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.”
Nobody quotes this verse about their own household while it is going well. We save it for other people's, where it explains a family from the outside in a single line, with the advantage of being in the Bible.
It is in the Bible as a proverb, in a book of proverbs. Look at the company it keeps. The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender, usually so and not a law of physics. Proverbs states what generally holds. Read as a guarantee, it promises that a method reliably produces a person, which no chapter of Scripture claims.
It also says less than the quoters think about direction, and nothing about timing. In the way he should go is how nine of the ten English versions this app carries render the phrase; the tenth prints about his way, the old argument surfacing over whether the training follows 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 middle years, and generations of parents have been sentenced on the strength of a season it does not cover.
The counter-cases are in the same Bible and nobody quotes those. Samuel, whom the books lay no charge against, made his sons judges over Israel, and his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes. It runs the other way too. Ahaz made his son to pass through the fire. That son was Hezekiah, who did that which was right in the sight of the LORD. Ezekiel said it flatly to a generation using heredity as an alibi: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.
Aim the warning at the quoter rather than the parent. Used privately to work out what went wrong in somebody else's house, it makes a verdict out of a proverb, and it was not built to carry one. Said to a grieving mother, it tells her that her son was her output. The proverb stays true as a proverb: what goes into a child usually tells, and that is worth every year it costs. It was never a receipt.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 239 is Compassed with Favor (Psalm 5:12).