Posted on 07/23/2022 12:41:29 AM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” (Proverbs 23:13-14).
Twice in these two verses the word “rod” is used, it is important to God. If you want to save your child from the pitfalls of life, and ultimately make him responsive to the Gospel, you need to apply corporal punishment. You need to associate pain with wrong-doing in order to teach him a healthy respect for right behavior.
Now, this doesn’t go along with modern psychiatry or modern ethics. All that modern psychology has produced is a race of mongrel teenagers that do not recognize authority, they cannot rule themselves, and they are frustrated by the time they twenty, so many of them blow their brains out. They are full of guilt. They are full of guilt because they have never been punished for their wrong, so they carry that guilt. Modern psychology doesn’t understand that. They think that guilt is something that is inflicted upon them by religion. No! Guilt is the product of human conscience and they have it before they even hear of religion.
When a child does wrong, he knows he has done wrong, and when they are not punished for it they bare the guilt—it doesn’t go away. Now, when they are punished, the guilt is gone. In their minds they know that they have dealt with the wrong. When a kid is not punished for doing wrong, he becomes a frustrated kid. Punishment absolves from guilt. Not only that, but children will test their limits just to be assured that those limits are still there, and they feel protected. Punishment erects those limits and are good.
“The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame” (Proverbs 29:15).
What we have today in our society is a lot of teenagers that have been left to themselves, and have raised themselves. They are called “latchkey” kids. Both parents work, so they are alone most of the time—and they gravitate toward peer pressure to establish the rules. Those “rules” are generally antisocial and lead to unrestrained wrongdoing. As a result, the kid brings shame to his parents and to himself. Many young women find themselves pregnant at an early age and their child carries on the same pattern.
The rod here is like the shepherd’s rod. That think was like a club with a round end on it. David said, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). No, the rod is not a baseball bat as modern psychology would like us to think of it as some sort of tool for abuse. It is not.
The sheep were comforted by the fact that that shepherd carried his rod. It was to beat the wolves and other dangerous predators off, and it was also to grab a sheep that had wandered away off the path and set him back on the way, back in the flock.
Where Christians get into trouble is that they too wander from the way and find themselves out in the world. This is where God’s chastening comes in: “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Hebrews 12:6). “Get back into the flock!”
You can put it down, a healthy Christian that stays out of church is in desperate trouble. That is where the wolves are. The wolves won’t come around the flock, at least in an open way—there are some wolves in sheep clothing in every Bible-believing church. But outside of the church, the wolves don’t have to disguise themselves. But as long as the preacher is preaching the Book and is preparing the people against the day of battle—those wolves won’t get away with much. What the wolves do is to peel folks off from the fringes and get them away from the flock where they are devoured.
That rod is a symbol of power and authority, and a source of comfort for the sheep.
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For many years, there as been way too little of that done. Now, look where we are.
When a child does wrong, he knows he has done wrong...
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Many children now are raised to believe they are god, so they actually don’t know when they do wrong. There are many budding sociopaths these last days.
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