Failure to Lead the Children

Judges 2:6-10

⁶When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. ⁷And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. ⁸And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. ⁹And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. ¹⁰And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.

I am blessed to have two parents who were dedicated to my faith life. Missing church was not an option. Christian music was ubiquitous in our home. Baptism came shortly after being born. Confirmation was pursued and celebrated. I was even allowed to attend a private Christian college (on their dime) to pursue a degree in theology. I was going to know about Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior; they had no other plans for me or my brother. As a result of this intentional upbringing, I shared the same fervor for the faith of my own children (and now grandchildren). It is a generational thing.

As our story progresses we read again about the death of Israel’s God-given leader, Joshua. He dies as the ripe old age of 110. He is buried on the land that God had given him and his family when Israel took the land that God had promised them.

Joshua’s inheritance and burial site is identified here as Timnath Heres and Timnath Serah in Joshua 19:50. We notice a word play at work. Serah is Heres spelled backwards, if we remember that Hebrew is written without vowels. Heres is “the sun.” Serah is “something left over.” The place was a “sunny spot.” It was also the very last piece of the Promised Land to be assigned, a “leftover” reserved for faithful Joshua.

Lawrenz, J. C. (1997). Judges, Ruth (p. 38). Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Pub. House.

While he was a great military leader, Joshua’s most famous words also come at the end of his life as he bids farewell to the people. In those words, he reminds them who they are and of the God that has given them their freedom and their land. He ends with a challenge about how to spread the faith into the next generation. That same challenge stands for us today and the one that I believe my parents took seriously.

Joshua 24:14–15

¹⁴ “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. ¹⁵ And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

God, through Moses, made a similar challenge that is shared with us in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 11:13–24

¹³ “And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, ¹⁴ he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. ¹⁵ And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full. ¹⁶ Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; ¹⁷ then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. ¹⁸ “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ¹⁹ You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ²⁰ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, ²¹ that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. ²² For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the Lord your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, ²³ then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you. ²⁴ Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea.

As we roll forward 40-50 years, we find that Joshua’s admonition to remain faithful to the Lord falls to the ground for the following generations. They forget the promises of God and determine to follow the gods of the Canaanites. Their parents apparently were not as strident about teaching the faith to their children and they were quick to abandon it. This leads to 400 years of disaster for the nation.

Please don’t misconstrue my intent here. A parent cannot save their own child. Only God can save a person – any person. The Holy Spirit must come into that life and bring about the necessary faith in Jesus Christ as Savior in order for them to have eternal life with Him. But – parents are the child’s first and strongest faith teachers and modelers.

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” ―Aristotle

Many have appropriated this quote over the millennia because there is truth in the saying. Even Adolph Hitler grabbed that idea and ran with it during his reign of terror. So on either side of the coin, be it negative or positive, there is truth in the words. That must cause us to examine what we are teaching the next generation about God. Right now, the trending idea is that God doesn’t really exist; or if He exists He is a construct of our own making. When you don’t teach children what God says about Himself in the Word, they’re going to make it up as they go along. That is exactly what the generation(s) after Joshua did, much to their own detriment. Edmund Burke said, “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” Apparently the parents following the days of Joshua were not taking the time to share the stories of their faith with the children.

Here's the deal: we have such an incredibly wonderful story to share! Grace through the blood of Jesus Christ is only great news. Why wouldn’t we take the time to pass that information along to the next generation? It seems like a no-brainer to me and I attribute that belief to two parents for whom a faithless life was not an option.