Biblical Fathering: On Being Flexible
Fathers and mothers both need to have the flexibility that allows them to come to an agreement on rules and limits and clearly define them for the children. Doing so prevents the possibility of the kids playing one parent against the other. Our efforts to teach our children to obey both parents make it easier for them to obey God later in life when they are faced with making their own decisions.
Part two of a four-part series on fatherhood.
My dad was of the old school where a father was to hold himself above outward displays of emotion, especially where the kids were concerned. The father of old was to be above question regarding his decisions as well.
Don’t get me wrong; my dad was a Christian man, a good dad who provided for his family and treated everyone well, including the dog that he didn’t particularly like. But he thought his authority was better preserved by exhibiting an air of infallibility and avoiding outward displays of emotion. What I learned from his example is how not to make the same mistake. A biblical dad needs to be flexible by being willing to show how he feels and also willing to admit mistakes when he is wrong.
Fathers are to be flexible.
Paul writes: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).
The Greek word Paul uses for “bring up” carries the idea of nourishing a child from the very beginning with tenderness and compassion. But you protest, “mothers are the natural nurturers!” Yes, that is true to some extent, but men are capable of learning the flexibility that the old school fathers of the past seemed to avoid.
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The Apostle and High Priest of Our Confession—Hebrews 3:1-6
Our hope and confidence is the heavenly calling that we share because Jesus shared in our humanity to bring us to glory with Him as the captain of our salvation. Our boasting is in love and might of our great Savior and that He is our merciful and faithful high priest who is able to help us whenever we are tempted.
Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house. For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.Hebrews 3:1-6 ESV
In our study of Exodus, we have noted repeatedly that the events of that book are the most important in all of the Old Testament. Genesis is a theological prologue, written by Moses so that Israel always remembers that Yahweh is the one, true God and the great promises that He made to their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. From Leviticus onward, the Old Testament is all about God’s faithfulness to Israel despite their repeated failures to be the kingdom of priests that He established them to be. The entire Old Testament is the story of God redeeming a nation out of slavery in order to be His own treasure possession.
And Moses was the mediator of that deliverance and that covenant. The LORD worked through Moses to rescue His people from their slavery and then similarly worked through Him to give His laws and commandments to His people. Even though (or perhaps, because) Moses was very meek, God exalted Moses in Egypt, making him like God to Pharaoh with Aaron serving as his prophet (Exodus 4:16). And before the tenth plague, we were told: “Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people” (Exodus 11:3).
Even though the Israelites repeatedly grumbled against Moses, they also revered him. At his death, God Himself buried Moses’ body, likely to prevent the idolatrous Israelites from worshiping Moses’ bones, and we are then told:
And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.Deuteronomy 34:10-12
Indeed, Moses seemed to understand something of his uniqueness in the history of redemption, for one of the chief prophesies given to him about the coming Messiah is found in Deuteronomy 18:18: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Only the Christ would be a prophet like Moses, who governed God’s people like a king, gave them God’s word like a prophet, and mediated between God and His people like a priest. Abraham, David, and Elijah are similarly towering figures of faith; however, even they do not bear the gravitas of Moses.
Since Moses is a prophet without an equal in the Old Testament, it makes sense that the author of Hebrews would establish Jesus’ superiority to him next. If the original recipients of this sermon-letter where indeed Jewish Christians being tempted to revert back to Judaism, the author is warning them here against returning back to Moses whenever we now know the One of whom Moses spoke and foreshadowed.
Consider Jesus—Verse 1
Because Hebrews contains some the sharpest warnings of the whole New Testament, it can be tempting to let those warnings dominate how we view this marvelous first century sermon. Yes, the warnings found in Hebrews are particularly startling; however, the authors words of encouragement are equally as comforting. And we are greeted with some of those comforting words at the beginning of our passage: Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus…
The command, of course, is to consider Jesus, but we should not lightly pass by what the author calls his readers. There are three items to note here.
First, just as Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers, so does the author call his readers brothers. This indicates that, despite all the warnings that the author will give, he believes his readers to be fellow Christians, members of the household of God alongside him, and part of his eternal family.
Second, he calls them holy. As we have noted before, holiness is properly understood as an attribute of God. He alone is holy, for there is none like Him. Our holiness is secondhand because it means that we belong exclusively to God. Having been redeemed by Christ, we are made holy in Him because we are adopted into God’s people.
Third, he says that they share in a heavenly calling. This calling is God’s ultimate design for redeemed humanity to inherit salvation and reign in dominion over creation under Christ our King. It is heavenly but not in the sense of being ethereal or abstract, as we might use that word today. Rather, throughout Hebrews, the author repeatedly points to the heavenly realities as being more real than those of earth. This life is the vapor; the life to come is substance. Thus, to share this heavenly calling is to partake in that which is most true.
This threefold description applies to all who are in Christ today as well. You may not feel holy. You may not feel worthy to be called a brother or sister in God’s family. You may think that you are unfit to share in that heavenly calling. And if so, you are right. In one of my favorite scenes in the Narnia books, Aslan asks the young Prince Caspian:
“Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?”
“I-I don’t think I do, Sir,” said Caspian. “I’m only a kid.”
“Good,” said Aslan. “If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not.”
Something similar should be present whenever we speak of our salvation. Just like claiming to be wise is one of the surest indications of being a fool, thinking ourselves worthy of such marvelous truths is strong indication that we do not yet understand the gospel. Instead, as Dennis Johnson notes: “they ‘share’ in this glorious calling because the Son came to ‘share’ their fragile flesh and blood (2:14), and thus they are ‘companions’ of the Anointed One (1:8-9; cf. 3:14).”[1] It is only by Jesus’ sharing in our suffering under the curse of sin that we are able to share in the honor and glory with which He has been crowned. Even on the last day when we judge angels in our glorified and sinless bodies, we will forever give Jesus all the glory for working our redemption and glorification. Thus, our hearts should not swell with pride to hear such things said about us; instead, such beautiful truths should set our eyes with renewed wonder at Jesus, which is precisely what the author intends for us to do.
