Category: Family life

Deuteronomy 21:18 … The Rebellious Child

Deut. 21:18 “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them, 19 then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city and unto the gate of his place. 20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, ‘This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones so that he die. So shalt thou put evil away from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear.

The graciousness of God’s law

1.) Note that this law ends the idea that children are absolutely owned by the parents to do with what they will. Instead, the Parent must go to a larger deliberative body in order to convict the child. The law thus gives the child a higher court outside the home where he would essentially be able to appeal a wicked parents desire to kill him. Remember, the way the pagans treated their children. This law is a safeguard against that.

2.) Clearly, this law applies to an older adolescent or young adult child still living in the home. Toddlers aren’t prone to be drunkards. We are likely looking at an adult child who has established a pattern of rebellion and criminality.

3.) Allowing such a delinquent child to live would be to allow the leaven of wickedness to infect the whole social order. One unrepentant adult child allowed to exercise their sovereign will over God’s will would breed more of the same and eventually, the whole Godly social order would be overthrown. Stoning such a guilty offspring is thus grace to the whole covenant community.

4.) I find it beyond astonishing that a culture that is so glib about torturing and killing the unborn as followed by selling the unborn body parts on the free market finds the ability to be outraged over a God who would legislate the death penalty for an adult child who has set a pattern of rebellion and criminality. Modern man complaining about the God of the Bible being cruel is like Miley Cyrus complaining about Madonna’s lack of virtue.  Clearly, we see here that this commandment is graciousness to God’s covenant community.

5.) Finally, there is no record in Scripture of this ever happening.

Immigration and its Social Order Consequence

“Immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to `hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

Robert Putnam
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century
The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

By saying that “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital,” what Putnam is getting at here is that ethnic harmony produces stability.  This obvious truth is controversial and the articulation of it threatens careers in a time where there is a mania about denying the obvious.

The obviousness that ethnic harmony produces stability while ethnic diversity reduces social solidarity and social capital is even seen in the historic definition of the word nation, which stems from the Latin “nasci.” Webster’s 1828 dictionary gives us the definition of “nation,”

“nation as its etymology imports, originally denoted a family or race of men descended from a common progenitor, like tribe.”

Of course, this flies in the face of the modern insistence that America particularly is a “propositional nation.” The idea contained in that phrase is that America was never intended to be a nation of common blood and ancestry, but instead, America has always been a place that found its union in the idea that a governed people find their unity in a shared commitment to a shared set of ideological truisms.

That this is historical revisionism is seen by just a few quotes, In The Federalist Papers, John Jay emphasized ethnic unity and religious unity as the source of American strength, saying that,

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs….”

A lesser-known Founding Father John Dickinson in his “Observations on the Constitution Proposed by the Federal Convention” likewise wrote,

“Where was there ever a confederacy of republics united as these states are…or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs?”

One can find other sentiments like the above throughout US History. John Calvin Coolidge, when Vice President echoing Robert Putnam above, wrote,

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

Dr. Joel McDurmon captured some of this sentiment when he wrote in his,  “Preventing the Warfare State: the biblical laws for kings,”

“The U.S. Constitution returned to the pre-1066 Anglo-Danish standard of “kith and kin.” The word “King” is related to the English “kin” which has an ethnic reference. “Kith and kin” means “same country and family.” Without this quality among a leader, there cannot be any true loyalty to the people. And while this sounds like a side matter, it is not: a ruler who identifies with the people almost as a family will fight to defend them and their liberties. A ruler, however, without that loyalty will more likely be less interested in defense. It’s the difference which Jesus taught between the shepherd and the hireling.”

All of this to say that the strength of a nation is found in ancestral roots which form a common ethnic bond. These roots provide the organic, interwoven connections among kith and kin who have lived cheek by jowl for generations in shared communities. What immigration does as it comes from nations that share no blood, religion, manners, history, and language with the White Anglo Saxon Christian origins of this nation is that it destroys the organic community roots by snapping off the shared plausibility structures, destroying the shared common way of life, and poisoning the well where the waters of common culture are drawn.  Where harmony of interests existed what is interjected by way of alien immigration is an instant conflict of interest driven by placing contradictory religions, ideologies, and theologies in the same proximate space. Where shared interests and values once existed as the glue that holds cultures together now room must be made for polygamy, clitorectomy, jihads and who knows what other foreign interest and value. Where community had been the coin of the realm, now balkanization is hegemonic.

