teach Solomon how to cope with the problem. David failed. Along comes Solomon. Solomon had enough wisdom to realize his areas of weakness; had even he tried with Rehoboam to work with this area of religion alone, because… I haven’t got time tonight to show you, one of the problems in the revolution was the area that Rehoboam let in all of the false religions and even gave it official sanction. And so had Solomon cut even this off he would have helped his son, but he didn’t; he let it go, the next man let it go, and then down the third generation you have total chaos and destruction.

Well, this concludes the survey of the mechanics of the family and next week we’ll deal with the nation.