Clough Manhood Series Lesson 21

Law: Man as Ruler of the Home

We finished manhood and the law, we’ve had a survey of some of the highlights of the man’s position under God’s law; we saw that man’s confidence comes from knowing the Law. There’s nothing like knowing what is right and what is wrong ahead of time so you can anticipate the situation; walk into it with a confidence that you do know where you were going. There’s always a problem when a person doesn’t know where they’re going to have the unpleasant feeling of being pushed around by the sea and the winds and so on.

We showed how the law specifies the character of one’s body; the idea of the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit in 1 Coir 6:20. We showed how there is a protection of life from just and unjust violence, that there is such a thing as unjust violence but there is also a thing as just violence and man is to protect the areas of unjust violence with just violence. The just violence comes from the fourth divine institution. There are such things, and in our day when we decry violence under certain moral and ethical principles it ought never to be forgotten that there is such a thing as just violence.

And then finally we studied ownership of property and showed how the Bible has a place for ownership of property, that there is a basis for freedom and creativity and it only exists if there is such a thing as private property. Private property is the sine qua non of public freedom. So the Bible is very intense that we respect ownership, that we stop theft, that we not engage in great indebtedness.

Now tonight we finish by referring to the male role as husband and as family man, as father. These are again specified carefully in the Law; we kind of collapse them together in one particular lesson because they’ll come up again and again by way of illustration in other portions of the text. So don’t be dismayed that we go through it this fast. These are the highlights of the Law and there’ll be numerous illustrations of this as time goes on.

The big principle in both the family and marriage is conceiving of the male as a ruler, little “r”, underneath God as the big Ruler, with a capital “R” so that on the one hand the man has been given some rights and some wrongs, a set of principles. And yet on the other hand he is responsible to higher authority. He can’t just run his home autonomously. Now some men try to do that. There’s a lot of men that try to do that; they get on to some idea that they are the boss of the home and to them this means the dictator of the home, and they’re going to push and shove and bully their way around until they supposedly quote “lead” their home. Well, they’re not leading their home, they’re just acting as a dictator, an autonomous one. The way of power in this situation is by reference to the Word and to the Law. The rule of the man must be submissive to the rule of the ruler and the ruler is the law of God.

In our day we have a crisis of role about the man and the home, both the man and the home and the man in marriage. There’s a great deal of debate; it’s no more than a crisis, the same old crisis that began the day Satan fell, and that is, it’s a crisis of who specifies what role. The crisis isn’t that we don’t know what the roles ought to be. We have to assume with Romans 1:18 and following that all men everywhere do in fact know their role. We do know that matriarchal society is wrong; that where women call the shots it is wrong. But we also know from Scripture that men have responsibilities and have a role to play that is defined very carefully and limited carefully in the Scriptures. So we’ll go through some of these and it will be again a night of looking up verse references in the Law, but again this is the only way we can, since the Law is spread out among many different books; I’ll try to confine most of the references as close as possible but this gives you a flavor for how the male is hedged in in the Law. He’s protected and other people are protected, and everything is built to function together.

Now in the first sequences, those of you have studied Womanhood, you remember that in womanhood and the law she illustrated the areas in which the woman is equal to the man and areas in which the woman is under the man. And so we’re going to use her listing tonight to start with, some of the listing, to show you how the Scriptures show the equality and at the same time the submissiveness of the woman. Now careful here, lest you read more into what is said than has been said. In the male/female role it is just like the Trinity of God. We have the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now unless you’re an heretic you can’t deny that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have the same essence. And so therefore the principle of subordination in this kind of a situation does not say that the Son is less than the Father or the Holy Spirit less than the Son. If it does we’re back to Arianism and we’ve really got a problem, and of course we’ve never said that.

Historic Christianity has always maintained the equality of essence of all three members of the Godhead, yet at the same time it is has always held to subordination; a subordination of roles such that the Father is somehow over the Son and the Son is somehow over the Holy Spirit. We do now know how exactly this works out, we just know that in fact subordination and inferiority are not synonyms. Subordination and inferiority are not synonymous terms. They mean two different things.

Let’s look at some of the text. Turn to Exodus 21:28; notice again the language. “If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die; then the ox shall surely be stoned,” now what’s the point. The point there is that the man and the woman are treated equally under the law; it doesn’t make any difference if the guy, the man is worth more and then you do less to the ox or more to the ox than if he gores a woman and she doesn’t count so no sweat, you keep the ox and dump the woman. There’s no inequality like this. Both the male and the female receive equal treatment under the law. This is murder and it proves that the law treats the man and the woman’s life of equal value. There’s no discrimination whatsoever in this. Notice the discrimination, verse 31, extends even to children. [“Whether he have gored a son, or have gored a daughter, according to this judgment shall it be done unto him.”] All right, there’s another reason why in verse 32 there’s a difference, we won’t go into it; I will say at this point it is not discrimination, it’s another reason that enters in.

