Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 239 · August 27
Train Up a Child
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
We do not usually quote this verse about our own family while things are going well. We save it for other people's families, where it seems to explain a whole household from the outside in a single line, with the weight of the Bible behind it.
It is in the Bible as a proverb, in a book of proverbs, and the company it keeps shows what kind of saying it is. The very next verse says, "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender." That is usually so, but it is no law of nature. Proverbs tells us what generally holds true. If you read this verse as a guarantee, you make it promise that a method will always produce a certain kind of person, and no chapter of Scripture claims that.
The verse also says less about direction than people think, and nothing about timing. In Hebrew, "in the way he should go" reads, word for word, "according to his way." Readers have long argued whether that means the right road or the child's own bent. And "when he is old" is a long way off, so the verse says nothing about the years in between. Even so, generations of parents have been judged for a season it does not cover.
The examples that go the other way are in the same Bible, and they are seldom quoted. Scripture brings no charge against Samuel as a father, yet when he made his sons judges over Israel, "his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes." It runs the other way too. King Ahaz "made his son to pass through the fire," yet his son Hezekiah "did that which was right in the sight of the LORD." Ezekiel said it flatly to a generation that blamed their fathers for everything: "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father."
So the warning here is for the person quoting the verse more than for the parent. If you use it in private to work out what went wrong in somebody else's house, you turn a proverb into a verdict, and it was never built to carry one. Said to a grieving mother, it tells her that her son is simply her product. The proverb stays true as a proverb: what goes into a child usually shows, and it is worth every year it costs. Children are finally in God's hands rather than a parent's method, and the God who raised up Hezekiah in the house of Ahaz can still reach a son or daughter who has wandered far.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 239 is Compassed with Favour (Psalm 5:12).