7.22.2008
A Quick Plea
Don't use Old Testament stories as morality lessons for you or your children. Use Aesop's Fables or something else instead. Use the bible for its intended purpose, teaching the Gospel. All of the Old Testament stories are a foreshadowing of the Gospel, NOT a guide book for how we should act. Read to your kids the Old Testament and show them God's means of provision. Read to them with your Gospel glasses on so they can see Jesus in those wonderful events that show us to Christ! If we reduce the stories in the bible to morality lessons, then we equal them to any sort of fairy tales, undermining the message of God's redemption of man and cheapening the value of the preserved Scripture. Our kids need to know that the bible is set apart from their favorite story book. It contains something far different and far more meaningful than any other book in history. Don't let them confuse the law and the Gospel by using the bible to show them how to behave. They will appreciate it later!
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1 comment:
Amen, and amen. It is amazing to me how many Christian parents hang copies of the Ten Commandments on their walls, hoping that by displaying those edicts, their children will become believers. These well-meaning, but ill-informed parents actually believe that such displays amount to 'raising their children in the Word!'
The problem is, of course, that the Word is Christ, not an arbitrary selection of verses from the Old Testament. Christ is not found in pursuing the Ten Commandments as though they were life-lessons, He is only discovered, if He can be 'discovered' at all, at the end of a life spent trying to keep those Commandments as though they were in fact the absolute demands of an unforgiving and rigid God of Justice. Fortunately, God doesn't require that we take that journey at all, skipping over it entirely by calling out to us now through the Spirit of the very Son who fulfilled that Law, and offered the answer to God's justice: Justification.
On a related and certainly ironic note, a Jewish woman I know, instead of hanging the Big Ten on her wall, hung an embroidered cloth that reads:
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law."
She didn't realize it was from the New Testament. Just thought it was from the Jewish Bible, but it spoke great truth to her, and to her child... Christian parents should take notes.
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