Providence Points: Devotional, October 29, 2007
shawn...@gmail.com
Biblical, Devotional & Informative
October, 29 2007
Vol. 1 No. 4
Chapter 4: The Family [Law for Heaven for Life on Earth, Arnot]
"My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law
of thy mother." 1:8
THE first and great commandment is the fear of God, and the second,
which is next to it, and like to it, is obedience to parents. Wherever
the root is planted, this is the first
fruit which it bears.
The teaching of the Decalogue, and of the Proverbs, though
circumstantially different, is essentially the same. On the one hand
we have the legislator formally recording a code of laws; on the
other, the aged, prosperous, and witty monarch collecting the best
sayings that had been current at his court in that Augustan age of
Hebrew literature. The cast of the writings corresponds with the
position of the men; yet there are evident marks of the same spirit as
the teacher, and the same truth as the lesson. The ten commandments
are divided into two tables. The first lays the foundation of all duty
in our relation to God, and the second rears the superstructure in the
various offices of love between man and his fellow. In the Decalogue
the fear of God lies deepest as the root; and of the manifold duties
which man owes to man, the branch that springs forth first is filial
love. It is precisely the same here. The beginning of the commandment
is " Fear the Lord," and the earliest outcome is, My son, hear the
instruction of thy father." This verse of the Proverbs flows from the
same well-spring that had already given forth the fifth commandment.
God honours his own ordinance, the family. He gives parents rank next
after himself Filial love stands near, and leans on godliness. God is
the author of the family constitution. He has conceived the plan, and
executed it. Its laws are stamped in nature, and declared in the word.
The equal numbers of the sexes born into the world, the feebleness of
childhood at first, and the returning frailty of age, are so many
features of the family institute left by the Creator indented on his
work. They intimate not obscurely the marriage of one man with one
woman, the support of children by parents, and the support of decayed
parents by the children grown. There are many such laws deeply
imprinted in nature ; and in nature, too, a terrible vengeance is
stored up, which bursts with unerring exactitude on the head of the
transgressor.
One of the wonders of that little world in the dwelling is the
adaptation by which all the powers of the elder children are exerted
for the protection of the youngest. A boisterous and impulsive boy,
able and willing to maintain his rights by force of arms against a
rival older than himself, may be seen to check suddenly the embryo
manhood that was spurting prematurely out, aud put on a mimic
motherlintss, the moment that the infant appears, bent on a journey
across the room, and tottering unsteady by. A condescending look, and
a winning word, and a soft arm around,-all the miniature man is put
forth in self-forgetting benevolence. How exquisitely contrived is
this machinery in nature, both for protecting the feeble thing that
receives the kindness, and softening the rude hand that bestows it!
There is fine material here for parents to watch and work upon. The
stem is soft, you may train it; the growth is rapid, you must train it
now.
In proportion as men have adopted and carried out the ordinance in its
purity, have the interests of society prospered. All deviations are at
once displeasing to God and hurtful to men. The polygamy of Eastern
peoples has made the richest portions of the earth like a howling
wilderness. The festering sores opened in the body of the community by
the licentiousness of individuals among ourselves, make it evident,
that if the course, which is now a too frequent exception, should
become the general rule, society itself would soon waste away. It is
chiefly by their effects in deranging the order of families, that
great manufactories deteriorate a community. Though the socialist
bodies, being so sickly and diseased in constitution, have never lived
much beyond infancy amongst us; yet, as they are founded on a reversal
of the family law, their effects, in as far as they have produced
effects, are misery and ruin. The Romish priesthood, abjuring the
divinely provided companionship of the household, and adopting
solitude, or something worse, have ever been like a pin loose in the
circling machinery of society, tearing every portion as it passes by.
In the constitution of nature there is a self-acting apparatus for
punishing the transgression of the family laws. The divine institute
is hedged all round The prickles tear the flesh of those who are so
foolish as to kick against them.
In practice, and for safety, keep families together as long as it is
possible. When the young must go forth from a father's house, let a
substitute be provided as closely allied to the normal institution as
the circumstances will admit. Let a sister be spared to live with the
youths, and extemporize an off-shoot family near the great mart of
business, with a dwelling that they my call their own. The cutting,
though severed from the stem, being young and sapful, will readily
strike root, and imitate the parent. This failing, let a lodging be
found in a family where the youths will be treated as its members,
participating at once in the enjoyments and restraints of a home. When
the boy must needs be broken off from the parental stem, oh, throw him
not an isolated atom on the sea of life that welters in a huge
metropolis. Nor pen him up with a miscellaneous herd of a hundred men
in the upper flat of some huge mercantile establishment, a teeming
islet lapsed into barbarism, with the waters of civilization circling
all around. If you do not succeed in getting the severed branch
engrafted into some stock that shall be an equivalent to the family,
and so exercise the natural affections, the natural affections
checked, will wither up within, or burst forth in wickedness. The
youth will be ruined himself, and the ruined youth will be an element
of corruption to fester in the heart of the
society that neglected him.
Honour thy father and thy mother. This is the pattern shown in the
mount. The closer we keep to it. the better will it be both for the
individual and the community. God is wiser than men.
Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, and all
right things are profitable. To violate the providential laws is both
a crime and a blunder. Love to parents ranks next under reverence to
God. That first and highest commandment is like the earth's allegiance
to the sun by general law; dnd filial obedience is like day and night,
summer and winter, budding spring and ripening harvest, on the earth's
surface. There could be none of these sweet changes, and beneficent
operations of nature on our globe, if it were broken away from the
sun. So when a people burst the first and greatest bond -when a people
cast off the fear of God, the family relations, with all their beauty
and benefit, disappear. We may read this lesson in the fortunes of
France. When the nation threw off the first commandment, the second
went after it. When they repudiated the fear of God, they could not
retain conjugal fidelity, and filial love. Hence the wreck and ruin
of all the relations between man and man. As well might they try to
make a new world, as to manage this one wanting the first and second,
the primary and subordinate moral Laws of its Maker.