I heard a speaker recently who emphasized the importance of responsibility holding hands with privileges. His example was striking; in one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, there were patriots with such names as Hawthorne, Poe, and Thoreau. Amazingly, even though these men fought diligently and helped to found our nation on the principles of the Bible, some even serving as ministers and elders in early churches, by the generation of their grandchildren, their families had turned aside from following God and were the leaders of the "Enlightenment," which emphasized man's learning as apart and more important than God. What happened??
These men did not pass on what they fought for. They had the right principles, they fought willingly and diligently for freedom of worship and religion and the founding of society on God's laws, but they didn't pass down those values. They passed on a love of knowledge and the privilege of pursuing it, but they did not share deeply the reasons for learning and the importance of the Search for Knowledge as a Search for God. Consequently their family line had the opposite effect that they intended.
In my recent study of the books of Joshua and Judges, this type of cycle is the way Israel's history began in Canaan as well. Upon preparing to enter their promised land, Israel was told by God that he would utterly destroy all the Canaanites in the land before them; all Israel had to do was to cling to God and His Law for them (see Exodus 23). In Deuteronomy 7, God had promised to drive out all of the inhabitants of Canaan before them. He warned Israel of the dangers of intermarrying with the tribes of Canaan and subsequently being seduced to follow their gods instead of God. Through Joshua God shared this same promise (see Joshua 23). Still, Joshua's generation died out, the next generation with elders who served under Joshua died out, and by the 3rd generation in Canaan, the people had turned away from God and were chasing after gods. God's word says they played the harlot (Judges 2:19). The Israelites passed down the privilege of living in the Promised Land, and no doubt they played this up to their children, but they forgot the conditions of God's Promise: that they utterly destroy Canaan's tribes; that they totally eliminate all other gods - those they brought from Egypt (Joshua 24:14) as well as Canaan's gods. This meant that their grandchildren grew up not knowing who God was or what He had done for their people (Judges 2:10). That is all it took. Just one generation that didn't pass on God's Will and Plan for His people resulted in over 400 more years of misery and cycling in and out of God's purpose. These cycles resulted in kings who led them further astray and finally the end of God's communication with Israel for a final 400 years (intertestament period). This failure set off a chain of events that led to Israel forfeiting God's intended blessing on them.
This is a warning to me. I am to certainly share all of God's bounty with my children, but I am to also share all of God's words with them; to talk of them all the time as God encouraged Israel to do in Deuteronomy 6; to encourage them to develop a relationship with the God who was Israel's and is also ours. If I fail to pass on the responsibility of being His child, I fail to pass on the privileges as well. To do less is to pretend in their eyes that what we have here in America and even in our own home is a result of something we have done, and it is a lack of acknowledging our dependence on God. I cannot fail to constantly represent everything we have as a family, as a church, and as a nation as a blessing from God; to constantly point to the stones piled up in the Jordan and the altars built across Canaan to remember what God has done for us throughout history. This is an enormous task, but it is one I cannot fail in or I will watch the consequences for generations to come.
