An Iron-Clad Guarantee

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Children are largely a product of the parenting they receive. The New Testament writers presumed the basic truth of this statement in instructing the early churches. If they had not, Paul’s repeated directions concerning eldership qualifications would make no sense. (“His children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.”) The apostle takes for granted that good parenting produces predictable results, and that bad parenting too produces its evidence in time.

If we care about what the apostles taught, we will disqualify any candidate for church leadership who has been unsuccessful in convincing his own children to follow his ways.

Advice That Doesn’t Always Work

When we turn to the book of Proverbs, we find what some Christian parents have taken to be an iron-clad guarantee of parenting success from God himself. I’ve quoted it above. Yet, from what believers tell us online in forums like Quora, God’s own advice doesn’t always work. IntoTheScriptures writes:

“I have 5 children who have in their youth made a commitment to Christ. But today, one would never know.”

Dee says:

“I raised both my children in a Christian home. They are now in their 30s and really don’t want to have much to do with Jesus.”

Then there’s my personal favorite. Quora User writes:

“These things have a way of turning around to bite you in the ***.”

Indeed. Sometimes they do.

Christians Respond

Most Christians will instantly feel some sympathy for these parents. I do. According to their own testimony, they did the best they could and didn’t get the results they believe the scriptures promise. Did God fail to deliver? You will find Christians answering them different ways:

1/ You Failed to Sell the Goods

One very common answer is, “Well you say you trained them in the way they should go, but obviously your example was insufficiently unconvincing. God didn’t deliver because you were hypocritical or nursed secret sins that your children observed.”

To be fair, this is not so much an answer as what goes through the minds of observers well out of hearing of the poor parent. Polity keeps most from being quite so blunt with hurting fathers and grieving mothers, especially when there’s nothing to be done to salvage the situation now. The milk is already spilled, and “I told you so” is nobody’s favorite cliché.

As crude as it is, we have to concede it’s a plausible theory in many cases. I don’t know one great parent who ever thought he was a great parent. The ones I’ve heard express that sentiment generally fell well short of top tier. We all fail in many ways. If there is genuine fault with the character and performance of the parents, who can say that God has failed to deliver on his promises when their children ignored their instruction?

As an argument, it works. I don’t like it much though.

2/ Just Wait and See

Another subset of believers will point to the word “old” and remind the grieving parents that their children’s story is not yet over. The proverb does not say a child will never struggle in his teens and twenties. Most do. The proverb does not even say we may expect all adults born into godly families to have turned the corner by late middle age. The proverb definitely doesn’t say that if you put in the hours, you will never experience lengthy periods of disappointment in the current status of your charges.

The Hebrew for “old” in this verse is zāqēn, a term that comes from an Arabic word meaning “decrepit”. It’s associated with proximity to death, the inability to do what one used to, gray hair, being hard of hearing and losing one’s sense of taste. For women, it’s associated with the inability to conceive. I doubt most Christians who make this argument have done their due diligence with a concordance prior to making it, but the word “old” is solid translation. Given the OT usage, even “ancient” would be reasonable.

It’s also an imperfect argument, but it leaves disappointed parents with a tiny ray of hope. Maybe God hasn’t delivered yet, but he didn’t promise to do it on our schedule.

3/ The Train Has Left the Station

There’s also a fair bit packaged into the Hebrew word translated “train” that we ought to consider. Parents do not put the proverb into practice simply by taking children to church, correcting them when they err, and setting them a decent example. The word actually means to dedicate. It’s a process, a method and a persistent habit, a daily undertaking to consider a child’s spiritual needs and address them with the word of God. I can pretty much guarantee that doesn’t happen all the time in Christian households where both parents work for a living. There simply are not enough hours in the day.

Deuteronomy gives us some idea of what godly parental responsibility looks like on a daily basis:

“These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 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.”

Training. Diligence. The “way that he should go” needs to be immersive, holistic, pervasive and very, very deliberate. It won’t happen by default. We can’t discharge this responsibility with a few Bible bromides at the dinner table after a child has been propagandized by the world all day long.

Are we training our children in the word of God with a biblical level of consistency and commitment? That’s almost impossible for anyone outside the family to evaluate. We all stand before our own Master in the matter. But if anyone has been unfaithful in holding up their side of the implicit bargain in this proverb, I suspect it was not the Lord.

A Proverb is a Proverb

I have another thought too. It’s probably equally unsatisfying to parents looking for iron-clad guarantees of child-rearing success, but it has the virtue of paying attention to context. That is this: Guys, it’s a proverb. We need to observe the genre when we read the Bible.

Proverbs are not iron-clad promises, even when they appear in the word of God himself. They are shrewd-but-general observations about how the world works. They prove true the vast majority of the time when you follow them as written, but there may always be exceptions.

Yes, the scripture cannot be broken, but that’s not what’s happening when parents do their job and one or more of their children sadly and mysteriously elect to make bad choices. Do you believe in a God who expresses his sovereignty by overruling wills, reordering circumstances and frustrating evil impulses in every instance across decades? That’s about the only way the Lord could give loving parents an iron-clad guarantee of parental success. I really don’t see our Father that way.

On the Other Hand

Let me say this though: I’ve witnessed several generations of kids born into Christian families, some all the way from a wink in Dad’s eye well into their thirties and forties. I’ve been in their homes, I’ve worshiped and enjoyed fellowship with their parents, and I’ve watched their children marry and start to raise children of their own. I’ve also lived next door (and next desk) to many, many unsaved parents for my entire working life, and have gotten close to more than a few. I’ve been in their homes and heard their horror stories and heartaches. My kids have played with theirs and had them for sleepovers. This being the case, I’m fairly well positioned to do the apples and oranges bit.

That’s right. There is no comparison. None. Not from my seat in the bleachers.

God is unbelievably faithful. His word works. It works best and most predictably when loving parents live it out diligently and teach it from early childhood. That’s how it’s intended to operate. But let me say this from personal experience, as a father who worked more than I wanted to and could (and should) have been much more deliberate about training my children: it even works to a degree when practiced by flawed, struggling, inconsistent parents who pray, depend, and cling to the Lord in faith. That includes single moms and dads, parents in unpleasant situations destined to end in divorce, and late-to-the-game conversions when the kids were raised secular and Mom and Dad switched tracks in mid-life. Sometimes, by the grace of God, it even works retroactively.

From the Bleachers

I’ve seen kids who professed and didn’t go on well. I’ve seen others who did. I’ve met still others as repentant adults who conceded they made major mistakes. I have yet to meet a rank apostate raised in a Christian home where I was familiar enough to judge the quality of parenting he received. Not one. God is faithful. His word works. Not perfectly, because we are not robots, and choice is real. But it works far, far better than any other parenting philosophy or default practice under heaven. Even smidgens of intermittent faithfulness reap some reward in outcome. Great amounts of faithfulness invariably produce greater rewards.

And really, what’s the alternative? How well do you think “Let the child do whatever he wants” is likely to play out?