Last week we began by looking at some foundational ideas when it comes to procreation in the Bible. The big idea there was simply to connect the fact that children were originally meant to expand God's kingdom (Genesis 1:28) with the Great Commission to expand God's kingdom in the New Testament (Matthew 28:19-20). When we put those two together, we arrived at the idea that our mission in marriage is ultimately to make disciples of Jesus Christ out of our children. We then looked at the first instruction to children in Ephesians 6:1-4 and we will pick up here with the second one:
i) GOD’S CALL UPON CHILDREN (6:1-3)
(1) OBEDIENCE (1): “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” We pointed out that in obeying their parents, children are ultimately obeying the Lord and we saw how this command brought out the issue of authority.
(2) HONOR (2-3) – “Honor your father and your mother (this is the first commandment with a promise), that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”
What does it mean to honor one’s parents? We have already seen that honor entails obedience (6:1), but it also means a lot more. One can obey their parents in a way that doesn’t honor them. Honoring means respecting our parents (verbally at times: Prov. 31:28) and that their counsel holds weight with us. In the Old and New Testament times, honor also meant helping around the house with various chores. Honor also extended as far as loving and caring for your parents as they get older (Matt. 15:1-9, 1 Tim. 5:8), and still does.
Now in telling children to honor their parents, Paul is quoting Exodus 20:12, which is the fifth commandment of the Ten Commandments, but is the first horizontal commandment and is the only one with a promise attached to it. The promise is that they would experience longevity in the land and the inference is that if they did not honor their parents, then they would not experience longevity, but judgment. How does this translate today?
Paul universalizes this promise as legitimate for all in one sense, but there is another that I would like you to consider. I would say that in the New Testament, the stakes are actually higher than living long in the land because Christians are not promised a piece of land. Instead of being promised a piece of land, what is at stake in the New Testament is eternal life in Christ or eternal judgment from Him. So in a sense this means that the promise of eternal life is attached to children who honor their parents. We have to be careful here. This is not teaching a works based salvation, but is saying that what is characteristic of children who have received eternal life through the gospel is that they honor their parents. In other words, people who have a problem with authority and will not honor their parents should be concerned about their souls, because to rebel against authority is to act like a person who is on their way to hell.
ii) GOD’S CALL UPON PARENTS (6:4)
The first thing I want you to notice about God’s call upon you parents is that “Fathers” have a leading responsibility in the raising of their children. In other words, their headship is extended to every relationship within the home.
(1) THE NEGATIVE (4a): “Do not provoke your children to anger”
Of all the things that God could have cautioned parents to not provoke in their children, why does God single out “anger”? Piper says it is because, “Anger is the most common emotion of the sinful heart when it confronts authority. Dad embodies authority. Apart from Christ, the child embodies self-will. And when the two meet, anger flares.”[1]
Now this does not mean that if our children ever get angry with us that we are doing something wrong, but this does mean that we are not supposed to “provoke” anger in our children in ways that are unnecessary. We are to deal with them, even in confrontation, in a way that is tender and gracious and minimizes the potential for anger in them.
How do we do this? One way is by keeping our own anger in check. For some of you what I just said about tenderness and graciousness sounded like a foreign language. It didn’t sound foreign because you couldn’t understand it, but because you have no idea what it means to confront or discipline your children in a tender or gracious way. Your automatic default when confronting resistance in your children is to raise your voice, point your fingers, and enter into this harsh, “drill sergeant” mode. I would caution you to remember the words of James 1:19-20, that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” Hear this: your anger will not bring about God’s righteous end in your children, only the gospel will. So one way you avoid provoking your children to anger is by overcoming anger in your own heart, and this too only happens through the cross, where God overcame His righteous anger toward us.
A couple of other ways that children are provoked to anger in the Bible are favoritism and passiveness. We see favoritism provoking Joseph’s brothers to the point of hating and wanting to kill him in Genesis 37. David’s passiveness in dealing with the rape of Absalom’s sister leads to Absalom’s murder of Amnon and his rebellion in 2 Samuel 13-18 (See also Jacob and Dinah in Genesis 34).
