Musings on the Fifth Commandment

Exodus 20:12 tells us, Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

Obedience to the fifth commandment comes with a special blessing, unlike the other nine.  Could there be more to this commandment than meets the eye?

I have said before that Yeshua did not come to Earth to start a new religion called Christianity. (I know, I am changing the subject, but bear with me). 

He is the Messiah, the fulfillment of all that was written about Him in the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures (aka the "Old Testament"). Christianity is simply a continuation of YHVH's plan. He was first promised in Genesis 3:15 as the Seed of the woman... the first suggestion of parenthood in scripture. 

Biblical Judaism and Christianity were both birthed from the ultimate parent, YHVH Himself.  But scriptures are filled with all sorts of family analogies.  We can also say that Christianity was birthed out of Biblical Judaism, after Yeshua came to earth - as the Seed of the Woman - and was sacrificed for our sins.  In this way, Biblical Judaism can be called our parent faith.  (Rabbinic Judaism, birthed after the destruction of the temple, re-wrote Biblical Judaism).

The early church was all Jewish.  But as it grew and expanded, it became more and more Gentile.  By the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine had adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Tragically, he (and so many others) did not like the Jews.  He forbade any Jewish expression of faith within the Roman church.  The Sabbath was abolished and the day of worship was changed to Sunday.  The Biblical feasts - which ALL point to Yeshua - were made illegal, and are still generally not taught in the church today.  The faith became something that was totally unrecognizable to the Jewish people (much like Joseph, who had fully taken on the look of an Egyptian and was not known by his brothers).

Even worse, the disassociation did not stop here.  Throughout history, Jewish people have been horribly persecuted, many times in the name of Christ.  Major events like the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms, and the Holocaust, are accompanied by hundreds of lesser-known tragedies such as forced conversions, expulsions, tortures, and massacres.  It is not hard at all to understand why Jews would distrust Christians.

We did not honor our parent faith. 

Genesis 12:3 says this:  I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

There is a promise of blessing when we bless Israel.  There is also a curse attached to cursing them.  But it is important to know that two different Hebrew words are used for curse here.  The first one, arar, means to curse, and the second one, qalal, means to lightly esteem, or treat as unimportant. 

The very last verse in the Tanakh, Malachai 4:6, is in the context of the Day of the Lord, when Messiah returns to Earth. 

And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to their fathers,
Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

Can this mean that the historical rifts between the Jews and the Christians will be healed in the days leading up to Yeshua's return?  I hope so!
 
The church has a lot of repenting to do for its sins against the Jews.  And many in the church still cling to Replacement Theology, the idea that YHVH is done with the Jews, has disowned them, and has instead given all the Biblically-promised blessings to the church.

To the early church fathers, Replacement Theology seemed logical.  The Jews had been scattered to the four corners of the Earth after the temple was destroyed 70 AD.  No ethnic group could possibly keep their cultural identity and then be re-gathered from such a scattering abroad, not even after one generation.  No, that was humanly impossible; it had never happened in the history of the world.

All that changed in 1948.  The miraculous  rebirth of Israel took place, as foretold in the scriptures.  The Jewish people came - and are still coming - from the four corners of the earth to settle in that little gem of land no bigger than New Jersey.

To cling to the idea that YHVH has disowned His chosen people is to miss the heart of the Father for His chosen people.  Yeshua gave us the story of the Prodigal Son.  It is a terrible thing for the church to take on the attitude of the arrogant older brother.

Now more than ever, we need to bless and esteem the members of our parent faith.  Very soon, Yeshua will return to the very soil of Israel and reveal Himself to those who do not yet believe.

Musings on the Education of our Children

I just realized that I have harped on this before, but I think it's a message that bears repeating.  I recently attended a home education conference, and the speaker really brought these things to the forefront of my mind again.

I am very thankful to live in a country where we as parents are free to educate our children as we please.  It has not always been so.  Our home-education pioneering forefathers and foremothers of the 1970s era risked jail and even losing their children so that we could enjoy this freedom to educate our children in the way that God outlines in His scriptures.

However, it seems that many of today's home educators have lost that early vision.  All around me, I see home educators trying to re-create school at home.  Why is this?  Why do we feel like we need to adhere to some school standard issued by a godless institution?

Revelation 2 says to the church at Ephesus, I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.  Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.

Of course, home education is not the context here.  But some parallels can be drawn.  The home-educating community perseveres and endures hardships, working very hard to educate our children.  But there are many of us who have lost the very hearts of those children through the striving to be more public-school-like, and to achieve the idol of high academic standards. Algebra in preschool?  Latin and Greek at age 7?  Are these things beneficial to the child, or to the parental ego?

