by Matthew Raley As a parent, I find it easy to think that my boys are rebelling against my rules. They don't like the limits I set, so they try to overturn them.

Until recently I have read the stories of Israel's rebellions against the Lord from the same perspective. The people hated the law, so they disregarded it. My misconception could stem from the definition of rebellion: it is the overthrow of authority. So the target of rebellion would seem to be law.

Yet, when Moses writes his song of witness against Israel's rebellions (Deuteronomy 31-32), the law of God is only a secondary focus.

Here is the song’s theme (32:4): “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” This teaching about the Lord’s name (32:1-3) should “drop as the rain” and “distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass.” The knowledge of God’s faithfulness renews the nation’s life, keeping it tender and green.

The witness Moses writes is not first concerned with the nation’s sin, but with God’s faithfulness.

Moses sings of it both in the past and the future.

The Lord found Jacob “in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness.” There the Lord kept Jacob “as the apple of his eye,” leading him into the fruitful land (32:10-14).

The Lord’s faithfulness will not change in coming generations, even after Jacob rebels against him. As a contrast to helpless idols (32:36-43), the Lord will “vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.” God proclaims, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me.” Ultimately, he “cleanses,” or atones for, the land.

Here is what I learned from the song about rebellion's target. Moses does not charge the people with rebelling against law, but against grace.

To be sure, Israel has broken God’s law, and no man can itemize the trespasses in greater detail than Moses. Yet Moses charges the people with rebellion against the Lord’s protection (32:11), guidance (32:12), and material gifts (32:13-14). He portrays the Lord as jealous, like a spurned lover (32:21). Israel's rebellion is perverse, in other words, because the people cast aside God's goodness.

This means that the four characteristics of rebellion all target God's faithfulness. Idolatry says that the living God cannot be trusted because we cannot manipulate him. The principal lies rebels tell are slanders against God's record of goodness. Rebels scoff at God's gifts, especially his forgiveness. A rebel's refusal to listen is driven by his bitter determination that God is against him.

Studying Moses' song has clarified my focus as a dad.

Rules matter. But I am not to be focused on them primarily. I am to call on my boys to trust me, and I am to demonstrate trustworthiness.

For instance, I have been deliberate about keeping my promises to the boys. But I want to go further. I want to gain their implicit confidence. I do this by taking the initiative to help them with problems, not just waiting for them to ask for help. I also nurture this confidence by helping them express themselves when they're having trouble, and by paying careful attention to their emotions. I want them to assume that I am for them, not against them.

Here's what I've found in applying this focus. When my boys trust me, the rules usually aren't an issue for them. They tend to comply readily.

In other words, this approach is a way to teach obedience toward God in faith. In Christ, God's authority is expressed toward us through grace.

by Matthew Raley We've been seeing that the sin of rebellion is, at its core, a refusal to deal with reality.

Moses' description of Israel in Deuteronomy 31-32 shows a nation unwilling to worship the real God, serving only their imagined deities. They were unwilling to face the real past and present truthfully, but fabricated bitter histories. And they were unwilling to face life with humility, preserving a deluded superiority with scoffing.

The fourth characteristic of rebellion in Deuteronomy is foolish obstinacy. Repeated experience of reality will not turn Israel from folly.

Moses calls the people “stubborn” (31:27), noting that their rebellion during his life will only intensify after his death. In his song, he dramatizes their refusal to listen, calling them “foolish and senseless,” and pleading (32:6-7), “[A]sk you father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.”

Yet again, this is a quality all too familiar in the nation’s history.

The Lord called the people “stiff-necked” after they made the golden calf (Exodus 32:9). Nothing had changed by Ezekiel’s time. The Lord warned him (Ezekiel 3:7), “But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me. Because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart.”

Again, the logic of rebellion dictates this attitude. No rebel can admit having learned from anyone except himself. To learn from experience would be to admit that he was wrong. To listen to others would be to admit that their priorities matter. To be taught, by definition, is to be turned from one’s own way. None of these things are tolerable.

The rebel would rather self-destruct than submit.

Now, there is an important consideration for a parent in this regard. I worry about a child who has no fight.

One of the biggest reasons I am against authoritarian parenting systems that emphasize compliance -- systems like Michael Pearl's, for example -- is that they are designed to break a child's will. Not soften. Break. That is why Pearl describes his system in terms of conditioning animals.

It doesn't take too much acquaintance with life to realize that a child is going to need his or her will to be strong. Adults have to make decisions, and make their decisions stick. Christ calls us to persevere against the world's constant wickedness. A Christian's duty is frequently to stand alone.

In light of this, I am not raising compliant boys. I am fortifying their wills for the days ahead, when they will need every last bit of resolution for godliness.

Is there a difference between resolution and obstinacy?

I believe there is. I've noticed that resolute people are able to persist in moving toward their goals because they adapt. They are profound learners, and quick listeners. That is, they do not ignore reality, but find real ways around real barriers.

