Clough Proverbs Lesson 73

DI #3: Principles in Biblical Training II

…in the home, but Isaiah 45:9-10 is the answer to that question because in that passage the affront isn’t to the parents. Isaiah 45:10 says when a child says I didn’t ask to be born, that’s not the issue; God says decree that he was to be born and so when the child says I didn’t ask to be born he is defying, no his parents, he’s defying the sovereign Creator who made him. It’s an issue between him and God and certainly Isaiah 45:9-10 is the answer to that situation.

The last question concerning family is this: You always put such importance on the father’s approval based on Scripture. But if a child has no father or has no father’s love or approval, then what is the answer for him or her? Is there a counter aid for this situation? Don’t you feel that putting such high importance on a father’s approval leaves a fatherless child with less importance for the approval of his mother alone? Now when you’re dealing with a fatherless child, let’s put the problem in perspective. God’s institution of marriage is made ideally before the fall. With the fall you have three things that happen; you have sin, you have death and you have divorce. Now in a fallen universe and in a fallen world families do occur where there is no father for that child. But God refuses to model and pattern His norms over the exceptions and damage situations. The norms that control a family and the norms that control a marriage are built from Genesis 2 before the fall, not afterwards. Grace tries to repair the damage done by the fall. But let’s get one thing straight, that when Scripture depicts all these institutions, the first three, we are never to design our picture over the exceptions to the rule. Now in the case of the fatherless child, that is the case where God in His grace would have to make up and take up the slack. I believe the local church can do a lot about this and I hope that as time goes on and we have enough men who would come forward in the church who would assume responsibility in various areas we’d have courses of action that as a congregation we can take in these cases, biblically and scripturally, and one of these is for children who live in a fatherless situation to be taken out in various social situations with families where there is a strong father that thinks biblically so that the child can get used to seeing a father in action, so to speak. But we can’t do all these things are very nice to think about and it would be nice if the congregation did these but we can’t get off the ground with them until we have a leadership structure in the congregation, which here we don’t have yet.

I just add this to the answer to this question and that is that oftentimes we have the same thing come up when we instituted the family training literature and I point this out to you because it was the same kind of mentality; watch how easy it is to fall into it. When we initiated this idea to teach the parents and have the parents teach the children during the week; fine idea based on Deuteronomy 6, but no sooner had we started this but then I began to get people coming to me and saying yes, but what do you do with the children who don’t have Christians parents who won’t work with them, with the implication being that we should design the program for the exception, and I refuse to design the program for the exception. God’s program is to be designed when there is a mother and father there who are Christians who will turn to the (?) and we designed the programs to fit the normal biblical pattern and then we, as God supplies, we try to take up the slack for the exception, but let’s not design programs for the exception. And the tendency in our society is always to design the programs for the exception.

Now why do we do this? Any time you have a school system or a church or a factory or a business that is designing their program or business for the exception, you’re having people who are unbiblical in their thinking, people who are saying the fall never occurred and therefore we accept as normal the universe as it now is. And as Christians it’s part of our testimony to the infallible Word of God and a literal fall that our programs are designed on the normal basis, not the abnormal basis. We design our programs to fit the normal family, not the abnormal family, and the abnormal situations must be taken care of as God provides. They say I’m hard-hearted but that is the only way I think we can be biblically sound and biblically true, is that if we don’t bear testimony to what is normal, then how can society tell what is normal.

Let’s turn to Proverbs and continue our study; Proverbs 10; we’re into the third divine institution, in particular we’re dealing with the four principles of biblical training. We have studied certain parts of the family; we have studied, for example, the biblical admonition or the biblical criteria of family success. The biblical criteria of family success is that we measure the success of the family by the character of its children. And we then moved on last time to the principles that can be used in a family situation for training. And Proverbs tells us that one of the first principles that must be observed in all training and by the way, this holds to any kind of training. Those of you who are in school, school teachers and so on, this principle holds to you just as well as it does the family, and that is there must be a positive volition toward God; there must be what we will call submission, or as we put it last time, humility before God. That has to be there. All learning cannot be justified on any other grounds than a literal Genesis.

