Train Up a Child
These four words can conjure up pain and disappointment for many believers. I’ve talked to many Christian parents who have now grown children who are not walking with the Lord. Often these parents are aged, their children have spent many years living in the world, yet the parents still hope in a childhood profession of some kind or hope for some fruit for all their efforts to raise their children in the faith, in a Christian environment.
Some will cling to this verse in Proverbs as a promise that despite a lifetime of spiritual rebellion, a Christian raised child will someday return to the faith:
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. (Pr 22.6)
I’ve read many commentaries on this verse as well as lengthy essays about it. How should we take these words? There are four main views:
- The Promise view sees this verse as a great encouragement to parents, virtually guaranteeing that good parenting will mean adult faith, if not now, someday soon. It seems most translators at least cater to this view and it may be the majority view among Christians.
- The Age-Appropriate view suggests that parents should be careful to train their children according to their stage of life, with expectations and requirements for a toddler that drastically change when the young person becomes a teen or young adult. This view sees the verse as wise advice, with the hope that appropriate training will result in proper adult behaviour.
- The Adaptive Training view is similar, but tailors training more to the child’s interests and abilities, leading the young person to become “all he (or she) can be.” More than just encouraging skills and abilities (which, I guess, every parent will want to do), this view advocates being sensitive to how the child best responds to leadership, what kinds of things work with each child, and then in old age the child will turn out all right. This is a child-centered approach to raising children.
- The Warning view takes quite a different approach. One of the better studies on Proverbs is written by Dan Phillips.1 Along with Jay Adams, this view takes the verse as an ironic warning against a child-centered approach. Here is the way Phillips paraphrases the verse:
Start out a youth according to his own way;
even should he grow old, he will not turn away from it.2
What he means is that the warning is if you train the child according to his own (self-centered) way, you can be pretty sure when he is old, he will live just like that. One problem with this view is that “his own way” is an interpretive translation, this meaning doesn’t come from the original Hebrew.
I have a fifth view, which I of course think is the right one, that I’ll explain at the end of this article.
Phillips also offers a helpful word for word very literal translation to help with our understanding:
Initiate for-the-child on-the-mouth-of his-way
even-when he-is-old he-will-not-turn from-it.3
First, the word “train up” (kjv et al) or “initiate” as here. The word is used only five times in four verses in the Old Testament. Every other use has to do with some kind of building as the object of this verb. If we take “train up” from Proverbs and apply it to these verses, we get some amusing results. Dt 20.5 would then instruct us to “train up your house,” while 1 Ki 8.63 and 2 Chr 7.5 would have Solomon “train up the temple.” You will see in these verses we have the translation “dedicate.” While contexts affect meaning so that a word can mean different things in different contexts, I think the idea of “initiate” can work in all these contexts.
The word for “child” has a wide range of meanings from a babe in the womb to a young man in his late teens. Interestingly, in Proverbs it is parallel to the naïve in 1.4 and 7.7. The naïve are a recurrent theme in Proverbs. In a way, the burden of Proverbs is to help the naïve get over his naivety. The naïve need wisdom. Whether a child is a babe or a teen, he is still inexperienced and he definitely needs wisdom.
In the kjv, we have “in the way he should go.” The idea of “oughtness” or “should” is an interpretation – the literal Hebrew expression is as Phillips puts it: “on-the-mouth-of his-way.” This is an idiom. In Gen 34.26 it is translated about killing someone “with the edge of the sword,” or, literally, “with the mouth of the sword.” In Lev 25.16, the value of land was calculated according to “the mouth of the years” until the next Jubilee. In other words, you start with the year of the transaction (the mouth of the years), calculate to Jubilee, and you have your price.
From this, we could simply translate this as “initiate the naïve child at the beginning of his way…”
The rest of the verse seems straightforward — whatever the initiation of the child is, he will tend to follow it to the end of his days.
Now how does this fit in with the views I mentioned at the beginning of this article?
We must remember that Proverbs is proverbial. It is a book of wisdom. Solomon has made or collected wise sayings about various aspects of life. For this verse, I subscribe to what I call the Proverbial view. Is it not generally true that how you start a young person, he will generally turn out the way he is started? As a general truth (as almost all the sayings of Proverbs are), it is not always true. We know many people who started out wrong, got saved, and changed. “Such were some of you,” 1 Cor 6.11. Praise the Lord!
But usually, the way a child starts is the way he goes.
So, how do we apply this? When we have those naïve little ones in our care, we need to expend every effort to start them on the right path. We should make the Christian life our very earnest life, faithfully and joyfully attending church, having family devotions, saturating our homes and lives with Scripture and the songs of the church. We should eschew the world as much as is practicable, especially being circumspect with the world’s entertainment, finding delight in Christian life and service and communicating that to our kids.
To be sure, as children develop interests and abilities, we should start them on that path with wise direction, helping them see what to avoid and what to cultivate. There is such a thing as art (for example) that glorifies God, and art that does not. We should start our young people on a path that understands and appreciates the difference. The same holds true with music, writing, work, athletics, or any other field of human endeavor.
What shall we do or say, though, about those scenarios I mentioned at the very beginning? What of those parents who tragically see their children depart from the faith?
First, each child has a will of their own, and they may reject the path on which they were started. We have to face the fact that a childhood profession could perhaps never have been a real possession of living faith. When we have church members who fall away, we treat them as unbelievers and our objective is to evangelize them. It would be a better service to pray earnestly for our child’s salvation than to assume they were ever born again way back when.
Second, we also may need to repent of our failings as parents. Who is not conscious of some failing as a parent? And what of our unconscious failings? We need to examine our own hearts every day and plead for God’s mercy and grace to be the kind of leaders and Christians we ought to be. But I am not advocating overly beating one’s self up for the failings of the past. I am advocating that we look at ourselves and starting now, get on the right path ourselves.
After all, the Proverb says something like this: “initiate the naïve at the beginning of his way, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Today is the beginning of the rest of your way. Turn to God, start afresh, and trust God for blessing.
Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Photo by Specialized and used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.