Sadly, I have seen so many crack under the pressure to measure up to the godless educational standard, and they end up sending their kids back to public school. Then they get to deal with the hours and hours of homework, assigned by an outside authority in their child's life, including content that they may even be opposed to. Not to even mention the ungodly influences that reign in the public schools.

Seven times in God's word, He tells us, The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom/knowledge. (Job 28:28, Psalm 111:10, Proverbs 1:7, Proverbs 9:10, Proverbs 15:33, Isaiah 11:2, Isaiah 33:6).   Do you really want your child sent to a place for education, six or seven hours a day, where the source of wisdom is man, not God?

We know through scripture that the home and the family was the center of biblical Hebrew education. Deuteronomy 6 tells us, Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.  “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The language in our modern vernacular says, focus on these things 24/7!  I see nothing here on math, grammar, French Literature, or any such thing.  This doesn't mean never study those subjects; that isn't my point.  My point is, what is THE most important thing?  If they learn all those other things but miss loving and serving God, it was all for nothing.

Training Up Your Child

When my four kids were small, I felt God leading me to homeschool them.  However, I resisted this prompting because all I could envision was the five of us huddled around a table, painstakingly going through each of our curriculum products one by one.  45 minutes for grammar, 45 minutes for science, ring a bell, have a snack, 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes to write a book report.  The very thought made me shudder and want to cry.  I was in no way cut out for that.

So off to school went my firstborn.  And then my second born.  By the time my thirdborn made it as far as preschool, I was feeling like I just couldn't take it anymore.  The children were becoming more and more attached to their peers.  Also, they were bringing home pages and pages of what I considered mindless busywork, but I had to make them do it because their teacher said so.  My God-given role as parent was being slowly diminished by these other authorities in their lives.

I think the final straw for me was the day my firstborn brought home SIXTEEN workbook pages to do, because he haden't gotten them done in school (he was in the third grade).  He spent about 30 minutes working on them, and then announced that he was finished.  I knew better, and a quick search revealed a majority of undone workbook pages, hidden under the rug.

About this time, a friend handed me some tapes of a homeschooling speaker.  The woman on the tapes spoke right to my heart!!  She advocated lots of reading out loud, very little curriculum, no busy work, and lots of life experience.  My heart sang with joy - THIS I could do!  (Actually, my heart sang with Joy.  Her name was Carole Joy Seid).   We began our homeschooling journey and have never looked back.  I never imagined that I would actually LOVE homeschooling - what a blessing!

I have to say, though, that a large percentage of homeschoolers that I have met through the years really have re-created "school" at home.  Some families do very well with the structure of this method.  But I see many others getting burnt out, and often even sending their children back to school.  Why does this happen?

There is an expectation in our society that to be successful, you have to study certain subjects, to fulfill requirements needed for college, to get a degree that society says you need in order to be a success in life.  It seems to me like there is a big, giant scholastic game out there; you just need to learn the rules, play by them, and you will become an accepted member of society.

Who makes these rules?  What does God have to say about it in the scriptures?  "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  This verse actually contains in it (among other things) the idea of finding out your child's gifts and aptitudes, and directing his (or her) path in that way.  In other words, to become the very person that God wants him/her to be. 

This past week, I read about one homeschooling mom who noted that her daughter was good at writing, so she felt no need to have her work on it because she already "got it."  So she spent much more time on the subjects that her daughter struggled with.  Really?  All I could say was "Boy, I'm glad I am not that daughter."  If she is gifted at writing, and loves to write, why not develop that talent to its fullest, so she can serve the Lord with it to the best of her ability?  Is it really important that our child know what a predicate nominative is?  Or can configure polynomials by the age of 10?

Proverbs reiterates several times that the persons responsible for teaching children are the parents.  The Hebrew home was centered around the family.  Proverbs also has much to say about the beauty of obtaining wisdom.  But what is wisdom?  Read the first nine chapters of Proverbs, and see if you find anything at all about chemistry, algebra, spelling, grammar, biology, etc. etc.  You won't.  But you will note several times that "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."   

Romans 12 tells us that we are not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed; yet we often work so hard to conform to the world's system.  The chapter also goes on to say that we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought (pride), and furthermore that different people fulfill many diverse functions in the kingdom. 

Here is our challenge:  helping our children to find their place within the body, by encouraging them and allowing them to discover who God made them to be.  .