Another thing, turn to Exodus 35:22, these are just points in the Law where the man and the woman are treated equally. This is giving, and I’ll show you a little implication about this in a moment. In verse 22, “And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing-hearted, and brought bracelets, and earrings, and rings, and necklaces, jewels of gold,” etc. etc. etc. There’s two implication that come out of verse 22 that’s very interesting. One is no one can give properly, no one can give what they do not own and this shows you that the woman had property rights of her own. You cannot give what is not your own; the woman, therefore is assumed under the Law to have control over some of her property to do with it as she wishes, as unto the Lord. And if she wants to give her golden earrings to the Lord at this point, and her husband doesn’t want her to, that’s too bad for him. She has a right as a creature before God to give, in this case to the temple.

All right, in Exodus 35:29 we see the same thing, “The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD had commanded….” Now why is it that this giving, the woman is free to give here on her own, at least what is her own. She is free to do this. Why? Because what is giving but an act of worship. An act of worship cuts across all divine institutions and a person must worship God directly, and therefore since it’s an act of worship it temporarily masks out the difference of the male and the female.

All right, let’s go to another situation. Let’s go to Deuteronomy 13:6, this is more on the negative side, “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend who is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods….” Verse 8, “Thou shalt not consent unto them….” Verse 9, “But you shall surely kill him,” “him” here being both male or female. What’s that saying? That the sin of idolatry is equally offensive to God, whether committed by a male or female. Again God is making no differences between the sexes. They are held equally accountable before God. There is total equal treatment for both sides. We could go on and on and on to cite the situation. The point being that here is your evidence when you get into those discussions with people who think that the Bible prejudices itself against women; there is gob after gob, gobs of tests here that you can cite for your discussion to show that the Mosaic Law treated men and women at this critical point totally equal… totally equal as far as their value is concerned. It’s simply not true, it’s sloppy reading of the Mosaic Law that says that women were trodden under foot.

Other examples of this: spiritism was forbidden to all equally. Restitution against theft was equally required, whether a woman stole $4,000 or a man stole $4,000, God doesn’t care who stole it, what their sex was, they stole it, that’s the point, so do something about it. Uncleanness comes to both sexes, whether it’s in a bodily discharge, unclean food, contact with a corpse, sanitation problems, leprosy, you name it, God doesn’t make any difference between the male and the female in the area of uncleanness. So there again there are the laws that are equally applied to male and female.

But now there is a sexual discrimination in the Law but this is of a certain kind. Let’s turn to Leviticus 27:3-4; here are passages that do discriminate. “And thy estimation [valuation] shall be of the male from twenty … to sixty … fifty shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary. [4] But if it be a female, then thy estimation” or value “shall be thirty shekels.” Now in the context you’ll notice it’s talking about the vows and so on, and it’s estimating the worth as to work, physical work. And so here the physical weakness of the woman is acknowledged. It’s not a discrimination against her moral worth but it surely is recognizing there is a difference between male and female that has been forgotten by certain people in our society. And the Mosaic Law recognizes the difference between male and female.

Let’s turn to Numbers 30, this is part of the passage that I read during the wedding service, when the father comes to give away his daughter. And at that point, just before that happens in the wedding service we read this passage from Numbers, though I do not start with verse 2. In verse 2 it reads, “If a man vow a vow unto the LORD< or sear an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.” That would be the kind of vow that we discussed this morning in the book of Acts. [3] “If a woman also vow a vow unto the LORD, and bind herself by a bond, being in her father’s house in her youth, [4] And her father hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she has bound her soul, and her father shall hold his peace with her, than all her vows shall stand….” Verse 5, “But if her father disallow here in the day that he hears, none of her vows … shall stand.”

Now there you have the woman clearly under the father’s authority to intercept vows. Now that’s a safeguard that’s built into the Mosaic Law for a woman’s protection, oddly enough, and it stems out of the fact, the same kind of thing in 1 Timothy 2; the higher spiritual deceivability of women. And therefore the male is given the authority in this area to direct here. Notice, not in the area of giving, not in the gross moral areas for those are equal between the husband and the wife, but in the area where particular religious services are involved, such as a vow, then the man has authority in his home here, and the reason is because his wife can be deceived, and can be changed. And this case is the father and his daughter, it’s a case here of the daughter not knowing what she is doing and her father recognizes that she doesn’t have any sense so he intercepts. But notice again in verse 2, if it be the boy, he has to hold to it. Now that is a clear cut case of discrimination.

