Samson #1 - His Home — Andrew Foster

When Alan gave me the invitation to come, there was a passage or a study that came to my mind almost instantly when he spoke of the conference. And I'd like to share some messages with you over the next day or two on the life of Samson.

Samson’s Call in Judges 13

And so we're going to make a start this afternoon in Judges chapter 13. And I'd like for us to take the time to read Judges 13. If you take the time to find the place in the Word of God, we're going to read together in just a moment.

But before we begin to read, we're going to bow in prayer and pray for the Lord's help. We'll be reading at Judges 13 in the verse 1, but let's please take a moment and, dear child of God, make it your earnest prayer today that God will speak to you.

You need to hear the voice of the Lord. I need to hear the Lord speak. That's the unusual privilege of being a preacher. You get to speak and to listen at the same time. I need to hear a word from God.

So do you. Let's bow our hearts before the Lord together now, please. Our Father in heaven, we come to thee with the Word of God in our hand. We thank thee for the unspeakable privilege it is to have the infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of the living God.

But our Father, we also recognize that of ourselves we cannot understand these things. We can sympathize even yet as Christians with the words of the Ethiopian eunuch. Understandest thou what thou readest?

How can I except some man should tell me? O God, grant us now the help of the Holy Ghost. It is that ministry, Lord, that looks for Christ in the book that we want to have today. We pray that we will know something of that Emmaus Road experience when Jesus Himself drew near and went with them, when He opened the Scriptures and showed to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself, and warm our hearts to that end, we pray.

O God, bless us today with a word from Myself. We need help. We feel our helplessness. We are here because we recognize a little of the need that we are in, and yet we freely confess our need is greater than we are prepared to admit.

Lord, we put a brave face on it at times, but our Father, what a mess the Church of Christ is in these days. Lord, grant us help now to learn from the Word of the living God and stir us and revive us for Jesus' sake.

Bless now the reading of Thy Word, and in a moment the preaching of Thy Word. Pour out the power of the Holy Ghost that we might speak and hear in the name of Christ, and for His glory we pray. Amen. Judges 13, verse 1,.

And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years. And there was a certain man of Zorah of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah, and his wife was barren and bare not.

And the angel of the woman said unto her, Behold, thou art barren and barest not, but thou shalt conceive and bear a son. Now therefore beware, I pray thee, and drink not wine, nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing.

For lo, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall come on his head, for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb. And he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.

Then the woman came and told her husband, saying, The man of God came unto me, and his countenance was like the countenance of an angel of God, very terrible. But I asked him not whence he was, neither told he me his name.

But he said unto me, Behold, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, and now drink no wine, nor strong drink, neither eat any unclean thing. For the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb to the day of his death.

Then Manoah entreated the Lord, and said, O my Lord, let the man of God which thou didst send come again unto us, and teach us what we shall do unto the child that shall be born. And God hearkened to the voice of Manoah, and the angel of God came again unto the woman as she sat in the field.

But Manoah, her husband, was not with her. And the woman made haste and ran, and showed her husband, and said unto him, Behold, the man hath appeared unto me that came unto me the other day. And Manoah rose and went after his wife, and came to the man, and said unto him, Art thou the man that speakest unto the woman?

And he said, I am. And Manoah said, Now that thy words come to pass, how shall we order the child, and how shall we do unto him? And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, Of all that I said unto the woman, let her beware.

She may not eat of anything that cometh of the vine, neither let her drink wine, or strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing. All that I commanded her, let her observe. And Manoah said unto the angel of the Lord, I pray thee, let us detain thee until we shall have made ready a kid for thee.

The angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, Though thou detain me, I will not eat of thy bread. And if thou wilt offer a burnt offering, thou must offer it unto the Lord. For Manoah knew not that he was an angel of the Lord.

And Manoah said unto the angel of the Lord, What is thy name, that when thy sayings come to pass, we may do thee honor? The angel of the Lord said unto him, Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?

So Manoah took a kid with a meat offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the Lord. And the angel did wondrously. And Manoah and his wife looked on. For it came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar.

And Manoah and his wife looked on it, and fell on their faces to the ground. But the angel of the Lord did no more appear to Manoah unto his wife. Then Manoah knew that he was an angel of the Lord. And Manoah said unto his wife, We shall surely die, because we have seen God.

But his wife said unto him, If the Lord were pleased to kill us, he would not have received a burnt offering and a meat offering at our hands, neither would he have showed us all these things, nor would, as at this time, have told us such things as these.

And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson. And the child grew, and the Lord blessed him. And the Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtoah.

Amen. May God add his blessing to our Bible reading. As we begin to look at the life of Samson that is recorded for us in the scriptures, I want very much to make application of that truth to our present circumstances in the Church of Jesus Christ.