Very, very foolish indeed is the person who says I’ll ship my kids off to school so they can get their degrees but we mustn’t let them be exposed to too much Bible, they become religious fanatics. Now it just so happens that as pastor of a congregation that’s largely made up of college student, it never fails, every semester I have some parent gripe that we’re turning their children into religious fanatics. Translated, what that means is that the child knows about two more paragraphs of the Bible than the parents. But nevertheless, this happens and it’s very tragic indeed that these parents place more emphasis on the college degree than they do on spiritual things their children are learning. Those of us who have worked in evangelism on the campus can easily say this, that it is far less dangerous for a boy to come home on drugs or a girl to come home pregnant than it is for either of them to come home to some homes as Christians living biblically consistent lives. That is a far greater threat and receives a far greater retaliation in the home than either drugs or sex or something else. Now why is that? Because in various situations people feel threatened when their children are now submitting to THE authority, and there’s nothing they can do about this so it’s a big threat. But children, when they learn to submit to the Word of God are on their way to training. Now the second corollary to this is that within the home, as minors, the children are to be submissive to God’s trainers, which are parents, excluding the problem, of course, when the parent tells and directs the children to do something absolutely and totally contrary to the Word of God. But those cases are rare where things can’t be worked out.

Today we come to the third principle and this and the fourth principle are interesting points about growing up in a family situation and particularly for older children, teenagers. Both the third and fourth principles have to do with what happens in the teenage years. The third principle has to do with a very interesting concept from Proverbs in that wisdom in a child’s life will produce more wisdom, but folly will produce more folly, and obviously the principle leaves you adrift because you say well that’s great, it’s like going out for a job and they want experience. Everybody wants so and so to have experience, well where do you go to get the experience that you need to get the job. It looks like we have the same thing here; where does the child go to get the wisdom that he needs to get the wisdom? Or, once he gets the folly, then how does he get rid of it. Let’s look at some of these verses and see if the Bible gives us the answer, then we’ll go on to a fourth principle that has to do with corporal punishment in the home.

Proverbs 10:8, “The wise in heart will receive commandments, but a prating fool shall fall.” Now “the wise in heart,” chakam it comes from chokmah, same word, this is an adjective, and it means the child has already grown up enough to get some patterns of obedience. This is talking about a child now and he’s in the middle of a situation and his response to the situation is controlled by two things, beginning to be controlled by two things. He’s obviously not a fully mature person because he’s still in the process of learning in the context of this chapter. But the situation faces shows that the child has picked up some +R learned behavior patterns, that means his parents have been faithful and the child has learned by osmosis or some way, at least how to respond to situations somewhat biblically. And the child is already beginning to develop a divine viewpoint framework. I’m very pleased to see how some of the young children in our family training program are picking up not just the Scriptures, but they’re picking up the ability to think with the Scriptures, a very potent tool, if it’s used once in a while. And when we have a child in the middle of a situation who has some divine viewpoint framework and has some +R learned behavior patterns, godliness, then we have the chakam child.

Now this principle begins with the child already having some wisdom in his heart, and then it says, this child with wisdom in his heart “will receive commandments,” or will take commands literally. We would translate it very easily in our vernacular by saying this child can take orders. Now it’s talking about an older child, he’s still a minor but he has grown up to the point where now as a teenager he can take orders. Now that without pride getting in the way. And that is the sign of more maturity and is the assurance Proverbs gives that that child, he’s grown up, say now he’s at 16, he’s growing up and by this age, by this point in his life he has developed already the idea of submission to authority. Since he has developed submission to authority now his life will start increasing in its rate of learning. The principle here is that this accelerates. Once this basic pattern established in the early years of submission to authority is learned, then learning can accelerate very rapidly.

“The wise in heart continually take commandments, but a prating fool shall fall.” Now the prating fool is the child who has already attained a certain age; we’ll just say arbitrarily twelve or fifteen, he has already lived that long and has picked up human viewpoint, he has picked up –R learned behavior patterns, he had neither when he was born but now he has them. So the fool is a sign that this child has lived for some time, it’s not the word used of a young child, this is an older child who has already had ingrained into him foolishness. Now the word “prating” is a translation in the King James from the Hebrew expression, “he is a fool of lips,” meaning that he has rejected the Word of God, he is against all authority and he’s back-talking. This is the concept of back-talk the “fool of lips.” And the Bible is even more forcible in the original in the King James, not just he “shall fall,” “the fool of lips shall be thrown down. It’s a wrestling term, he shall be thrown down.