We could go on and cite other cases, which we won’t, but we can go on and cite things like the father is responsible if any idolatry is found in the home, not the woman, it’s very interesting, a man is held responsible. Why? Because time and time and time again there’s one thing that should be clear from this manhood series if nothing else is clear, and that is God places the responsibility for the spiritual welfare of that house on the man. This is why circumcision was invented and why it is administered the way it is, to underscore and emphasize the male role. So these are areas, then, where we can prove that the man has a defined position over against the woman. Now if the man is the spiritual leader, what happens when something happens to the man? Now we’ve had three or four feedback cards now that will be answered. People have written in, what about what happens to the problem, the husband dies, then who assumes the spiritual leadership in that home, or the husband, like many of them do gets tired of his wife and takes off and leaves her, then what happens? What happens to the woman left in such a situation?

There are two passages, famous ones, known for centuries in the book of Numbers. Turn to Numbers 27:1, “Then came the daughters of Zelophehad, the son of Hepher, the son of Gilead,” and it goes on to list the genealogy of this particular set of women because that is crucial to the whole discussion that’s going to happen now. Remember what I said, this is why last week I put property first; this week I put family because if I had done this last week you wouldn’t have caught it. Remember I said that when God set up Israel, He gave a certain capital, that is, a land allotment to every family. And the Mosaic Law was structured so that even under indebtedness that property would revert back every fifty years to the family title. You could not lose your capital, in other words. It was constantly brought back to you by the provisions of the Mosaic Law. Now it might not earn anything but at least the original capital would be brought back.

So we have that provision in the Mosaic Law, so property was rooted to the family. Now watch the situation that’s just happened here. Numbers 27:2, “And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar, the priest, and before the princes and all the congregation by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying,” here’s the case. [3] “Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not in the company of them that gathered themselves together against the LORD [in the company of Korah; but he died in his own sin, and had no sons].” that’s to clear, so there’s clear title to the property; [4] “Why should the name,” he had no sons, so there’s no sons in the family to inherit title; “Why should the name of our father be done away with from among his family, because he has no son? Give unto us a possession among the brethren of our father.” In other words, the property was to remain in that immediate family and not passed to the uncle just because the uncle was a male. These girls had a right to their inheritance, and not even a near male relation.

So the Lord’s answer to this kind of situation is given in the immediate context. Notice, “And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying,” and this is direct revelation, and I would suggest that God is His own best interpreter. “The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of the inheritance among their father’s brethren, and you will cause the inheritance of their father to pass to them.” So in the exception, when the man isn’t there to perform, God sees no problem with the woman taking up the role. [8] “Thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. [9] And if he has no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance to his brethren. [10] And if he has no brethren,” and so on. The important one is verse 9; the property does not pass to the near male heir; it passes to the female immediate heir first. She stands between that and going out of the family, even to an uncle. The woman has been given secondary property rights here.

Implied in the decision of Numbers 27 is the general principle that when the male falls down the woman is authorized by God to pick up the sticks. And example of this would be Deborah. Remember when we went through Judges, Deborah and Barak; “hold my hand, Debbie, I’m afraid.” Remember Barak? And so God sent Deborah up with Barak and he went into battle and then God, to add humiliation, had the enemy clobbered by a woman. He says Barak is going to use women to clobber the enemy, then fine, we’ll have this lady, she’s got a good strong arm, she’s been pounding ten posts for a while, she’ll pound this guy’s skull, and she did, she drove a ten pin through his temples. It’s no mean feat when you know that the human skull is pretty strong. So this woman managed to do her thing.

Now that’s a secondary plan, but please notice that God is not adverse to letting women operate in this situation when there’s no man around. This is what happened, in many, many areas; the men have… I don’t know, tripped out, gone some place, doing something, they’re not around where it counts and they’re not around when it counts and they’re not doing what counts. And so in many cases the women have to take over. BUT, we have to say this, having said all that, that when God passes the property out of the hands of the male heir He has violated His own creation ideal. And whenever you involve a plan B or a marring of original creation design you are going to pay a price somewhere down the line. So the price is paid in Numbers 36, watch what happens.