I know that many of you are here today because of a deep concern for the state of Christ's body in the earth. A deep concern over the decline, the weakness, the powerlessness, the error, the emptiness of much that is called Christianity today.

You have a concern. Does God have an answer? Absolutely he does. And it's the same answer that he has always given, because the Church of Christ has been here before, many times. The circumstances that we witness all around us today in the visible church are not new.

They are not new. And the answer is an old answer. It's simply to look into the Word of God and discover what it was God did for his people before when they were in such circumstances. And that, I think, is one of the reasons why the book of Judges is a profitable study for God's people in these days.

Sin, Chastisement, and the Cycles of Judges

You will know that that book records cycles of blessing and deliverance and then decline into sin and bondage and chastisement and judgment and God's favor and blessing was lost, only to be restored again as God stepped in and mercy and raised up a judge, a deliverer who came in the power of God and whether on a large or local scale, exercised that reviving, restoring influence among the people of God.

Judges 13 opens for us a view into one of those last cycles, because we're coming to one of the final chapters in those centuries known as the times of the judges. And rather than go back into all of the history to this point, we're just going to try to draw a line and jump right in here at verse 1 of chapter 13.

The children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. Here is that point in the cycle where there is a departure from God. Oh, the wheel has turned so many times up to this point. Previously, we've had judges like Jephthah, and you may be familiar with Jephthah's story in the previous chapters here.

Under God, Jephthah saw deliverance. He was followed by three more judges, a little more obscure, who covered 18 years between them. There was a period of rest and now God's people again foolishly depart from the law.

The short answer to the question, why are we here again, is given to us in the verse 1 of this chapter. The children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. That's why. The reason why the church of Christ is in the state that it is in today, and when I speak like that, I do not for a moment want either to divorce myself from its current condition or give you grounds to divorce yourself from its current condition.

If you're a Christian today, as I am, you are part of the church. You're part of the problem. I'm not saying that every child of God is guilty of the same sins, but ultimately we are all part of the problem.

You study the revivals that are recorded in God's word, and you will discover inevitably that when it comes to the point of a confessing of sin, it's the best of men like Ezra, like Daniel, like Nehemiah, that are on their face before God and say, we have sinned.

Read Daniel's confession of sin in chapter 9, and there's not a blemish recorded in Bible history against Daniel's character before God, and he confessed his sin like one of the worst offenders in the nation, because he was part of the corporate body of Christ, and part of his responsibility was to own up to that corporate need and to confess it as his own.

Why are we here? As in, why are we at this point again in the cyclical history of the people of God? The place of powerlessness, the place where we have to say the spiritual enemies of the gospel are running all over us, they're trampling us into the dirt.

We have no power, we have no liberty, we have no influence. Why? Sin. That's the reason. There's no other reason. Why have we lost the power of God? Sin. The children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord.

Don't you find it an interesting thing here that there's absolutely no detail recorded about what they did? In one sense, it doesn't matter what they did as far as specific activities were concerned. We're told here it was evil in the eyes of God.

So many different forms of sin. The sin that will beset me is perhaps one you have no difficulty with, or vice versa. It'll not be so much my specific sin as opposed to your specific sin that is the major problem in the church.

It's sin generally. All sin. We don't know, or we don't need to know so much what they did on this occasion to grieve God. We can look into other descriptions in this book and in other passages of God's Word for the sake of time.

We're not going to do that. But you will find idolatry, you will find pride, you will find disobedience, you will find it turning away from the truth of God in one fashion or another. It was evil. And God delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.

They're given into the hand of the Philistines. God's people called to liberty. Yes, but when they sin, they sacrifice their liberty. Called to be the masters of the enemies of God in the land, but here being reduced to their servants because they did evil in the sight of the Lord.

It's a very, very simple exercise in spiritual logic to argue from cause to effect and effect back to cause. This is not the first time the Lord has used these enemies to chastise His people. Like in chapter 3, we read at a much earlier period in Israel's history, just one of those beautiful references to Shamgar, just one verse recording his ministry.

After him was Shamgar, the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with enough gold, and he also delivered Israel. Boy, there's so much in that verse. One man, what a work for God he did.

But we're interested especially in the enemy that he was dealing with. God had used the Philistines to chastise His people because of their sin. In chapter 10 and the verse 7, you will discover a second instance.

The anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hands of the Philistines. Why the Philistines on this occasion? Well, look at verse 6, the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord and served Baram and Asheroth and the gods of Syria and the gods of Zidon and the gods of Moab and the gods of the children of Ammon and the gods of the Philistines and forsook the Lord and served him not.