Now you see what happens usually is a child gets back-talking and if he has some timid parents his parents will let this occur. Last week we dealt with two kinds of children; we dealt with what we call the ltz, which is a person who is older, who is already ingrained with him this antiauthoritarian attitude, and then we dealt with the peti which is the younger child who hasn’t developed any of these bad habits. And do you remember what the Bible tells the parents to do? If you have a child that’s the ltz, and he doesn’t obey you, and you know ahead of time that no amount of discipline that you apply is going to make a particle of difference to this ltz, the Bible says you go ahead anyway, for the sake of the peti in the family. You have two children, one is a ltz, one is a peti, a peti is a child who does not yet know right from wrong, he’s growing up, he’s immature, he hasn’t had a chance to go either way. The ltz has already gone one way, he’s older, but you apply your discipline consistently to the ltz even though by this time it is not going to do any good because in the time you do that you are bearing testimony to consistency to the peti; the peti learns from your discipline of the ltz, even though the ltz doesn’t.

Now here we have one of these ltz, and the point is that he shall be cast down, probably not by his parents. The casting down will occur some time later on in his life. It can be through many, many ways, some can be very, very sorrowful. The ltz can be cast down by, say going into the service and trying to buck some D.I. even though Congress investigates regularly there still are extracurricular activities that go on in certain military training and there are ways that ingenious sergeants have of handling this kind of person. And this is where ltz can be cut down but ltz can be cut down even a more, to my way a more tragic way, and much more suffering way, and that is by mental illness, psychological disturbance. Many, many college students are in this category because they are ltz; they have never learned to submit to authority. But the concept of instant obedience is completely out the window. Instant obedience, are you crazy man, we don’t instantly obey anybody, when ironically at that very moment they say they are instantly obeying their sin nature. But the lack of instant obedience will cause the ltz much, much sorrow in life, always trying to buck the system and so on and his mind has not been made for this, and these people are the ones that jump off the towers and so forth. This is the concept.

Now let’s look at another passage in Proverbs that deals with the same principle, Proverbs 10:17, same concept, “He is in the way of life that keeps instruction,” now the word “keeps instruction” is shamar, except it’s the Hebrew participle, shomer, and this means he constantly holds on, it’s the concept that it’s his but he holds onto it. He constantly holds onto it, this is a participle meaning this is his nature, this has become habit with him, to hold onto it. Hold onto what? The word says in the King James to hold onto his “instruction,” but in the Hebrew it’s stronger than that, it’s our old friend musar, musar if you want a vivid picture is what God did to the Jews for forty years in the desert. Would you say that was gentle training that He gave them, eating sand for forty years. The Jews know what it is to wander around Sinai; they had lots of training; musar. Musar would be like military training today; that’s musar, so the musar that is held onto in verse 17 is the instruction, in this case, of the parents which consists of number one, verbal advice, and number two, as we’re going to see today, corporal punishment. It includes other things also. But “He that is in the way of life,” that is the child who is growing up with his life molded on biblical principles, is one that holds onto musar.

Now what does it mean to hold on to this kind of a training, it’s not like you can take notes and hold onto the notes; what does it mean hold onto musar. Again, we would translate it he sticks it out. In other words, as he grows older the tendency is to think himself wiser than his parents are and therefore now that he has reached the grand age of 16 dad is a clod, everybody in this community knows more than my father, how did I ever get stuck with this thing; that attitude. And then of course by 25 it switches the other way around. But at 16, at that point it’s different and at 16 he thinks he knows it all. Now that’s the principle of the person who doesn’t keep instruction, he doesn’t stick to the program of his parents, in other words, like Jesus did in Luke 2.

But then it says, “he that refuses,” again it’s a Hebrew participle, it’s the word for forsake or leave the road, “he that constantly leaves the road,” again participle referring to inbred habitual character, “he that constantly refuses reproof,” now the word “reproof” is verbal instruction. Now look at something very interesting about this verse. Here’s the kid on positive volition; he’s a teenager, he has grown up and the issue with his positive volition is whether or not he’s going to stick to the tough part, musar; that’s the word used for him. In other words, he shows his maturity by sticking to it all, even the tough stuff, even when his parents may be wrong like Jesus’ parents were in Luke 2 but Jesus Christ still remained under their authority, musar. But then notice the negative volition in the last part of the verse, “he that refuses” what? musar? No, this is the word for just the word of advice, verbal counsel, that’s all it is, verbal advice. So his negative volition shows up very quickly and he hasn’t even graduated to musar; we know that he objects to musar, the proverb (?) would say, we know that, he shows his negative volition all the time, but this guy, he can’t even hold the verbal advice, you tell him something and he still won’t listen to you. So not only does he reject musar but he rejects all advice, and it’s part of his nature and part of his character to do so, and the Bible simply warns that children brought up this way are headed for catastrophe.