The problem was that after these girls got their property they were free to go marry someone, and they might look upon some guy in another tribe. And they say that’s fine, I’m from Issachar, I’ll go marry someone from Asher, there are better boys over there anyway, I’ll go over there and date. And she’d go over there and start developing a relationship with one of these boys from Asher and start a marriage out of the tribe. Now God says hold it, this is going to introduce chaos in the system because My whole point in the first place was to keep X amount of capital in the tribe. Now we’ve got this transfer system going on; we can’t have that so hold it. And so that’s Numbers 36; watch.

Numbers 36:1, “The chief fathers of the families of the children of Gilead, [the son of Machir, the son of Manasseh, of the families of the sons of Joseph], came near, and spoke before Moses,” you see Manasseh, the tribe, that was what that genealogical note was doing back in Numbers 27, to clue you to which tribe these women are connected to. So now look what happens. These are the older men of the tribe and they notice what’s happened to these girls. [2] “And they said, The LORD commanded my lord to give the land for an inheritance by lot to the children of Israel; and my lord was commanded by the LORD to give the inheritance of Zelophehad, our brother, unto his daughters. [3] And if they be married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the children of Israel, then shall their inheritance be taken from the inheritance of our fathers, and shall be put into the inheritance of the tribe whereunto they are received; so shall it be taken from the lot of our inheritance.” In other words, chaos is being introduced into the system because of an exception that God made because of another exception. Now watch, God does not permit this chaos to just endlessly cause turbulence and then ruin the system.

[Numbers 36:4,] “When the jubilee of the children of Israel shall be, then shall their inheritance be put to the inheritance of the tribe whereunto they are received; [so shall their inheritance be taken away from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers].” So, decision, verse 5, “And Moses commanded the children of Israel, according to the word of the LORD, saying, The tribe of the sons of Joseph hath said well. [6] This is the thing which the LORD does command concerning the daughters of Zelophehad, saying, Let them marry to whom they think best; only to the family of the tribe of their father shall they marry.” So they said girls, I’m afraid you’re going to have to cut down your dating opportunities to a spectrum that includes only the guys in your tribe. Why? Because I said so, that’s why. And that’s God’s final word on the subject.

God has ordained a creation order; he allows freedom for the woman under emergency contingent situation, but very carefully even those are hedged in. And this is why, in some cases, women are called upon in history to do what ought to be done by a man. But they ought to think of Numbers 36 and say I can’t make this an ideal or a norm or a standard practice; as soon as a man comes in here my job is back out of the situation. I am only a temporary contingent operation. Don’t make it a norm, but yet in Christian work after Christian work after Christian work we find it becoming a norm, that a woman does such and such. Now I can see it happening, for example, if we have nobody to handle the translation problem out in the middle of a tribe, there’s a skilled female linguist, we send her out alone, maybe that’s necessary for a month to finish up what we’re doing. But you don’t make that the norm and the standard. If God isn’t going to provide the men then we’d just better reevaluate our whole operation and just cut it off. And it’s God’s problem, if He hasn’t supplied any men I can’t do any work so let’s turn this thing down, shut it off, rather than perpetuate an abnormality.

So that’s the whole thrust here of the role of the woman and the man. And the husband’s role, then, the male role, over against the female role in the Law is quite clear. The man is ultimately the leader of the family. And everything follows from this, under God’s law of course. Everything follows from this; if he fails the woman can plug in momentarily but then as soon as a replacement comes in, then back down. That’s the principle. Now unfortunately Numbers 27 and 36 give only the fine illustration of inheritance of property. It doesn’t go into the other situations in life and we, as Christians, have to deduce. We have to deduce the principle from this illustration and say okay, here’s the norm and the standard, now what do we do with it in X situation, in Z situation, in Y situation? And that’s where spiritual expertise and the leading of the Holy Spirit is required. But those two passages are critical to show you what you do when you have woman leadership in the wrong places. It’s always a secondary and at best contingent situation. All right, that’s the sum of some passages that show the male versus the female, just vis a vis one another.

Now let’s look more closely at the family institution itself. Let’s turn to Exodus 20:12. One of the key commands of the Law was to honor parents. Paul, in Ephesians 6:2 calls this promise of verse 12 “Honor thy fathers and they mothers that thy days may be long in the land wherein the Lord thy God gives thee.” He calls this a particularly special promise because he says of all the Ten Commandments this is the first one that has a promise attached to it. The promise is very clear, “that the days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God gives thee,” the implication being that if there is not an honoring or parents in the third divine institution that society would collapse. In other words, “the days might be long” in the sense that the society will degenerate to the point where they’re kicked out of the land. And then there’s another application and another way to read it, “honor thy father and thy mother that thy days,” your individual days, “may be long,” because if you don’t inherit the wisdom of your parents you’re going to die early. The ancient world was far more intolerant to fools than our world. Fools met an early death; fools were not rewarded for their foolishness. They were simply killed off or eliminated because they were incompetent. Today we coddle and we protect fools. And so today this promise is violated; you can be dishonorable to your parents and still go ahead and live a long day because somebody else has picked up the tabernacle somewhere along the line.