They adopted the religion of the Philistines and now they're going to have to deal with the influence of the Philistines as their taskmaster. Inevitably what you worship will rule your life. You can't avoid that.

What you worship will rule. They worship the gods of the Philistines and now they're tyrannized by the Philistines who reduced them to the level of slaves. There we read of how they were delivered into the hand of the Philistines.

Chapter 10, verse 8 tells us that they oppressed the children of Israel 18 years, but they sinned again. They don't learn the lesson. Eighteen years is a long time. Eighteen years is a long time in anybody's life, but they sinned again.

And what happens? God delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years. You think of the children that were born in that forty-year period, and until they were mature men they never knew anything but Philistine bondage and oppression.

They didn't know anything about the liberty of the glory days under Joshua, the times of victory that had been given under men like Othniel and Jackson and others of the judges. Think of those children.

Until they were forty years old, until they were grown men, they'd never seen anything but the powerless, weakened, deprived, oppressed of the people of God. What a tragedy. Forty years just about covers the best years of our lives.

You think of a young fellow that might have been ten or fifteen years of age whenever the captivity to the Philistines came. The best years of his life were done by the time it was over. Was that a waste?

Of course it was a waste. It was the waste caused by sin among the people of God. There is a lesson here, and I hope you have picked it up already. Here's a forty-year period. It's more than double the last time of captivity to the Philistines.

More than double. You see, if you don't learn the first time as God deals with us, He's going to deal more sternly the second time. Go back to that sin again. If we were to take the time to look at Leviticus 26, a series of verses there where Moses is counseling Israel and saying simply this, you turn from God, He's going to deal with your sin.

Now when He deals with your sin, you turn back. Or if you persist in sin, He's going to deal with you seven times more. And if you still don't learn, it's going to be seven times more. And still don't learn, it's going to be seven times more yet again.

God does not allow His people to go on in sin unchastised. God does not allow His people to go on in joy and blessing while they are in sin. He must chastise it. He must work in His people against that which is contrary to His own being.

He cannot indulge while earthly fathers may be prepared to indulge in their children that which is destructive and harmful and wicked. God cannot. He cannot. He will always work against sin, and He will continue working against sin until you turn from it if you are a genuine child of God.

Let me be plain about that. If you can live in sin and God takes no issue with it, you're not a child of God. You're not. It's an evidence of God's mercy. Every son whom He receiveth and loveth, He chasteneth.

It's an evidence of God's mercy to the church that it finds itself reduced to powerlessness in a time like this because we are brought to the place where we have to say God's hand is against us in chastisement, therefore we must have sinned.

That's the reason for the chastisement. That's the reason for the inflection of His displeasure. It's not done in a capricious fashion. It's not done without reason. It's done because there are real issues to be dealt with that are not dealt with easily, quickly, or casually.

I want you to understand that. There is a spirit abroad today among the people of God. I think we have imbibed so much of the McDonald's type culture where you have drive-thru Christianity. You can sort things out in a 60-second sound bite or even in the context of one sermon, been there, done that, fixed it out, we're moving on.

You think if that had been really possible, Israel would have spent 40 years under the heel of the Philistines? I think what we as God's people need to recognize is that when we depart from God, there is a situation created that is not easily fixed.

It's not easily undone. Can God work suddenly? Yes, He does. And He does. Bless the Lord. But He works as part of a process. And what we might look upon as a sudden intervention from God is in fact really just the climax of an ongoing process that has been in place for years.

Why is it that God breaks through in revival? You probably have read some of the great narratives of revival among God's people. And suddenly it seems, in the blink of an eye, there's power, there's conversions, there's influence, there's holiness.

God's people get right with Him. But read behind the scenes. Maybe for years there's been permeatings. Maybe for years there's been preaching on the issue of getting right with God, dealing with sin, a consciousness, a burden of sin, a submission to the Lord's chastisement.

You look at these cycles in the book of Judges. I commend them to you. We live in a day when every man does that which is right in his own eyes. And when the book of Judges records that, it wasn't talking about the Philistines or the ungodly or the pagans or the heathens.

It was talking about the professing people of God doing what was right in their own eyes. That is the curse of the church today. Every man does what is right in his own eyes. I think we should do. Let's have a business meeting, a board meeting, a congregational meeting, and let's see what we should do.

What does God say we should do? Because until we get to the place, let me share this with you, my brethren and sisters in Christ, share it with you from the depths of my heart. Until we get to the place where in honesty and sincerity before God we say with an open Bible, O God, what do we need to do?

We'll still live under the Philistine. I want you to know that. There will be no turning back of the clock one generation, two generations, or two thousand years to the days of the apostles until we get before God and say, now Lord, what would you have me to do?

