Deuteronomy 6:6-9 (NIV):  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

A primary duty for God’s people has always been to pass His word, His commandments down to the next generation.  Someone has said that Christianity is always a single generation away from extinction. That is true of Christianity as well as anything else.  Mathematics, for example, is one generation away from extinction – if no one teaches the children how to do math, the skill would have no way to reach subsequent generations; the chain will be broken.

But knowledge of God is far more important than math, since it serves people not only in this world, but determines their eternal destiny.  That is why God instructed His people early on to continually keep His commandments before themselves, to memorize them, and to impress them on their children so that they would be in their hearts, too.  They were to talk to their children about God, His deeds on behalf of His people as well as His commandments for them, all the time, so that the torch would be solidly passed to the next generation.  He even commanded them to write His words on their homes and buildings, so that they would serve as constant reminders of who God is, and what He has done.

Unfortunately, even back then, God’s people got lax, and they failed to pass the faith on.  As recorded in Judges 2:10-11, “After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.  Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.”  The people of God failed to pass the faith to the next generation, and so they doomed their future generations to more than 300 years of living outside of God’s favor.

To be sure, God is always working to ensure that Christianity never fails.  From a human standpoint, the faith is always a single generation away from extinction.  But from the beginning, God has always ensured that there is preserved at least a spark, from which the true faith in Him will expand and burn brightly again.  He has always preserved a remnant, from the days of righteous Noah, all the way down to the remnant that He is preserving in places where persecution and genocide seem poised to extinguish His light for good.

And so, especially when times seem perilous for the true faith, it is vital that we, as God’s people, act diligently to internalize His word in ourselves, and then to impress that same word so powerfully on our children that the salvation of the next generation and the powerful continuity of the faith, are ensured.  The enemy understands this very well, too.  These days we see many attacks on the faith leveled at precisely this point, to the extent that some today virulently claim that passing on biblical Christianity to the next generation is tantamount to child abuse!  We just need to understand that this is the enemy talking, attempting to cause God’s people to disobey His clear commands, and so endanger the eternal salvation of our children, as well as the future of the faith.

Father, our children are precious to us, so their eternal destiny should always be an area of vital concern to all of us.  Help us to be faithful to You and Your word, as well as to our children, by not merely entrusting their whole knowledge of You to an hour a week in Sunday School, but to obey Your clear command to teach them about You and Your commands ourselves, and to do it constantly.  Help us to faithfully bring up the next generation in Your nurture and admonition, so that the chain is never broken.  Amen.