Proverbs 14:6, here’s one of the effects all this has after the teenager leaves the family. Now every once in a while when we’re on passages like this people say gee, why do you keep talking about me, or you just hit something that’s very close. Honestly, I do not run a G-2 system and I do not know what is going on, all I do is I just teach what I see in the Word of God and it just happens to fit, and if it fits, wear it, but I do not spy on you, when I do give illustrations from counseling I disguise them so you’re not going to guess who it is or the exact situation, so believe me, you can rest, relax, I am not looking over your shoulder to find out who you are, maybe the Holy Spirit is but I’m not.

Proverbs 14;6, “A scorner seeks wisdom,” now that’s the ltz, and here is the ltz after he’s left his parents, probably, we can guess, the ltz again being a child who’s developed a rebellious attitude, who will not submit to any kind of authority and now he goes out, and he realizes, say, I’m going to have to make a living sometime here and I’m going to have to pick up some skills because I can’t be hired just because I have long hair and walk around with B.O. People are not going to hire me and now I need some advice. So here’s the ltz who finally comes to the point in his life of seeking wisdom. But what is it? And it says in the King James, “he finds it not,” in the Hebrew it’s more strong here, the Hebrew just says “and there is none.” Now what has happened? Why is it that the ltz, after all these years finally you would think when he seeks wisdom, practical things, remember wisdom here in the Bible means practical every day wisdom, chokmah, smart in the details of life, he can’t find them. That is one of the judgments of God upon a rebellious person living in His universe. There is no such thing as common sense to a person who is a ltz according to the Bible, because they have rebelled and rebelled and rebelled and rebelled against their parents. You say well that was just they had bad parents. Huh-un, any person who is a habitual rebel against their parents is a habitual rebel against God; therefore he is rebelling against the way the universe has been made. And therefore he lacks common sense and will never find it. This is a simple fact statement that the scorner may seek wisdom and seek it and seek it and seek it and seek it and there’s none for him.

“…but knowledge is easy unto him that understands,” the word “to him that understands” is the one who understands with his conscience. It’s one who discerns, knowledge comes easy. Now that, remember we said the accomplishment of the family, here’s the kid out of the family, say at 20, and he’s on his own, now the payoff, the person who has responded to his conscience is now going to find they can pick up things fast. Why? Because they submit to the authority of whoever it is doing the teaching. They are the kind of person that says well, I may not be able to stand this kind of person, I may not personally like my boss, I may not personally like my professor but I know one thing, truth is truth and I’m going to learn it and I’m going to do my best as unto the Lord, period, whether I like the personality or not. So that’s the concept of the mature kind and then the ltz, of course, he can’t find anything.

Proverbs 14:15, “The simple,” this is another aspect of the child raising again, going back to wisdom, except this goes back to the pre-teenage years. Now there’s a word used in the Bible for this, it’s called peti; peti is the child who is what we call naïve; he is not bad. You might get the idea looking at this that he’s bad; peti doesn’t mean that, it’s amoral; it just simply means he’s naïve. After peti you go in two ways, you go with folly, the ltz, or the k^esil, or you go with wisdom and understanding. That’s the way the picture looks connecting all these words together here.

Now let’s look at what the words say in verse 15, “The simple,” the peti, “believes every word,” now the Bible doesn’t condemn this at this point. I’ll show you a verse in a minute that proves it. The Bible does not condemn this kind of thing. “The simple believes every word,” why? Because he is still in a position of what we will call naïve obedience. He is in a position where someone in authority says something and he accepts it. That, by itself, is not wrong. Let’s look at the whole verse, then we’ll go back and set it in the framework because I know a lot of you question about why this occurs this way. “The prudent man looks well to his going,” now the “prudent man” is down here, he has the wise man, he has passed through a maturing process so he does not believe everything, he submits and can distinguish between true and false authorities. And so this verse is giving you what is happening here, is that as a child grows it’s not the issue that he is developing freedom of thought.

Now here’s where it’s going to hurt, but here’s where divine viewpoint and human viewpoint are going to come into collision and some of you are going to have to decide with your human viewpoint theories of education. The Bible does not say the issue in the developing child is freedom of thought. What the Bible does say is that the child becomes discerning of thought, he is not more free to think anything when he’s older than he is when he’s younger. It is that he discerns truth from error, conscience is the development, not the mind. Human viewpoint always insists that we develop the mind; the Bible insists no, we develop the conscience.