But the promise basically is a critical one; it is related to an idea the permeates the Law. The idea is that the parents are the guardians and the heirs of life. Peter mentions this in 1 Peter 3, and there is something sacred about the transmission of life, that independently of the personality of the parent, this word “honor” doesn’t mean that there’s to always be a tremendous deep personal relationship. That’s not what the Law is saying; kabad, which is the word here means to give respect to; recognize their position. They may be non-Christian, and you have not to take their advice, if non-Christian and they give you the wrong advice, in which case if it’s them versus the Word you go with the Word. But there is an honoring and the word here means to respect their authority. It’s just like in the service, they have a certain rank on their shoulders and you say “yes Sir” to that rank. That’s the point of honor. You honor them not for their personality, whether you like them or you dislike them, you honor them strictly because of the structure of the third divine institution.

Now this is carried out, in of all places, the treatment of the death of animals. In the Mosaic Law the same condition applies, that the baby animals were not to be killed with their parents. Let’s watch how this works; Exodus 23:19 I believe is the reference, “Thou shall not seethe [boil] a kid in its mother’s milk,” true, this in one case doesn’t prove the death of the mother but it proves the fact that what the mother’s milk was was to nourish, to be a channel of life for that baby animal, and you’ve made what is a channel of life to be a source of death. You’re to respect the parent/child relationship, even among animals.

Turn to Leviticus 22:28, this is a more clear cut reference. See again, it’s not that the animals sit there and condemn the person; it’s just that God trains believers in the way they handle animals, the way they handle property, the way they handle anything. And so in Leviticus 22:28, “Whether it be a cow or a ewe, you shall not kill it and her young both in one day.” Same principle; there is to be a respect. You don’t just slaughter parent and child alike; there’s something about it to be preserved, there’s a delicate thing there, and you could go on to discuss Deuteronomy 22:6-7, it’s the same kind of thing. So the principle of those animal references, it’s not only just humanity to animals but it’s a respect for the life chain. The parent, the child; the parent, the child; the parent, the child. And this plays a heavy role in family and the respect accorded to parents.

It can be seen in another way by the way we look at these divine institutions. Three of those divine institutions, responsibility, marriage and family, are clear on the chart, indicating they are what we call positive divine institutions. That is, they are wealth producing institutions. That is the place where society generates wealth; always has. Individuals generate wealth; families generate wealth; marriages generate wealth. The other institutions were never ordained of God to produce a thing; they all come in after the fall and when you have the ordination of the state, the state doesn’t produce anything. That’s why I used, when I first taught this principle, I used the principle of an herbicide on a farm yard. The first three divine institutions are planting your producing crop; that’s where your wealth is, it’s not in the herbicide. You lay down herbicide from one side of the field to the other; it doesn’t produce a thing. All its job is to do is suppress competition to the production. And that’s the role of government in the Bible. Its role is a negative one; it’s a role, it’s a restraining role against evil. The role of government is to be nothing more than the suppression of things that would destroy the first, the second, and the third divine institution. It is to be a herbicide against all the weeds that would grow up in society to destroy the home. And yet tragically in our day it’s precisely the fourth divine institution that is trying to take over area after area after area and tear down the very institution it was ordained to keep up.

Let’s look a little bit more at what honoring parents mean. Two things can be assumed under honor: first, what a younger child, how he honors his parents and how an older adult honors their parents. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is the passage that shows what is required of a child by way of honoring their parents. “If a man,” and we’ve read this many times but we’ll read it again, repetition won’t hurt, “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken still unto them, [19] Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him to the elders of the city…. [20] And they shall say unto the elders of the city, This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunk. [21] And all the men of the city shall stone him with stones, that he die. So shall you put away evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear,” and you bet “they shall fear.”

