Hello and welcome. Recently we have learned from the Bible that May 21 in the year 2011 will be Judgment Day. Since this information comes directly from the Bible, the Word of God, God’s people trust it, believe it, and know that this is going to take place.
Possessing this information cannot help but influence everything that we do in our lives. Understanding that the end is at hand ought to impact all areas of our lives. For instance, our families, we have husbands or wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other relations.
Well today, let us think about how knowing these things that are coming forth from the Bible concerning time and judgment ought to affect our children, the Christian’s raising of his children, the father who desires to bring up his children under the care and protection of the Lord.
The Bible tells us this in Ephesians 6:4:
And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Yes, a believing father desires greatly to share the Gospel with his children. The father does not pick and choose what truths from the Bible to teach; he teaches whatever he has learned from the Bible.
Of course, since we have learned about May 21, 2011 and we are getting ever closer to this day, any father who is in fear and trembling for his own children, who loves them so much and so greatly, will want to give this information to his son or to his daughter, to his little ones. Even if they are not that little, the believing father just desires that God might have mercy and save one or two or all of his children. I think that this is really the prayer of every father and mother, that all of their children might be saved.
Hebrews 11 is a chapter that outlines the faith of Christ and certain people of God who received God’s gift of faith. In Hebrews 11:20, it says:
By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.
This was quite a long time ago, thousands of years ago, but it was the same Gospel. It was the same Bible truths that we have today concerning judgment and salvation. So, too, with father Isaac and with his twin sons, Jacob and Esau, which God uses elsewhere in the Bible to typify the saved and unsaved of the world.
Isaac loved both of them. Yes, he preferred Esau. He enjoyed eating some of the meals that Esau would cook after hunting; but really, he loved both of his children. Every father loves his children, whether they give evidence of salvation or not.
So we read that Isaac blessed both Jacob and Esau “concerning things to come.” He did not hold back. He did not just reveal some things. Whatever Isaac knew that was true about God and man’s condition and our desperate need of a Saviour, he imparted that knowledge to both of his sons. In doing so, he was bringing them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
This is what we are to do, the fathers and mothers of our day who know these things, who know that the end is coming. We cannot just sit down and have discussions with our children about college education or, “Oh, will it not be wonderful when you grow up and get married and have children of your own?” We would love to talk to them about future occupations, about being a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman or a soldier, things far off in the distance; but no, we cannot get into these discussions. We have to stop them and say, “Son, daughter, please understand, the future that you are talking about is never going to come because the end is at hand.”
We must share this truth that we have learned from the Bible with them, praying all the while, “O Lord, open their eyes, open their ears that they might understand and see and take warning.”