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Chasten thy son while
there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. – Proverbs 19:18, AV
Discipline your son while
there is hope, and do not desire his death. – Proverbs 19:18,
NASV
You don’t think about it
when you’re disciplining your children, but in fact you are doing
your future daughter- or son-in-law, grandchildren and great
grandchildren a favour.
The benefit and blessing of the discipline accrues not just to the
child, but to his spouse and children. (A whipping is a
blessing?!
Yes.
Couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was nine.)
Alas, the opposite also holds true. When you fail to
discipline your child, his spouse, children, and grandchildren bear
the burden of your disobedience. God “visit[s] the iniquity
of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of
them that hate [him], and show[s] mercy unto thousands of them that
love [him], and keep [his] commandments.” (Exodus 20:5-6)
THROWING FITS
Suppose you have a child
that throws temper tantrums.
(I’ve had several of those.) It is your duty to break him
of that. However, as
everybody knows who has ever dealt with a fit-thrower, that requires
unsleeping vigilance and relentless and imaginative punishment,
including but not limited to frequent whipping. Nothing else will work, and
it is tiresome, thankless work. Thankless, that is, from
your viewpoint in the dust of that battle, because you receive no
thanks from the rebellious child. Even you tired conscience
seldom thanks you.
However, an unseen host of children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren as well as their wives and husbands
will thank you, whether you can see them or not.
OR GIVING UP?
What happens if you don’t do
your duty to conquer your wild child’s temper? It won’t be conquered, so he
will visit its tortures on his spouse. (Don’t let this impersonal
masculine pronoun fool you.
Women can display tempers just as bad as men’s, hence the
abundance of descriptive epithets: shrew, vixen, virago,
termagant, fury, beldame, she-wolf, scold, harridan, Xantippe,
etc.). Their
children, the witnesses of every family crisis, learn to give their
ugly tempers full rein, and the road is prepared for yet
another generation of misery. The curse will continue
until someone, by the grace of God expressed as ruthless, relentless
discipline, stops it.
Of course, the sin may not
be anger. It may
be disrespect, sloth, or gluttony, or covetousness, or theft, or
lust, or pride, any other failure of self restraint.
FOLLOWING THE
COMMANDMENT
The Bible commands us to
whip our children for discipline: “Withhold
not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with
the rod, he shall not die.
(Proverbs 23:13).
Sometimes you may think he is going to die, because he
screams and hollers like it. But God promises, “Thou shalt beat him
with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs
23:14) And not only
from eternal hell, but from the hell on earth of the slave to
sin.
What
ought to encourage you more, you will not deliver one alone,
but at the same time all those yet to be born, and their families
with them. How hard it
is to see these unseen!
How hard to remember that Christ’s Kingdom is built in such
ways, when we show ourselves faithful to his covenant. In the wretched midst of
duty’s passing unpleasantness, we ought to fix our inward eye on
those unseen generations, who one day they will rise up and call us
blessed.
--
F. Sanders
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