God's Greatest Priority — The Children

The Lord Cares About Our Kids

With all of God's power and eternity under His belt, He worries about our next generation, about our snot-nosed children. This is one of these texts that totally amazes me and gives me chills:

Here is the Creator of the world. Yes, the whole world and everything that is in it — from the tadpole to the rhinoceros, from the tsunami in the ocean to the highest mountains in the Himalaya, all is created and made by the God of Israel:

Especially in these very dramatic historical moments, the Creator Himself is thinking about our next generation, about how we are going to share and teach and educate our next generations.

The Shema — And What Comes Right After

This is not only in Parashat Bo, dear brothers and sisters. In the holiest text in the whole Bible, notice what God is instructing us to do:

Note: After the great declaration, "The Lord our God is One!" the Lord focuses our attention — our minds and our hearts — on our children, on our homes, houses, and on our daily schedules. There is not some great theological reference to the nature of God, to the angels, or to the Messiah.

Just after this greatest of all proclamations in the Bible, a proclamation that is alluded to from the book of Exodus to the book of Revelation, the next words of God come down from the Olympus of theology and address the issue of "your children." The Creator of the Universe is concerned with our children, with the future generations of disciples of Yeshua our Messiah.

Children as Geiger Counters

For our children are the most efficient and sensitive Geiger counters of an honest and sincere relationship with the Creator. (Geiger counters are detectors of nuclear radiation, or in this case, spiritual bad-smelling stuff.) For this reason God, in His divine revelation, puts these most important moments in the holy history of salvation and emphasizes the importance of the children and the next generations.

Today, we don't really have a real biblical Passover celebration. What we have is a dinner and a retelling of the Passover exodus. There are symbolic representations of what was. However, even today the children play an important role. From the beginning to the end, from the opening with "Ma Nishtana" (the four questions) to the end with the finding of the afikoman (hidden piece of matzah) by the children.

The Qualification That Churches Have Forgotten

We must refocus our ministry and restore the focus that God's word prescribed a long time ago. The greatest treasure that God gave us is our future generations. Not our theological beliefs. We must remember that one of the qualifications for being an elder or a pastor is that he has faithful children. The upshot of this qualification is that if a "pastor's" children are not faithful, i.e. disciples of Yeshua, that pastor is disqualified and must look for another job:

I realize that our Torah reading has so many important aspects and themes that carry through the whole Bible to the book of Revelation, but I can easily get carried away with these first verses because I see the degradation of the youth and the next generations of followers of the Messiah in the world. I see the emphasis of the churches on the physical plant, the building, and other important things for the community, but the most important things that God puts so much emphasis upon are less emphasized and less invested. Your youth ministers — you should have more than one, at least one male and one female youth minister — they ought to be your premium and best-educated most supervised and best paid servants in your community, and the youth programs ought to be your most financially-invested.

May we invest in our children and youth with the seriousness God gives them, passing on faith, love for His Word, and hope in Yeshua.