That rule, as I mentioned, one night earlier, was part of John Cotton’s 1641 code for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and observers to the 1641 code say that the Puritans never had to exercise that in one court case. All of the Massachusetts Bay Colony heard and feared and there wasn’t one JD among them, if they were doing their thing, boy they weren’t back-talking their parents about it, anyway. They might bump off somebody but then they’d come home and confess it, but they sure weren’t going to get caught on this one, capital punishment for notice again, in verse 18-19, it’s like that excommunication thing we studied on Wednesday night, God doesn’t rake you over the coals for sinning as such. Where He really hits us is after we’ve sinned we still don’t do anything about it. Then that is considered the sin of defiance. And that’s where God really gets tough. So we saw it in excommunication. No one under the principles of the New Testament ought to be excommunicated from a church, no matter how gross the sin is they may have committed. That is never a cause for excommunication. What is the cause of excommunication is that after whatever the gross sin may have been done, that then they weren’t repentant and do something about correcting it, etc. etc. etc. Then excommunication occurs. Technically it is only one sin that excommunicates; the sin of calumny or rebellion, rebellion against the final authority of God’s Word.

And so it is here, the son, the child that is killed in verse 21, is not being killed for some bad thing they did. Now parents often may wish to kill their son for some bad thing they do, but that is not authorized in Scripture. The only death of a child authorized in the Bible is this defiance against… now notice the Law is very clear at the end of verse 18, “when they have chastened.” In other words, the parents have tried a program of severe discipline, and that still hasn’t worked. There’s a long process between the rebellion and the final execution in verse 21. It might have involved the parents going to the local Levites in the village and say, hey, what do you do with a clod like this. And the Levites would go back and they were the repository of wisdom in the community, see, the parents didn’t have a copy of the Bible, the Levite priests did. And so some of them just memorized it, sometimes in the nation Israel there weren’t any texts, as far as we know, and the Levite priests would be the guys down at the city gates and if you had a Bible question you just tapped them on the shoulder and said hey, got a question, and this just blinks and pop out with four hundred verses or something because he’d memorized it. There was your copy of the Scriptures, contemporary translation. Not only that but you had it applied right in the situation for you.

So the parents had gone to the Levites, had tried to get a program of discipline, had tried to work on the problem and the point at the end of verse 18 is that even after they did that they kid still wouldn’t listen to them. And that’s when the boom was lowered. So this is parent’s rights. We’ll come back to this passage in a little bit when we get to children’s rights. But right now you’ll see parents have rights under the Scripture and the rights they have include the right of having obedient children and the children obeying their parents. That is a parent’s right.

Now look, this can be practically applied in many, many different ways. First of all, when a parent knows that he has this right, it goes back to confidence. If you know that you have this right to expect obedience on the part of your children you’ll expect it. But if you listen to these nitwits that are involved in a lot of this family counseling stuff they’ll get you so confused you don’t know what rights you do have; you wind up totally confused and you have no concept of what happens. The little brat comes up and spits at you, oh Johnnie, I see you got a problem here… well, the point is that in the Mosaic Law we have standards and the parent knows these standards.

Another thing, if there’s a particularly vexing problem and we don’t know now to go, some problems you don’t, what do you do, you’ve tried everything, gone through Proverbs, did this, did that, nothing else worked, this gives you a lever to go to God in prayer with because now you can sit there, now Father, You give me the right as a parent to expect obedience of this child, now I don’t know and I’m confused how to do this right now but I demand from You help and wisdom on the basis of this point, that it’s my right as a parent; You’ve given me this child and therefore I demand You give me enough wisdom to take care of this child. And I have a right to come to the throne of grace and make that petition. So use this as kind of a handle on prayer petitions.

All right, the other thing that is involved in “honoring,” is illustrated numerous times throughout the Old Testament, is also mentioned in 1 Tim 5:8 and that is the principle that children are to provide for parents in old age. Children are to provide for parents in old age! So younger children—obedient; older children, welfare. Now look, again at the third divine institution. By the way, a generation ago this happened in this country. This was happening in this country. I can remember my father, my father died with about a dollar in the bank because he had to pay medical bills of my grandparents. I know how that went. I had many years experience with that kind of situation. But families used to take care of their own because there was no body else out there to take care of them. Now we say, oh, the government will take care of them. Well, besides the fact that that in itself is a questionable item, the point remains what is right. Whenever the State assumes the position of caring for older people, it has usurped the design of God and the family. Now it’s impossible, almost, to provide for your parents on your own because you have to pay so high taxes. See, before the deal was you didn’t have to pay so high taxes, you could save some of that money and invest it and then it would be around when your parents were older, but now the government rips off the money and squanders it all over the place in the bureaucracy, so you don’t have the money available, so now it’s effectively killed the whole thing. Very few people can lay aside enough money to take care of their older people; that’s why we get one thing leads to another.

