Articles
Coping with Life 29 – Disobedience to Parents
Coping with Life 29 – Disobedience to Parents
Mike Willis
As the American society moves further and further away from Christ and Christian values, we witness the breakdown of the family. More and more children are conceived outside of wedlock, raised in one-parent homes (usually without the Daddy being involved in the lives of his children), and producing more and more narcissistic young men and women—children who think the world exists to satisfy their wants.
Most of us have witnessed the scene in the Walmart or Kroger store (or Target and Publix, if you prefer) where the mother tells her child to do something and he openly defies her parental authority. She tries to coax or bribe her children with promises of toys or candy, and eventually threatens the child with punishments that the child has learned she will not enforce.
The author Hebrews used the example of parental discipline to explain God’s chastening of His spiritual children: “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and WE RESPECTED THEM. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For THEY DISCIPLINED US FOR A SHORT TIME AS IT SEEMED BEST TO THEM, BUT HE DISCIPLINES US FOR OUR GOOD, that we may share his holiness. For the moment ALL DISCIPLINE SEEMS PAINFUL RATHER THAN PLEASANT, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:7-11).
The wise King Solomon wrote: “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” (Prov. 13:24). “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (Prov. 22:15). “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die” (Prov. 23:13).
One of the most criticized passages in the Old Testament addresses rebellious sons: “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:18-21).
I have watched many detectives shows in which the police approached the parents of a criminal son, appealing for their help in finding their son. At first, the parents concealed information to protect their son, but in the end they perceived the seriousness of the situation and told the police where to find their son, for the protection of innocent people in society. This is what is described in Deuteronomy 21:18-21 as well. A marked difference in Old Testament society and modern society is that the ancients perceived that there were better things to do with their public funds than to house for decades of their life hundreds of thousands of wicked men in the “pollyanna” hope that they will eventually wake up some morning a changed man. Instead, the ancients inflicted public capital punishment on wicked men who refused to obey civil laws in order to protect and preserve their ordered society. Like the mother in the grocery store who tries to coax or bribe her children to do what she says, our civil state tries to coax wicked men into obedience with “carrots on a stick” and both are about equally effective.