And the modern theories of education say the kid has a mind here that’s got some stuff in it, from home, say, filled up with this stuff from home, so we’ll start Head Start programs and all the rest of it so we can get the kids out from under the parents at age 3 and 4 and we don’t care, the parents don’t care anyway, they’re glad to get rid of them, so here the kid comes and we’ll take that kid out of the home at age 3 and 4 so we can begin to destroy what his parents have put in his mind because we want to go back like John Locke to the concept of tabula rosa, the blank mind. Then when we destroy the effect of the home in the child’s mind, then we, the public educators, the priests of human viewpoint will not imbed within that child’s mind the truth, and we define the truth, but it will be our program that dominates his thinking and one axiom of our program is (quote) “freedom of thought,” translated biblically that means autonomous thought, think without any authority. And we are going to sell the American public and the children that there is such a thing as freedom of thought. The Bible says there is not such a thing as freedom of thought. But the educators, oh yes there is, you’re free to think anything.

The Bible says no you’re not free to think anything. Why? It goes back to the fall; let’s trace the effect of the fall on the mind to understand why the bible says this. Here is the mind before the fall. Before the fall, what was man’s mind? Free, or was it in submission? It was in submission to God, absolute 100% submission to God. But was the mind cramped? No, do you get the idea that Adam was uncreative when he named the… conducted his zoological expedition and named all the animals? Was Adam, do you ever get the sense that he was cramped and couldn’t name? No, this man was powerfully creative. Why was the man who was most submissive to God in his mind the most creative thinker? It’s simple, if you’re submissive to God and God made the universe, your mind operates in a way that fits the way the universe really is, and therefore you become more creative. Now after the fall we have negative volition; after the fall man doesn’t want to submit his mind any longer to God and so he says I will investigate. But when he says I will investigate he deals immediately with his limitations. And he’s in a box and he’s trapped, and the autonomous mind cannot break out of its own limitations, so the autonomous mind tries to erect all sorts of standards, the good up here. Now what’s “the good,” it doesn’t mean a thing, just a product of man’s mind.

So, in a nutshell this is what the Bible’s saying; there is no such thing as freedom of thought ever; there is either submission to God’s authority or submission to man’s authority but you’re always submitting to authority and don’t think you’re not. Examples: why, as one student said in a philosophy class where I gave a seminary recently, why, he said, you Christians with your Bibles, it stops you from thinking. My reply to him was I think only on the Bible can I think one thought at all; apart from Scripture no thought is possible on any subject whatsoever. Why? Because I’m not sure that the universe fits what my mind was made to do; that is an axiom that only comes from the Bible. The unbeliever says I am free to think about all the religions of the world, not just get myself trapped into one religion, I can get freer to look at them all. But do you know what he has done? He has said, in effect, that Christian must be wrong and because Christianity is wrong the other religions merit attention. Is that man free to think at all? No, he is already dogmatically submitting himself to the man’s conviction that the God of the Bible does not exist and because the God of the Bible says He exists, therefore other religions might be true. But he already submitted himself to an axiom; he’s already bowed his knee before an authority.

Don’t buy the line that there is freedom of thought; there is no freedom of though, period, and public educators that constantly sell the public on freedom of thought have produced one of the most unthinking generations that has ever arisen in this country and if you don’t believe me, so a little experiment. Go down to the library, take off the shelf anything you want to, written say before 1800, take off the shelf The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, take off the shelf The United States Constitution, take off the shelf some of the minutes of the Constitutional Convention; take off the shelf some of the great Puritan writings and then come home and take your college history book and compare them. You tell me who does the most thinking. What has millions of dollars… millions of dollars, you just walk down here to the Citizen’s Bank Building, do you ever go down in the basement of the Citizen’s Bank Building? Do you know what’s down there? A multimillion dollar audiovisual center, they’ve got movies on how to brush your teeth, all the way on up how to do anything; millions of dollars poured into that thing and what has it produced? Look at the history experiment; just do it. The men like Alexander Hamilton and the tracts that were circulating, remember, The Federalist Papers were written by American colonial citizens; don’t argue that oh well, Alexander Hamilton was unusual for his day; he was not. The Federalist Papers were meant to be read by the average citizen. Could the average citizen today read The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton? You tell me whether public education on (quote) “neutral” (end quote) grounds has really produced thoughtful intellect.

All right, the Bible denies the whole principle. It goes back to the fact that the problem with it is that you develop the conscience first, then the conscience develops the mind. Because the conscience, not the mind, is the source of the (?) of thought, which is the framework. The conscience provides the mind with the framework and if you don’t develop conscience first and mind second, you don’t develop the mind, you put it to sleep. It’s what I feel is true, not what is true.