Immigration is better called “recolonization,” and when practiced with passion, “genocide.” What is lost when mindless immigration is practiced is something of greater value than stock dividends and an ever-ballooning Gross Domestic Product. What is lost is a sense of identity, generational history, and belongingness to a particular people in favor of an egalitarian cosmopolitanism that atomizes the individual with the consequence that the only possible identity comes from identifying with the State which becomes both the destroyer and the pretended protector of the original stock.

In the end, the simple truism that “proximity + diversity = war” is indeed accurate. World history testifies to that truthfulness. Whether one looks at the Muslim conquest of the Northern African Littoral, or the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxons, or Stalin’s population transfers, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or former Yugoslavia repeatedly it is found that pronounced diversity in one geographic area is a recipe for significant cultural conflict. The vacuous and jejune egalitarian idea that “diversity is our strength” is just stupidity on steroids and no amount of reciting that mantra is going to make it become true. Not even when one sprinkles it with Christian pietistic sparkles. Similarly, the ubiquitous and now tired habit to use the cultural Marxist magic hex word “racism” in order to sublimate the reality that immigration and ethnic diversity is a bad thing sure to create conflict has become tantamount to peeing in a stiff breeze. It may make someone feel better short term but it only results in getting all wet.

The result of all this will either be genocide if the host culture surrenders or if the host culture does not surrender the result will be a Hobbesian war of all against all which will make the Lebanese civil war look like Red Sox vs. Yankees Baseball game.

In the former Christendom (The West) we are now absorbing the largest immigration movement in World history. Much of the visible church mindlessly blather about how God is bringing the world to us in order to be converted. Hearing the visible Church leadership exult in this mass migration is like being present to hear  Montezuma and the Aztec leadership rejoice with the arrival of Cortez. Those with eyes to see know that it is not the immigrant world that is being assimilated to Christianity but rather it is Christianity that is being assimilated and redefined in a non-Christian direction. When we rejoice with the entry of the third world into the West we are rejoicing at the death of Christianity and the death of that ethnic group that God has pleased, by His grace alone, to make the primary civilizational carrier of Christianity.

All of this is why Enoch Powell as the canary in the coal mine could lament 50 years ago

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” 

Christianity vs. Multiculturalism on Nation, and Culture

According to Dr. Bruce Waltke, in his “An Old Testament Theology,” a Nation, according to Scripture, is defined as:

1.) A common people (Genesis)
2.) Sharing a common history (Exodus) 
3.) Having a common law (Deuteronomy)
4.) With a common land (Joshua)
5.) And a Kin King (David’s Kingship)

Our present-day Multicultural empire presents an agenda that is a far cry from a biblical definition of nationhood. Indeed multiculturalism is an attack on the Scripture’s definition of nation in favor of a Babel-like New World Order where we imagine there are no nations and above us only sky.

We agree with the late Sam Francis who defined multiculturalism as “a deliberate device by which the power-hungry can subvert a culture, whose moral codes deny them power, and build an alternative culture, whose different moral codes yield power for themselves.” What Sam failed to mention here is that the alternative culture that the multiculturalists desire is one that is reverse of what Biblical Christianity offers in terms of culture. In point of fact, the culture produced by multiculturalism is anti-culture culture.

However, multiculturalism not only produces an anti-culture culture but in keeping with that it produces an anti-nation nation. Consider that whereas in Classical Liberalism, a key foundational (though untrue) tenet is the separation of Church and state. Multiculturalism extends this by insisting upon the separation of nation and state. For multiculturalists, the state is not identified with a definable nation, nor is the state responsible for any people group that composes the nation. The nation and the state are thus separated.

However, oddly enough the way this works itself out is that the nation and state are not separated because the state ends up being identified with all peoples who will identify with the State’s multiculturalist agenda. All peoples who, regardless of their ethnic origin, will align with a Statist identity are the people who compose the nation whom the State represents.

The multiculturalist separation of nation and state is just a reflection of an alienist agenda. In this arrangement, it is those who refuse to identify ethnically and only will identify ideologically with the State who comprise the nation whom the state represents. Separation of nation and state is a doctrine that kills the nation in favor of the anti-nation nation.

In the end, multiculturalism provides both a culture and a nation but it does so as an anti-nation nation and as an anti-culture culture.  Bono and U2 w0uld be pleased,

I believe when the Kingdom comes
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I’m still running.