Well, when the state has come into the situation it has replaced the children of the home. Now here’s a paradox; the State educates the child, as the parents ought to; now the State takes care of the parents as the children ought to, and we have a remarkable phenomenon in our day; the State has become both child and parent; simultaneously it’s performing both roles and most people sit and clap and vote for it to do it more. We’ve essentially broke the back of the third divine institution.

Another little footnote about this honoring older parents; if you will notice in the Scriptures, generally speaking, with some exception, generally speaking it is the male heir with whom the patriarch rests. For example, Abraham in his old age with whom does he live? Ishmael or Isaac? He lives with Isaac. When Isaac gets in old age, who does he live with, Esau or Jacob? He lives with Jacob. So you see, there’s another reason why the firstborn son received double inheritance. The firstborn son’s double inheritance would be the thing that would sustain his parents, he had the responsibility of investing that double inheritance such that it would be around and productive and fruitful for his parents when they got older. You see, the Bible is internally consistent in all of this. There’s a grand design behind it all and when we tamper with that design, we just wreck the whole thing.

All right, those are parent rights, the parents have a clear cut right, a father has a clear cut right to expect obedience and in his old age to expect some sustenance. Now today we’ve jammed and crammed the thing so children often do not have opportunity to provide for their parents. And by the way, this is also the blessing of a large family; it takes the economic load off the children in an old age for the parents. So this is again the reason why God says “be fruitful and multiply.” See, there’s reasons why these things are there.

But now let’s look at the children’s rights. Let’s look at Deuteronomy 21:15, see this is man under God’s law and it means everyone is under God’s law, even the parents. So although the children have to toe the line before God, so do the parents. The parents do not have unconditional authority over children. Their own will is limited by God’s will. Children are a gift and we as parents have to treat them as a gift from God. Verse 15, “If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated wife, and if the first-born son be hers that was hated, [16] Then it shall be, when he makes his sons to inherit that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved first-born before the son of the hated,” you see the child, he can’t help it because his mother and father don’t get along. Why does he bear the brunt of it then? God says no, you don’t perpetuate family feuds into the next generation.

Now how under heaven we’re going to take the principle of verses 15-16 and apply it to what we’ve got today in our society, with sometimes three, four, five divorces, everything screwed up, who does this kid belong to? I don’t know, can’t even tell what his last name is. And you see, we pay a price. Now this kid can be ripped off. The kid has lost his own rights before God because of the total chaos among his parents, whoever they may be. But God originally had protected it, so that the child who couldn’t help it if his parents didn’t get along, would not be faked out in his generation. He would receive his inheritance; very businesslike way here. Verse 17, “But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the first-born, by giving him a double portion of all that he has; for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the first-born is his and it shall not be abrogated. You see, the woman and the husband in this situation do not… repeat, do not have final authority over their own children. God has, and under this parents have to operate. Parents have authority but they don’t have absolute authority. It’s like that ownership; we don’t have ultimate ownership we have derivative ownership and as parents we have derivative parenthood, not absolute parenthood.

Let’s look further; even in the passage in Deuteronomy 21:8-21, this passage about the stoning, do you notice something interesting. The point is that the parents couldn’t kill the kid; that was the job of the State. The parents do not have the right to take the life of their child. This, by the way, would be an interesting argument in the current abortion controversy. Here is a passage in the Law which teaches that parent cannot take the life of their children; that is not theirs to do because again, their right over their children is not an absolute one. There are other things which demonstrate this. In Deuteronomy 23:17 there’s a little notice about daughters. We have to get a little cultural background to appreciate it but it’s teaching exactly the same truth that we’re talking about, namely that parents do not have unlimited rights over their children. Now in the ancient world when parents slipped into poverty, and there was a desperate need to raise capital, as there is in recent days I understand that in the 20^th century in Japan there was a situation like this, where daughters would be sold off to houses of prostitution and the money that the daughter would make in the house of prostitution would then go to her father so that that family could survive, and many families could only survive this way, they thought, by selling their daughters into prostitution.

Thus, the restriction in Deuteronomy 23:17, “The shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.” This must be compared with other passages, such as Leviticus 19:29-30 to get the full import of what it’s saying. Besides the restriction against illegal religion, this passage is forbidding the parents to sell off their children as white slaves. A child cannot be sold as a slave. It’s forbidden, because again, the parent doesn’t own the child.

