“He is not only the Creator but also the Preserver of all things [Col. 1:16–17].
If he did not sustain life, which he called into existence, with his omnipotent and omnipresent power moment by moment, it would immediately sink back into nothingness.
God would be able, if this pleased him, to bring about this preservation without any means, even as he preserved Moses for forty days on the mountain and Jesus in the wilderness [Exod. 24:18; 34:28; Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13].
He would be able to bring it about in an unusual way, even as he sent ravens to provide for Elijah at the brook Cherith and nourished Israel for forty years with manna from heaven [Exod. 16:4; 1 Kings 17:2–6].
But as a rule, God’s work of preservation is indirect. He uses food and drink to nourish us, and he uses parents, as the natural caregivers, to provide for the many needs of the child. The parents must lay up treasures for the children, and the children live on those treasures. They have not earned them, nor in the least are they entitled to them; the children are purely dependent and live by grace.
Nevertheless, it is not really bread that feeds us, but the word that comes from the mouth of God [Matt. 4:4]. Man cannot live simply by bread alone, but by the word, the command, the power, the blessing that God has placed on the bread and communicated to us. That which nourishes us is what pleases God to provide with power.
What nutrition is to the natural realm, upbringing is to the spiritual realm. It would not be too amazing for God also to preserve a person’s whole spiritual life without any means.
Nevertheless, it pleases him to allow people to bring up other people and above all with the word to permit them to work toward the forming and growing of the soul. From childhood, it is through the influence of others that mind and heart, conscience and will, disposition and imagination are formed in people.
Likewise, in the nourishment of the spiritual life, which comes through regeneration, God does not work in a different way.
Parents are principally instruments in the hand of God, employed to guide the spiritual lives of their children toward maturity. Nature itself already points to this, for it is in the circle of the family that the children receive their life and spend their first years.
God in his revelation is compatible with his teaching in nature. Under Israel, the Lord sharpened the duty of the parents: that they should recount the great works that God had done in their midst to their children and their children’s children; that they must give an explanation of the ceremonies that take place in their worship, especially those of the Passover; and that they must instruct them in the laws, in the statutes and judgments that God had given to his people.
Even as the Lord himself was the Father and Tutor of his people, so the parents must be the physical and spiritual caregivers of their children.
This duty is bound even stronger to the hearts of the parents in the days of the New Testament. Jesus particularly invites the children to himself. He blesses them and promises them the kingdom of heaven [Matt. 19:13–15]. Not less than the parents, the children share in the blessing of Christ.
Therefore, the apostles esteem them highly, including them—as well as adults in the community of Christ—and exhorting them to be obedient to their parents in the Lord. On parents, they lay the duty not to provoke their children to anger but to nurture them in the instruction and admonition of the Lord [Eph. 6:1–4].
When Christianity entered the world, it restored and sanctified the broken bonds of family life. It gave the husband to the wife, the mother to the children, the children once more to the parents.
And under the impression of that moral transformation a church father wrote this beautiful word: ‘The mother is the glory of the children, the wife the glory of the husband and both are the glory of the wife.’”
–Herman Bavinck, The Sacrifice of Praise: Meditations Before and After Admission to the Lord’s Supper, Trans. and Ed. Cameron Clausing and Gregory Parker Jr (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2019), 16-18.
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