So, we live in a time when all the pieces are moving towards a Babelistic New World Order. The vision of the enemy is a uni-culture and a uni- nation. We will have a common people, a common land, a common history, and a common law but it will be the commonality of the contents found in a blender. Resistance is futile. We will all be assimilated.

The media moguls with their Hollywood films, books, radio, and magazines are cramming down our throats the messages of a Globalism that offers an amalgamated, unisex world union as a promised utopia. Likewise, Corporations and Governments are pushing us incessantly towards this nightmare dystopian New World Order vision. Even the modern contemporary Church in the West, both ‘conservative’ and liberal, having reinterpreted Christianity through a Cultural Marxist grid, is pushing this globalist agenda.

To the contrary, we stand with the Dutch theologian Geerhardus Vos, who could write in his Biblical theology,  “Now it is through maintaining the national diversities, as these express themselves in the difference of language, and are in turn upheld by this difference, that God prevents realization of the attempted (Babel) scheme… [In this] was a positive intent that concerned the natural life of humanity. Under the providence of God, each race or nation has a positive purpose to serve, fulfillment of which depends on relative seclusion from others.”

 

Familialism and Folk Sayings

Often the wisdom of a long-standing truth is contained in our aphorisms, proverbs, and apothegms. Here is a brief primer on the long-standing truth of familialism (a love of, and so a proper prioritizing of one’s own kith and kin) as seen by the legacy of folk wisdom.

Our current mad rush towards egalitarianism and culture marxism overturns all this long and storied wisdom handed down by the centuries. With our rush to embrace multiculturalism, multifaithism, and multiracialism, we are cutting ourselves off from the wisdom of generations and generations of Christian forebears who have gone before us. With the embrace of cultural Marxism, with its egalitarian emphasis, we are violating a maxim taught to us by G. K. Chesterton that we should never take a fence down until we know why it was there.

Some of these are more obvious than others. Others will require you to pause and think of just a moment as to how they overturn the current trend of Alienism found among our cultural gatekeepers.

 

1.) Blood is thicker than water.
2.) The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
3.) A leopard cannot change its spots.
4.) Birds of a feather flock together.
5.) Bloom where you’re planted.
6.) You aren’t required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.
7.) The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.
8.) The same law for both the lion and ox is oppression.
9.) You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will hurry back.
10.) Good fences make good neighbors.
11.) Every tub sits on its own bottom.
12.) They that lay down with dogs get up with fleas.
13.) A lamb adopted by a wolf pack will never be the alpha.
14.) Home is where you go when you have no place else to go.
15.) A house divided against itself cannot stand.
16.) Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.
17.) Charity begins at home.
18.) Children are a poor man’s riches.
19.) Like Father, like son.
20.) An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.
21.) Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
22.) Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven that doesn’t make them biscuits.

Hat Tip — Mickey Henry, Ehud Would, Matthew Lee, Colby Malsbury 

 

11 Easy Steps On How To Raise Children Who Will Hate Christ

Dear Pastor,

“The older I grow the greater my concern becomes that I will somehow fail in the main purpose of parenting, and that is to bring up Godly children. I understand it is Christ who does the saving but I am called to be faithful in my duty and that is where I tremble. Am I faithful in studying myself to impart to my Littles? Am I faithful and consistent in my actions? Am I faithful in my training and instructing? My heart’s desire is not to raise “good” children who are cultural Christian, but rather my heart’s desire is to raise warriors of the faith who do not fear man but faithfully serve God.”

Anonymous in Tuscaloosa

Dear Anonymous in Tuscaloosa,

There is no formulaic way to successfully raise our children. To think that there is an easy “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3” type approach would subtly suggest that God’s grace in calling is programmatic. Secondly, such a formulaic response has been disproven by the simple reality that there have been children raised in good families who went bad and children raised in bad families who were convinced and enchanted by God’s grace and so were trophies of His grace.
 
So… let’s look at this from the other direction. Let’s examine if there is a formula for raising God-haters. And here I’d say the answer is “yes.”
 
The formula for raising God-haters.
 
1.) Refuse to discipline your children according to God’s standards. Let them run the roost and be king/queen of a child-centered home. Indulge them and never draw lines or let them know that bad behavior has consequences. On the other hand, be so strict and unreasonable with them that they resent you and your standards. Never let them see mercy. Never let them see how having to discipline them fills you as the parent with sadness because it reflects your failures in parenting.
 