In the New Testament, if you come forward to Ephesians 6, the central passage on fathers, you’ll now see remnants of the Law peaking through the text of the New Testament. See, this is why it’s always good to go back, even though it takes you more time and it’s more bother and it requires more effort, it’s always better for you to study the Old Testament, then come to the New, and sure enough you’ll see pieces of the Old Testament cropping up in the New Testament text. Now, you see, in Ephesians 6:4, here is an application of the principles of the Mosaic Law. “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Now “bring them up in the nurture and admonition,” the word “nurture” there is physical chastening, and activities, positive also, and “admonition,” this would be in the case of verbal counseling.

So there’s both the physical and the word, sitting down and explaining something and demonstrating it, or spanking and chewing out—positive or negative, the two sides. But notice, it introduces in verse 4 something that every man has a problem with, I’m sure, in his home, is frustration and blowing his stack in the Marine sergeant manner with his children. And what does it say? “Provoke not your children to wrath.” It quickly qualifies it to say you don’t have to be a doormat to them, but notice, it is not addressed to the mothers in verse 4, it’s addressed to the father and the reason is because the fathers most likely are the ones to blow their stack when there’s disobedience around. [can’t understand words] So Paul knew this and therefore he addresses it directly to the father. That context, particularly the first part of Ephesians 4:6, comes right out of the spirit of the Mosaic Law. You see, the New Testament isn’t that new, it’s just a convenient capsulization of the spirit of the Old Testament.

We need not, of course, belabor the point that one of the main things of the father is to see that his children are educated. And to see, in conclusion, that they know the Word of God. Lest you think that family training program and a few other things are undue burdens, let’s go back in history a little bit and read a little instance of what some children received in the home by way of training. It just is amazing to think people did this. We do have some data on the child’s nature in Montaigne’s time. “The life of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, Huguenot, friend of Henry IV, born in 1550.” By the way, the d'Aubigné, family was a very well known family in European history. “Montaigne was born in 1533 so he had reached the age of discretion when d’Aubigné was still a child. Observing young contemporaries of Mr. d’Aubigné Montaigne did not notice anything about maturation. Of d’Aubigné it is told that he read Greek, Latin and Hebrew when he was six years old, that he translated Plato into French when he was not yet eight. Plato, Montaigne, recommended the reading and explaining of philosophic discourses,” philosophic discourses, “to children. Well, if an eight year old child can translate Plato, what objections can there be to reading a translated version to him when he’s four. When d’Aubigné was still eight he went through the town of [can’t understand word] accompanied by his father just after a group of Huguenots had been executed. He saw the decapitated bodies and at the request of his father he swore an oath to avenge them. Two years later he was captured by the inquisitors. The ten year old boy’s reaction to the threat of death at the stake was a dance of joy before the fire. The horror of the mass took away his fear of the fire which was his own later comment, as if a ten year old child could know what is meant by that. And yet a child who has translated Plato and who has been used to reading classic for four years, could not such a child know what he wants, and know what he is doing? But such can be hardly called a child. A person who observes the effects of an execution intelligently, who swears an oath to which he remains true through life, who realizes for himself the true biblical interpretation of holy communion, and who fathoms the horror of death at the stake is not longer a child; he is a man.”

His point isn’t being that every child be brought up that way; his point is only that look what a child is capable of doing.

In conclusion, then, we have seen the Law telling the male believer how to do things as unto the Lord. You know that phrase is glibly used; hopefully now the study of the Mosaic Law has given content to what it means to say, do things as unto the Lord. Some of you might be interested innovative little things to do with children, I have left on the communion table some games that have been designed, nothing new but there are just some that are interesting if you haven’t seen these kind, on teaching children, through the use of games, how to think. There’s a number of games, one of the games is modern set theory, and teaching children as low as kindergarten to use a disjunctive, the various language of set theory, to show them that, in fact, you can perform the various operations, set differences, disjunctions, and you can combine, you can have the union of two sets, the intersection of two sets, and these small children can gather very, very quickly. And this is important because set theory basically forms the whole logic structure behind mathematics.

Another game is a game of logic, and that is to teach children how to use syllogisms in their thinking so they can start out with a proposition and infer other propositions from that proposition. And to watch how they can reverse the proposition, negate the conclusion and it will infer the negative of the premise. These sorts of thinking that are common in ordinary language and so on, that we don’t normally think about, but it’s an exercise in thought. The games are graduated, you start the child off very, very slow with very simple ones; it goes up twenty-one levels until it gets up… I haven’t worked with it that much but I’m told it goes up to twenty-one levels, to the point where it becomes more difficult than a good game of chess. So it just constrains the child to just see how far he can go, all the while he’s playing a game and enjoying himself. So here’s some experiments that people are developing to try to increase our ability to think.