Looking at verse 1 in its entirety, we read: Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession… The command to consider Jesus is at the heart of this verse, and I would argue that it is at the heart of the entirety of Hebrews. This really is the great purpose and aim of the letter. Yes, the author repeatedly emphasizes that Jesus is greater than every aspect of the old covenant; however, all of those comparisons are subservient to this supreme command: consider Jesus. But what does the author mean by consider? Robert Paul Martin explains:
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A Review of “Against the Great Reset,” Edited by Michael Walsh
The revolutionaries always want to create a new world order, but always end up destroying man and civilisation in the process. Nothing new here. But the Davos elites have no interest in history. We should, however. If we will not learn from history, the prospect looks very bleak indeed. Hopefully a volume like this will wake up enough people to take a united and forceful stand against this great globalist evil.
This is not the first book to appear in recent times critiquing the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and related matters. Some of these volumes I have already reviewed here. But this is the newest and perhaps the best. At nearly 500 pages, the collection of essays found here is first rate.
The editor has assembled a great lineup of leading intellectual heavyweights, including Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Angelo Codevilla, David Goldman and a number of others. All up the book has 16 important essays, plus introductory and concluding pieces by Walsh.
All the key issues are examined here: Covid tyranny, socialism, globalism, economics, politics, China and the social credit system, Big Tech, national sovereignty, the WHO, the WEF, Schwab, Bill Gates, critical theory, green energy, population matters, politicised science, cultural Marxism, climate alarmism, health fascism and so much more.
It is good that all the bases are so carefully being covered here. Given the rapid pace at which the nefarious agenda items of the Davos elitists are being realised, this book could not be more timely. The plans the activists have for their globalist utopia are not something that lie ahead – all this is already well underway.
Walsh explains early on why such a volume is so very much needed. It will be too late if we wait around for the history books to look back on the Great Reset. The issue NOW is whether “the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters.”
And he is right to speak of how the secular left West is so receptive to all this: “In an age of atheism and disbelief, note the religious fervor of neo- and cultural-Marxism and the messianic quality of Schwab’s anti-humanistic Great Reset.” Quite so. Once you ditch Christianity, plenty of false religions will rush in to take its place.
His closing paragraph nicely informs us of just where we are heading in the Schwabian dystopia: “The satraps of Davos don’t want to simply reset a post-Covid world. Or a post-fossil fuels world. Or even a post-racial world. They want to run it, forever, and while they no longer have need of a god, they’ll always need an enemy. They may not believe in a power higher than themselves, but they certainly believe in demons, and their most irksome devil is you.”
Others pick up on the quasi-religious nature of all this. As Hanson puts it in his essay, “When ‘great’ is applied to a proposed transnational comprehensive revolution, we should also equate it with near religious zealotry.” Marxism and radical greenism have both been pseudo-religions, and they come together in the Great Reset.
He and others of course note how Schwab and Co have capitalised on Covid, and want the whole world under their thumb in order to ‘keep us safe’ from further pandemics, including climate change disasters they assure us are just around the corner.
Many of the writers give us terrific descriptions of who these folks are and what they want. But I especially like how Conrad Black characterises our Davos Divines:
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Dignity, Faith, & Work
Written by R.C. Sproul |
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
The humanist exalts the virtues of honesty, justice, and compassion, but he must crucify his mind to do it. For the humanist is caught in the vicious contradiction of ascribing dignity to creatures who live their lives between the poles of meaninglessness. He lives on borrowed capital, deriving his values from the Judeo-Christian faith, while at the same time repudiating the very foundation upon which these values rest.Charles Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities with the immortal lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” These words sound like a contradiction, dissonant to the ear, harsh to the brain. How could the times be both best and worst?
Before Charles Dickens ever picked up a pen, the French mathematician, philosopher, and writer Blaise Pascal had made use of the paradox. For Pascal, man himself is the crowning paradox of all creation. He said that we are at the same time the creatures of highest grandeur and lowest misery. The paradox is that we can think, an ability which is a two-edged sword. That we can contemplate ourselves is our grandeur. The misery comes when we contemplate a better life than we now enjoy and realize we are unable to make it happen. We have just enough knowledge to escape the bliss of ignorance. Translated into daily realities, this means that a person with enormous wealth can conceive of yet more wealth, power, prestige, health, fame—all things can be increased or improved. But consider that person who commands such a vast amount of money, yet who suffers from ill health or grieves over the death of a loved one. Ultimately, human dignity is built on the conviction that someone is up there who made us. Behind human dignity is theology.
I was addressing the top executives of a Fortune 500 corporation. It was a small group composed of regional vice presidents and the president and chairman of the board. The surroundings exuded an ambiance of power and prestige. The patrician audience was a bit nervous about my mixing “religion” and business as I spoke. When the seminar was near completion, the chairman of the board became excited as his eyes lit up in understanding. “Let me see if I can connect what you’re saying. What I hear is that our business life is affected by how we treat people. How we treat people is a matter of ethics. Ethics are determined by our philosophy. Our philosophy reflects our theology—so respecting people is really a theological matter.” In simple terms, the chairman was expressing what Dostoevsky meant when he said, “If there is no God, all things are permissible,” or Sartre was driving at when he said, “Man is a useless passion.”
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