A resolute leader such as Lincoln offers a good example. He refused to consider any outcome of the Civil War but restoring the Union. But in his drive toward that goal, he adapted to circumstances constantly. He changed his generals, maintained political coalitions, and managed the timing of such pronouncements as the Emancipation Proclamation. He adapted.

So how do we foster a resolve that is tempered by a willingness to learn?

Teaching a high view of God is the answer once again. When our children are taught to listen to him, to learn his ways, and to pursue his goals, they inherit a balance of traits than can only come from reverence. Our awe of God teaches us both what is yet to be learned and what must never be compromised.

Next week, we'll discover from Deuteronomy what may be the most important point of all about rebellion.

by Matthew Raley Sarcasm is my default mode. My favorite form of literature is satire, and I bond quickly with anyone who has wit.

I am like much of my generation, which seems to have rejected the true believer's ardor in favor of irony. But in me, scoffing is also a tic that comes with being self-taught. Autodidacts don't submit. They too quickly dismiss what they've heard before because the notion wasn't original with them. These qualities made me a difficult boy to raise -- as my parents often affirm.

So the third characteristic of rebellion that we discovered in Deuteronomy 31-32, contempt, was uncomfortable for me to study.

The Lord foretells that the Israelites “will despise me,” having “grown fat” from the land’s fruit (31:20). Moses finishes that sketch in the song (32:15). “But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked; you grew fat, stout, and sleek; then he forsook God who made him and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.”

Persistent scoffing was a feature of Israel’s camp life in the wilderness.

One thinks of Korah’s sarcastic jab at Moses, taking the phrase that described the land of Canaan and applying it to Egypt (Numbers 16:13). “Is it a small thing that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, that you must also make yourself a prince over us?”

Scoffing would remain the scourge of Israel’s prophets right down to the last, as the Lord warned Ezekiel (2:6). “And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions. Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house.”

I identify too closely with this kind of contempt.

As I said in another post, scoffing is like an energy drink. It gives a false feeling of superiority, of remaining unaffected by others, and of knowing people’s “real” motivations. And once you get hooked on it, weaning yourself off the security of sarcasm is difficult.

A pattern of scoffing, in this sense, is just like the patterns of idolatry and lying we've already seen: it breaks a person's contact with that unyielding master, reality. It fortifies him in rebellion, the exaltation of his subjective world over the claims of others.

The job of a parent is often to strengthen some of a child's ways against others.

In my case, Dad and Mom tamed my contempt for others, and for authority generally, by strengthening my sense of God's majesty and a reverence for truth. With a conviction that I must not lie, I was already sensitized to my own fakery. More than that, having already believed that God will not adapt to my priorities but that I must adapt to his, I was not going to venture any contempt for him.

These have helped me keep my flair for satire within a proper, narrow scope: puncturing self-regard, my own included, and exposing the folly of human hatred against God.

The most potent tool for parenting is not rules, which feed a scoffer's conceit, but a high view of God. That alone can humble the proud.

by Matthew Raley Rebellion in a child is not a phase, and it doesn't just happen. Rebellion is the sin of disregarding or overthrowing authority, and as we saw last week, it is the convergence of four patterns.

These four are on display in Deuteronomy 31-32, where Israel's past and future rebellions are confronted. In chapter 31, the Lord commands Moses to draft a written witness against Israel to set beside the ark of the covenant. Chapter 32 contains the witness itself, a song about the Lord's faithfulness and the nation's twisted response.

Let's think in more detail about the first pattern described in these chapters, idolatry.

After Moses’s death, the Lord says (31:16), Israel “will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them . . . .” The sexual metaphor captures the intimacy of Israel’s coming betrayal: having taken God’s faithful love the people will reject any bond with him.

Moses dramatizes this unfaithfulness in the song of witness (32:16-18). “They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods . . . They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently.”

Rebellion through idolatry has been characteristic of Israel throughout Moses’s life. Most notoriously, the nation made the golden calf at Sinai (Exodus 32:1-6), calling it by the Lord’s name and proclaiming that it had brought them out of Egypt. Israel also worshiped Baal of Peor in Moab (Number 25:1-5).

Israel’s idolatry after Moses is well-documented in the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord called to “nations of rebels” (Ezekiel 2:3), offers an important reference point. He gave repeated descriptions of the nation’s whoring after false gods, with abominations even brought into the temple (8:7-18). Inside, “engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel.”

So Israel's rebellion both under Moses and after him consistently involved the worship of false gods.

The close association between the scriptural concepts of rebellion and idolatry is no accident. Rebellion has a perverse logic. The Bible’s God is sovereign, making submission to him the only option. For the rebel to gain control of his life, he must fabricate a new god, a pliable deity whom he can manipulate through rituals and rationalizations. A woman who was leaving her husband put this rationale to me quite succinctly: “My god wants me to be free.”

People often grow up treating God like he’s made of Legos.

