Good or Godly: Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Part 1

Posted on May 16, 2016 in Intentional |

“6 When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. 7 And 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.8 And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. 9 And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. 10 And 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.” – Judges 2:6-10 (ESV)

So, Wow! How could one generation live passionately for God and the next generation become a bunch of pagans?

I really think the answer is simple. People forget the importance of passing down from generation to generation the knowledge of the holy.

Deuteronomy 6:1-2 states, “Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules[a]—that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, 2 that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long.” – So basically, each generation is responsible for the coming generations. So why is this important to fully understand? Because ultimately God wants us, even commands us to think in generations! We are not to just think of our children, but our children’s children. Here in Deuteronomy we see three generations, you, your son and your son’s son (grandson).

We need to understand that Deuteronomy 6:1-9 is commandment to us as parents and that all it takes for the coming generation to not know the Lord is for parents to neglect what God is saying here about being the spiritual teachers for our children. I look around and often see that a lot of people, even parents live their daily life as if God has nothing to say about how they should live. We as parents have to realize that just passing down the Lord’s commands is not enough, we have to pass down not only the knowledge but also the translation into a life changing relationship with Jesus Christ.

So how do we do this? How do we avoid this generational departure? I thought long and hard on this, so much so I even had to take a walk and just mull it over. So after some serious prayer and some serious walking time, my thoughts came to this. The Christian parent must do everything in their power to pass on the heart and passion for the Lord to include the knowledge. I know vague right! Good news though, there are many ways to enhance doing this (and we will talk more about this in Part 2), but it has to start with living out Godly lives before our children. I think, no I know, that my children more often than not look at the goodness of my life rather than what I say (they rarely listen to me), so if we do not LIVE by what we say then our children only see our hypocrisy. By us living that Godly life, our children will pick up that passion and as we will see in part 2 of this blog (coming soon) we can begin to build off that foundation we set and foster that undivided loyalty and devotion to God and his Word!

To be continued…