Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. ~ Deuteronomy 6:4-9
One of the heaviest burdens I carry as a father is the spiritual state of my boys. My wife is my first priority, but I know without a doubt where her faith lies, and that she is eternally saved by grace through her faith in Jesus Christ. My boys, however, are not yet saved. They are young still, but it haunts me daily that they do not yet know Jesus personally and are not yet Christians.
Every father worries about his kids in some way or another. No doubt Aaron had great concern for his four sons. But like all fathers, he had to come to grips with the fact that they stood before God on their own. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that God has no grandchildren. Every person must give an account of their own actions to God. This is hard for a father to accept because we desperately want to protect our children and keep them from harm. Most of us would gladly take the heat in place of one of our kids.
In a stunningly tragic passage from today’s reading, two of Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, were punished for their sins against God (Leviticus 10). We don’t know what exactly is meant by “unauthorized fire” (literally in Hebrew, “strange fire”), but it’s clear from God’s response that they had violated some aspect of the requirements recently laid out for the priests. In a moment that is gut wrenching for any dad reading, Moses tells Aaron not to mourn the death of his two sons. They knew what was expected by God, and they had sinned in some way. They stood before God, and were judged according to their own actions. Aaron could not allow this tragedy to cause him to sin and incur God’s wrath himself.
I can’t imagine how he must have felt.
It’s interesting that with the preliminaries of this article floating through my head, I sat down to dinner tonight and found myself in the midst of an intensely spiritual discussion with my boys. We started out talking about Grandaddy and how he’s going to have to have another surgery in a few weeks. We talked about how our bodies sometimes breakdown, kind of like our toys do when they get old or we don’t take good care of them, or sometimes they just break! I saw a teachable moment for my boys, and went into discussing how illness and death are the result of sin being in the world. I read Genesis 3 to them and we discussed Adam and Eve and the first sin and how it lead to their eventual death. I read Romans 6:23 and talked about the payment we earn when we work hard at sin. I asked Tripp (my 3 year-old) if what I was saying was making sense to which he quite enthusiastically said, “No!”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
However, Corbin (4½ year-old) my got a sad/scared look on his face and said that when he dies and Jesus makes him alive again he wants to come to his house, meaning our place here in Crewe. So I read John 14:1-7 to him and talked about the many rooms in heaven that Jesus is preparing for all those who believe in him. I read Romans 10:9 to him, and told him that we love him and Tripp very much and that’s why we teach them about Jesus because we want them to be in heaven with us one day.
It’s very hard for me to teach my 4½ year-old these hard and sometimes scary truths. But I know that one day my little preschooler will stand before a righteous God (hopefully after a long, long life) and give an account for his actions and his faith. I want him to be ready. For an agonizing span of about 5 minutes, I began to think that tonight might be the night Corbin got saved. He knows what sin is, and he knows he’s a sinner. He knows (mostly) that sin leads to death.
I don’t think he’s got the rest yet, and it was painful to realize that the conversation had gone as far as it could tonight. It’s that terrible dilemma that I find myself in, where I so desperately want someone to understand and believe the gospel, but I can’t make them do either. I have to let the Holy Spirit do His work. I am glad that he’s a few steps closer to understanding his personal guilt before a Holy God and his need for a personal Savior, Jesus.
I’m excited about the days ahead, and yet I’m still filled with that dread knowing that his eternity is not yet secured. It pushes me to take advantage of every chance I get to tell my boys about Jesus, about their sin, about their need for Jesus, and about His wonderful gift of eternal life by grace through faith (Romans 6:23, Ephesians 2:8-10).
Let’s always remember that no one lives on borrowed faith. Each man and woman must stand before God in judgment one day. Let’s let this spur us on to tell others about Jesus’ salvation, especially our kids.
Words of Reason 