Now how has all this training; so far we’ve dealt with the third principle of training and the fact that wisdom brings wisdom and folly breeds folly. Fine, but what are some of the tools that were used and are recommend in Scripture. For a real eye opener if you’re not yet offended by the biblical concept of education let’s turn back and look at some of the tools that were used.

Proverbs 13:24, just what every education course needs. And don’t let some person who teaches education, such as in our local university, tell you as they have told some of you that well, the book of Proverbs was written for its time. That itself is a religious position that has just been asserted; if the book of Proverbs is a book written “just” for it’s time, what you’re saying in effect is that the God of the Bible does not exist, and I know that, and I can pronounce that my word is superior to God’s Word, and I have decreed by my own finite mind that God’s Word and His instructions are not absolute, I have the right to change God’s absolutes, I am the authority, not God. That is a very religious position, in case you haven’t caught the point.

Proverbs 13:24, “He that spares his rod hates his son; but he that loves him chastens him” as it says in the King James betimes [early].” Now we’ll explain what “betimes” means but first let’s look at the first part. “He that spares his rod hates his son.” The word “hates” has a very definite theological point here, “hate” means… the opposite is love, let’s define love here and we’ll get it. What is love biblically, a good definition of it, the best definition I ever heard was given at Dallas Seminary by Dr. Ryrie when he said love, biblically is wanting God’s will for someone more than anything else. Now if you’ll just remember that is the definition of love it will steer you away from all the subjective emotionalism that is attached to that word. If you hate someone you could care less for God’s will for their life. So you see, if you define it this way, you see what it does; maybe some things you thought was love weren’t love at all, they were actually hate biblically. Because maybe you thought that it would be an act of love to stand by and let someone work with human viewpoint unwarned about the dire consequences; maybe you thought it was an act of hate for the missionary to go into the Indian tribe and (quote) “straighten them out” (end quote). What right, does the anthropologist say, of a missionary to go in and bust up the Indian culture? Every right in the world because the Indian culture is apostate and needs busting up just like American culture is apostate and needs busting up. It’s an act of love to destroy culture; it’s an act of love because you treat God’s Word above all other things, including the sentimentalities that go along with this particular culture, whatever it is.

Now “he that hates his son,” is a father or a mother who could care less for God’s will for their child. And some ways this might be expressed, well, I can’t take the time right now to get involved in all that biblical training bit; that is an attitude of hate toward the child, you don’t care whether the child learns the biblical framework or not; be it honest, that’s the way it is, you don’t care, and call it by its right name. It takes, according to the Bible, effort and time to not spare the rod. This is not some dictator walking in and knocking the kids off the wall, so let me assure you that’s not what’s taught here. To have a sound, consistent, day in, day out, week in, week out, constant attack against learned behavior patterns and molding them requires the most effort any parent can put out. It requires more effort than [can’t understand phrase] put out; it’s only by grace that you can do this at all. And a parent who is lazy, who could care less for their kid, doesn’t take the time to find out what, for example, they’re learning in school and could care less what they’re learning in school, it doesn’t matter about the public programs of taking the kid out of the home early; glad to get rid of them early, that attitude. “He that spares his rod hates the son.” The rod, by the way, there’s nothing allegorical about it, it’s a literal rod, and it’s applied you know where. Just the place that God made for it; God has a special design for the human body; in one place there’s lots of padding and you can get hit pretty hard and it won’t severely damage you and that is the place for the rod.

Now the second part of verse 24 has to be handled a little differently. “Him that loves him,” that is the parent who desperately wants above all else, not necessarily to be a friend of your children, not necessarily to be popular with your children, but you will later on, but who wants God’s will for your children, then “he chastens him betimes.” Well that’s not right, the word means at the dawn, literally, “he seeks him at the dawn with musar,” now what does that mean? The kid’s sleeping there at 6:00 o’clock in the morning, pop, does that what it means? No, the word “dawn” used in Scripture refers to the dawn of life.