There’s a pile of ideas of about God on the carpet, and your job is to assemble God out of them. So you try different ideas and see how God looks. If an idea about God’s justice doesn’t work for you, it’s like a black Lego that looks out of place. Pull it off and try a red one, a piece of mercy perhaps, and see if it doesn’t look better. Or if a Bible verse seems like a “hard saying” to you, it’s nothing more than a block that’s too big. The Bible has other verses. Find a smaller block.

Whatever. They’re your Legos.

If you want to nurture your child in a way that prevents rebellion, that first thing you have to do is teach him about idolatry. Train him that the real God does not conform to his imagination.

One summer when Dylan was 2 years old, we stopped in Ashland, Oregon, one of neo-paganism's many little pleasure domes. In a store, I noticed a wall full of Buddhas and a sampling of Hindu gods. I walked Dylan over to a shelf at his eye-level, got down on one knee, pointed to a fat and happy Siddhartha, and said, "Son, this is an idol. Many people believe this is a god."

Knitted eyebrows.

"People pray to him, and even bring him food."

Laughter.

I pointed at the whole wall of shelves. "This store sells idols."

I did this more than once when Dylan was small. He is now 9, and has a deep aversion to idols. The other night, I was reading him The Lightning Thief, the well-written series opener by Rick Riordan that treats Greek mythology as if it were happening today. We enjoyed it enormously. After I closed the book, he knitted his eyebrows and said, "I can't understand why anyone would pray to those gods."

When we instill the truth early that God is God, and will not yield His being to the human imagination, we are building powerful categories for discerning reality from fantasy. Further, we are teaching a child to yield to reality -- the one thing a rebel will never do.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex%2032.1-6&version=ESV

by Matthew Raley One day when I was 11, I stood eyes down in our family’s laundry room while Dad bawled me out. I don’t remember what I had done. But I do remember taking my eyes off a pile of dirty rags and giving Dad the sharpest look my face could make. And I remember the look as a conscious decision.

Dad changed. His voice dropped. “You are looking at me with defiance. Don’t you know that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft?”

He was quoting the verse we examined last week, 1 Samuel 15.23, in which the prophet defines rebellion as the overthrow or disregard of authority, and the search for power.

Rebellion is not a phase in a child's life. Identity formation is a phase; rebellion is a sin.

It takes strength for a child to maintain defiance against his parents -- moral and emotional strength. Morally, a child has to be convinced that his defiance is right. Emotionally, he has to be able to hold his course without parental approval.

Maintaining strength requires the child to twist his mind and habits with falsehoods.

The twisting is on display in Deuteronomy 31. The Lord and Moses confront the rebellions of Israel, both in the past and those coming in the future. The passage shows that rebellion is a close association of four distinct sins, all of which give rebels a feeling of empowerment.

1. Idolatry.

The Lord says (31:16) that after Moses' death Israel “will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them . . . .” That is, they will leave the true God who loves them, has brought them out of Egypt, and is giving them their own land, and will follow the gods of their imagination.

Rebels have to receive spiritual blessing from somewhere. They fabricate gods who will meet the need. A woman recently told me she was leaving her husband. "Your God wants me to be in bondage," she said. "My god wants me to be free."

2. Lying.

The Lord tells Moses that Israel will “break my covenant that I have made with them,” a phrase he repeats four verses later (31:16, 20). He is referring back to the covenant at Sinai and ahead to the renewal of that covenant in the land (Joshua 24.19-22). The nation is going to lie.

I have noticed a pattern in rebellious people, both young and old, of deceit. They create different personalities for different sets of people. They make up half-histories of ill treatment -- legitimate claims, but highly selective. And they tell outright falsehoods.

3. Scorn.

The Lord foretells that the Israelites “will despise me,” having “grown fat” from the land’s fruit (31:20).

A rebel’s emotional life needs the energy drink of scoffing. The feeling of superiority, of remaining unaffected by others, and of knowing people’s “real” motivations becomes the animating power of the rebel’s personality. There’s security in sarcasm.

4. Stubbornness.

Moses tells the people (31:27), “For I know how rebellious and stubborn you are. Behold, even today while I am yet alive with you, you have been rebellious against the Lord. How much more after my death!”

Rebels do not listen. They debate, rationalize, and shift blame. But they do not consider the points of view they don't agree with.

We will look at each of these characteristics in more detail over the next few weeks.

For now, here's the point. I do not think of my fatherly task as controlling my boys behavior at all levels so as to make them compliant. Instead, my task is to counter these four sins separately, before they join. My boys need to learn how to gain strength from the true God, Jesus Christ, strength from being personally truthful, from cultivating humility, and from a habit of listening to counsel. They need to draw strength from grace.

This is how my parents raised me. So, in our laundry room when I consciously attempted defiance, I did not have the toxic compound of sins to carry it off. My strength was already coming from good sources. I submitted sincerely, for the right reasons.

Looking back, it was a crucial moment in the formation of my identity as a man.