2.) Have the parents not agreed upon the centrality of a Biblical Christian World and life view. The child will naturally gravitate towards the ethic and belief system of the parent who will most naturally indulge their sin.
 
3.) Allow your children to play with friends who are pagans. Scripture teaches, “Be not deceived; bad company corrupts good character.” This is also why youth groups are to be avoided at all costs unless you as the parent are participating to keep both eyes on what is transpiring. You as the parent have the right to veto your children’s friends and who they hang out with. Use that veto power.
 
4.) Send your children to either Government schools and/or lousy churches. The Government schools exist to catechize your children into a pagan non-Christian religion. If you send your children to Government schools you should expect that you will lose your children. Much the same is true of the modern Church. The modern Church (exceptions notwithstanding) will poison your child’s soul and their thinking.
 
5.) Let the example of your living grossly contradict your Christian world and life view. We are all going to be hypocrites at some level because none of us are able to live up to the perfection that the Scriptures call us to, but there is being a hypocrite and then there is being a hypocrite. Parents should pray that their walk conforms ever more closely to their talk so that the children will see the harmony.
 
6.) Refuse to catechize your children in the Christian faith. Refuse to spend time with them in the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Westminister Confession or one of the great summaries of the Faith. Remember, all children will be catechized. It is never a question of whether catechism or not. It is only a question of which catechism. If you will not catechize your children the culture will. Better to self consciously catechize your children than to let them catch their catechism as informed by the culture.
 
7.) Refuse to give your children worldview training. I’m sorry, but in this culture, the catechism is NOT enough. We must also help our children connect the dots of catechism by putting that catechism in the broader context of a biblical Christian world and life view. We must train our children what it means to think Christianly, with basic Christian presuppositions. If they do not receive from us as parents a Christian worldview they will adopt the worldview of the culture and so will be set against Christ. This means comparing and contrasting the Christian mindset with the pagan mindset so that they see and know the differences.
 
8.) So protect your children from the culture that they become fresh meat for the enemy once they finally are exposed to the anti-Christ culture. We must engage the culture with our children while they are children. Concretely, this means helping them see through the smoke screen that the culture puts up to hide its intent. This means reading modern novels together and as you go pointing out the non-Christian thinking. This means viewing films together and pausing the film to point out the non-Christian worldview behind the scene or dialogue. This means coming home from Church and saying to the children, ‘Alright, what did we hear from the pulpit today that is not Christian?” Then pointing it out. Failure to train our children to be cynical and skeptical of the culture is a failure to protect them from the enemy.
 
Note on this one — The compromised Christians around you will hate you for this. I once did a Worldview analysis on a play a “Christian Troupe” did. The cultural Christians rained down hell on me for pointing out how the play contradicted a Christian World and life view.
 
9.) Let your children watch copious about of television as unsupervised and uninformed. Let them play violent video games as unsupervised and uninformed. Let them read trashy novels as unsupervised and uninformed.
 
10.) Refuse to train your children in a skill or ability. In that way, they will grow up not only brain dead but craft and skill dead. Daughters should be learning skills around the home and sons should be learning how they can make a living. Failure to do this will fill your children with resentment and make them conclude that your Christianity is impractical.
 

11.) Refuse to teach your children basic Christian virtue. Instead let them be proud, willful, unkind, disrespectful, rude, cutting, impatient, etc.  As just one example, Scripture warns over and over again against the vice of pride.

16 These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: 17 A proud look

18Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling.

 

Proverbs 8:13
“The fear of the LORD is to hate evil; Pride and arrogance and the evil way And the perverted mouth, I hate.
 
Proverbs 11:2
When pride comes, then comes dishonor, But with the humble is wisdom.
 
 
Proverbs 18:12
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, But humility goes before honor.
 
Proverbs 29:23

A man’s pride will bring him low, But a humble spirit will obtain honor.

As such, if we refuse to discipline our children for pride (and pride is to humans what honey is to bees) then we are raising our children up to be Christ-haters.


Os Guiness has a decent book (some of his examples make me cringe but overall it is helpful) on this subject of virtue. “Steering Through Chaos: Vice and Virtue in an Age of Moral Confusion.”

 

Well, others may be able to add more. This is my recipe on how to make sure to raise Christ-hating children.

Thank you for the letter Anonymous,