Turn to Ecclesiastes 11:10, here is where the same word is used and it clearly teaches not in the morning, “Therefore, remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh; for childhood and youth are vanity,” the word “childhood” is a noun form of the word used here as a verb. So what does it mean? “He that loves his son seeks him at dawn with musar,” it is in the early days of his life, that’s what it’s talking about, at the beginning of his life start musar. Now as we go through the next few verses you’ll see what the Bible talks about by musar, but for now just look at the timing of this, early. Do you know why? Have you ever observed that you don’t have to teach a kid how to be bad? He picks it up naturally and the longer you wait to let him pick up more insights on how to be gross, then the harder it is to get rid of it. So the Bible simply teaches, very much common sense, you begin musar early in life. And “the dawn” means as early as he can take it, you do not tolerate tantrums, fits, and everything else that goes on. No child ought ever to be throwing tantrums without a suitable application to you know where. Tantrums are just a system of training the child so when he’s an adult he’s going to throw tantrums; the adult name is schizophrenia and so forth. But for a child we call it tantrums. And people who do not learn how to break their tantrums wind up married to people and have tantrums in their marriage, blow the marriage, have tantrums in their family, blow the family, have tantrums at the office, blow the office, it’s just a mess all the way around. Think of all the suffering you can stop by beginning musar early.

Let’s look at another verse; Proverbs 19:18, remember, this is the Word of God and this is normative through all time and space. “Chasten thy son while there is hope; and let not thy soul spare for his crying,” that reads pretty good the way it is, except unfortunately it’s not too accurate in the King James but it teaches doctrine just the way it is, so don’t worry about it. “Chasten,” that is yasar and you should see something, if that’s the verb it’s related to the noun musar. Musar is the act describe by the verb yasar, “chasten thy son” refers to mainly physically discipline. “Chasten your son while there is hope,” now the Hebrew doesn’t say “while there is hope,” it says, “because there is hope.” Now why do you suppose this piece of advice would be given to a parent, “Chasten your son because there is hope.” Well, if you’ve ever been a parent I think you can understand why, because you wonder, do they ever learn, for the 8^th million time we’ve been through this and what does the Bible say? Go ahead and chasten them because there is hope. And what is hope? Evidence of things not seen. And so there is hope, and so this is an urge by God to keep at it, stick with it, be consistent and stick with it, there is hope.

Now the next part, “and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” Now how they ever got that out of here, it’s been a puzzle to me. I worked this one over several times and I don’t know what happened when they hit this one, but it means do not raise up your soul to dying. Do not raise up your soul, it’s actually to his dying. I think the interesting thing is, why do you suppose there’s a shift here in the personal pronoun? “Do not raise up your soul to his dying.” In other words, don’t let it happen, don’t stand by and let his death occur, and this, as we’ve seen in Proverbs, can be literal physical death or it can mean a disaster in the life and so on. Now why does it say “your soul,” don’t let “your soul” slack off? Because in the Bible your children are your soul. Remember the definition of soul? Spirit and the body; your children inherit from you, when you look at your children biblically they are part of your life. And so, when you allow him to die you are allowing your soul to die, that’s how close the Bible puts the parent and the child. Don’t raise up your life to death, don’t let it happen is idiomatically what it means.

Another verse, Proverbs 20:30, this one really looks like it’s a candidate for court action, but let’s explain it and find out why. “The blueness of a wound cleanses away evil’ so do wounds in the inward parts of the belly.” Now what does it sound like? It sounds like things are getting kind of rough, and as a matter of fact that’s exactly what it means. Now let’s go through this carefully. The first part, “the blueness of a wound,” now it’s actually in the original “the blows” and then it has the word that can be translated either as cut or bruise, and it’s just “blows,” cut or bruise, now that is just a way of saying “blows that cut or bruise” and if we want to get very, very technical the word “cut” or “bruise” here is the word that was used by the Arabs, and the Arabic counterpart of this one, to take a date and squeeze it until the skin cracks on it. And from that you have the idea both of a bruise and of a wound, a break in the skin is what it’s talking about.

Now I think some of you are beginning to see that this teaches a very interesting point of how severe discipline was in Israel; “blows that cut or bruise rub away,” or “cleanse away evil.” Now you see it’s worded very harshly at the start, “blows that cut or bruise,” then the verb comes in with a very gentleness because the word “cleanse” here was a word that they used when they took herbs and they’d make a little kind of a bandage out of these herbs, pour all sorts of lotions in them and they’d put it together in a pot and they’d rub a wound with it, very gently. And that’s the verb that’s used together with these nouns that indicate strong activity. And so what is it teaching: “Blows that cut or bruise soothe evil,” is what it means. Now how do you put the violence of the noun with the tenderness of the verb, “blows that cut and bruise soothe evil.” Obviously what he’s talking about is that evil here is rooted into the nature of the child, and the only way, it’s like a sore that it must be massaged, it’s actually a sense of humor here. You have a cut, it’d be dirty, it’d get infected and the only way they had of cleansing the cut and keeping it from getting infected was to wipe these medicinal herbs on the wound, and the idea is that evil is like an infection in your body, it’s like a cut or an open sore. And so you sooth the sore by making cuts; it’s kind of a pun. In other words, this evil that is so deeply ingrained has to be soothed and how do you do it? [bangs his hand on table] That’s how you do it. It’s to draw attention to the fact that physical force is necessary to cope with the sin nature.