Another way that we avoid anger in our children is by seeking to avoid hypocrisy. Deut. 6:4-6, that great passage on parenting in the Old Testament, begins with the call for parents to worship God themselves with all their hearts, minds, souls, and strength. The words of God are to be on and in their hearts before they can be on and in the hearts of their children. The idea, I think, is that you can’t reproduce what you do not have and that you can’t fake passion for Christ because it is by definition something that isn’t fake. And one of the quickest ways to frustrate your children is to fake something you don’t have, because your children will not be fooled when everyone else is. What we all need is to replace hypocrisy with humility and let our children see us confess our sins to them and repent of them and constantly hope in the gospel. Our children don’t need parents who are good at playing church, they need parents who have tasted and see that the Lord is good.
(2) THE POSITIVE (4b): “Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
(a) Discipline:
The word “discipline” here refers to training our children in general, but also encompasses discipline for wrongdoing. While this latter sense is not popular in our culture today, no one can honestly read the Bible and not see that the Bible repeatedly calls for parents to discipline their children and warns of the consequences for not doing so. Here are several examples from the book of Proverbs:
· Proverbs 13:24 – “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”
· Proverbs 22:15 – “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.”
· Proverbs 23:13-14 – “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with the rod, he will not die. If you strike him with a rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.”
· Proverbs 29:15 – “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.”
So it is pretty clear that parents should discipline their children, but what should we discipline for? Corrective discipline is for rebellion (disobedience) against God. This statement helps us understand when a situation merits discipline and when it doesn’t. If a two year old spills something, it may or may not merit discipline. If they have spilled something as an accident or touched something that you haven’t told them not to, there isn’t rebellion involved. But if you have clearly given an understandable directive and they have disobeyed it, then it is a matter of discipline.
Rebellion occurs and should be met with discipline in two broad areas: God’s rules and the Parent’s rules. A child or teenager should be disciplined accordingly if they don’t comply with a standard that the parents have established in the home or if they have defied the commands of scripture. If Sam hits Lily, he needs discipline because has rebelled against the command to love his neighbor. Likewise, the Bible may not touch every rule in the house that needs to be established. That’s what the general command of obey you parents is for.
At this point, I would like to revisit this thing of lowering the “bar.” If God sets the bar, then lowering it is rebellion. We may feel better about it, but in reality, all we have done is joined with our child in rebellion. So on one level, lowering the bar is rebellion on our part, but on another level, some instances of lowering the bar is simply illogical. I have in mind here those things that parents don’t enforce because “they don’t want their kids to resent them/it.” Let’s take church attendance for example. A parent may say, “I don’t force my children to go to church because I don’t want them to resent it.” My reply is simply do you operate under the same mentality when it comes to their education? “I don’t make them go to Algebra because I really want them to like Algebra.” I didn’t think so. Why not? Because it is completely illogical. So why do we operate that way in the areas that matter most in our children’s lives (church, dating, etc.)?
Let me tell you why your children will not want to go to church. It will be one of two reasons. The first one will be if they are a fallen sinner. If this is the case, they won’t love God and won’t want to be there. And what does a lost sinner need? They need the gospel. So why would you not place them in the one place they are going to repeatedly hear it preached? The Second reason would be if the version of Christianity you have sold them as parents was distasteful to them. If you haven’t modeled true Christianity and love for the bride that Jesus died for, then yes, they will not love her either. God give the church some parents like Joshua, who said in Joshua 24:15 that “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
One more thing we need to be careful with here is raising the bar higher than God does or failing to bring the gospel alongside of it. We call that legalism. As we said earlier, enforcing the “bar” is intended to bring about this sense of desperation that we apply the gospel to. To not do so without applying the gospel to their shortcomings is to provoke our children to either pride or despair.