Now you say, oh, this is brutal, this must have been written for the time, it can’t be written for today. Listen, which is more cruel, to have a child in a home where you constantly day in and day out harp on something over and over and over and over and over and finally destroy that child’s image of himself, an image before God and everything else, where you rot out his whole confidence by constantly harping, doing nothing, just talking to him all the time, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, or dealing with the situation like this, [bangs hand on table] boom, once and for all. Now the Bible says it’s the latter way and it is more humane. This is why, incidentally, under the Hebrew law jails were not tolerated in the Old Testament. There were only three methods of discipline in social areas of crime: capital punishment, corporal punishment and fining, but you never had a human being confined to a jail; this would be considered very, very primitive by the standards of Israeli jurisprudence, simply because it would be treating man like an animal. You hit him or you fine him and make him work but you do not imprison him like an animal. See, our concepts are very, very much different than the Bible, unfortunately.

The last part of this, “so do wounds the inward parts of the belly,” the inner chambers of the belly literally, and this draws emphasis that not Paul but the Old Testament teaches the inwardness of the sin nature. The only way you can reach the inward parts of the belly are by external wounds. See, here’s again the irony of this way it’s set up. The word “stripe” means external wounds, but then it talks about the inward areas of the body. In other words, what’s the fastest way to reach the sin nature? Through the gluteus maximus. It’s very simple; it’s a one-way circuit that’s very short and very effective.

Turn to Proverbs 22:15. Now remember, this is not parental brutality that’s described in Scripture. They loved their children very, very much in Scripture. In fact, I would dare say the average parent in Israel loved their children far more than we do. Their children were their whole life; it was precisely because they loved them that they wanted them straightened out. They poured their life into their children because their children were the next generation that might inherit the kingdom. They had to be ready to inherit the kingdom; that was always the motive and it’s because of that motive. So this is not an excuse for parental brutality. Something of that comes out in Proverbs 22:15.

“Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” The word “foolishness,” again it’s folly, “bound constantly” literally, “in the heart of the child,” now the next phrase, “the rod of discipline,” now some people read that as though that’s talking only about the rod, but that’s not true. It says “the rod of musar,” and that means corporal punishment, and it also means other ways that you may have of punishing your child together; see, it’s “the rod of musar.” It’s not talking just about the use of the rod but the fact that the overall program in the home to promote musar is what corrects folly in the heart of the child.

Now let’s go back to find out why this is necessary. Let’s draw two kinds of children; let’s draw a child before the fall, a child after the fall and see what the problem is. Remember, any educational theory that does not start with the fall of man is apostate from the very beginning. Here is the child before the fall; what does God want of the child before the fall? +R learned behavior patterns. Question: does the child before the fall get his righteous learned behavior patterns at the point of physical birth? Answer: negative, he develops these. +R learned behavior patterns had to be learned by Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ did not have a sin. So, was there training needed before the fall? Answer: yes. Was there sanctification needed before the fall? Answer: yes. Well what then is the difference between the pre-fall child and the post-fall child? After the fall is training needed for learned behavior patterns? Yes, but there’s a complicating factor; now there is sin that resists the training program.

So every training program has to, if it’s going to be biblical, treat children as fallen children. That is, you do not just stress the (quote) “positive,” you do not just teach them how to be good. You do not just teach them righteousness. You teach against the sin tendency of their heart that is destructive; you have to teach against that as for righteousness. That’s the difference. Most educational theory proceeds as though the fall never happened, all we have to do is teach positive things, if people just knew the truth, they would be good people. Socrates taught that and it’s not changed in all of Greek thinking, all the way down through European philosophy. We teach it as though no fall happened, there is no self-destructive tendency. All right, the Bible says “the rod of correction” must be there “to drive” what from him? Folly, the sin nature.

All right, summary of the four principles of biblical training. It starts with humility toward God; continues with humility before parents. Third, you must build wisdom on wisdom, and once you get folly started you are in deep trouble. That’s why so many people cut out in the teenage years. And finally, the fourth principle is corporal punishment is an integral part of the training to destroy sin in the life. You not only build righteousness but you must also destroy the works of the evil one.

Next week we’ll deal with further aspects of the family.