Show me. Teach me. Get serious with the Bible. I'm not talking about soundbite Christianity. I'm not talking about cliched expressions that trip off our tongue so easily. I'm talking about getting serious with God's Word.

Read it. Study it. Lay it up in your heart. Live it. If you have a burden to see things change, if you take nothing else away from what I have to say, please take this away. If you want to see things changed in the visible church of Christ today, would you take this book in your hand in the place of prayer and begin to prayerfully read it, looking for what God would have you to do to be right with him.

The Forty-Year Philistine Captivity and God’s Promise of Deliverance

We read here of these 40 years. I can't take the time to go into some of the historical background and lessons that we could look at here, but I want you to get an overall picture of this. There's 40 years that run from Judges 13 .1 and they don't actually finish until we get to 1 Samuel chapter 7 and the events that are recorded there when under Samuel, God defeats the Philistine.

Get that idea? There's a 40 year window of history that's in view in the record here in the Word of God. So from just before Samson's birth right through to 1 Samuel chapter 7, there is a lot of scriptural history packed in, believe it or not, to those 40 years.

Inside that 40 year period, we have Samson's entire life. He's born after the 40 years begins. He dies before it finishes. We're not told quite how long before he dies before that great victory under Samuel in 1 Samuel chapter 7.

But he's dead at that point. So his ministry is less than 40 years. We have events like the life and ministry of Eli. He judged Israel for a number of years, judged Israel for 40 years. And his ministry ties in.

It's not the same 40 years, but his ministry ties in there as well and he dies. In fact, he dies about halfway through this 40 year period. Remember how the ark of God was taken? So if you have a picture in your mind of a 40 year timeline that's described here, halfway through the ark of God is taken.

Eli dies. Samuel is already a young lad at that time, for you'll remember that he's already in the tabernacle just as a child, but already marked as God's man. For 20 years the ark, having been returned from the land of the Philistines, for 20 years the ark lies neglected in Kirjath-Jerum until the days of Samuel.

It's still there. You read of that in 1 Samuel 7, the ark is still there. Samuel gets a great victory over the Philistines in these 40 years come to an end. But the interesting thing about this 40 year period is this, that just after it began, God began to work to raise and deliver.

The 40 years would run their course, but just after it began, God, that would at least, as we look at verse 5, who would begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines. How merciful the Lord is, you will always find this.

You will always find it. Even when God is punishing sin, he is already working to provide deliverance. Do you not find that in those blessed words of the first great gospel promise of all scripture in Genesis 3 .15, where God promises to Adam, I'll raise and deliver the seed of the woman.

He'll come to destroy the power and the influence of the serpent. When did he speak those words? He spoke them in the immediate wake of the fall. And you know the interesting thing? He spoke the word of promise before he even got to tell Adam what the curse of his sin would involve.

He was already working in mercy. And you have an illustration of that here. There's a 40 year period of chastisement that's just beginning. But as it begins, God comes to Manoah and his wife. Bless God, there's hope.

But that hope rests in God's intervention in power among his people to stir again. Not so much, and I want you to bear this in mind as we look at the words, not so much to raise a man like Samson, to raise one prominent figurehead.

But I think as we apply the words to our sins, take away this thought. Here is the spirit that God must raise again. Here is what God is ever at work to raise among his people, the spirit of resistance to the enemy, a spirit that led by the Holy Ghost, energized by the Holy Ghost, will strike against the enemy.

Samson is such a uniquely marvelous study in the word of God because not only did he exhibit on the one extreme the power of God, but on the other he demonstrated the awful wickedness of his own flesh.

Those are things that we have to confront and deal with as God's people in this day and age. But the wonderful lesson of Samson's life is that God was at work even to use a faulty, failing, flawed vessel such as Samson to accomplish something for his glory.

God Raises Deliverers in Darkness

Very quickly I'd like for us to look here at a couple of things. First of all, to see that God raises a deliverer in a day of oppression, in a day of darkness and bondage and powerlessness and weakness among the people of God, he raised up a deliverer.

Or as the word also can be translated, he raised a savior. The judges to some degree, in some cases it was in a greater degree than in others, but all of them in some way reflected and represented the work of the Lord Jesus, the great deliverer of his people, the great judge who is ever at work to deliver his people from their sins.

Now the raising up of such a man, the raising up again of that spirit among God's people is a work of the Lord alone. No man can raise himself, no man can raise up another of his own power. It's not about God's people searching among their ranks and seeing if they can find a man that can help them.

God must work. Now there are a number of ways in which this is seen in this passage. The revival, the restoration that I believe we're looking for is a work of God as the sovereign of his church. You see that the raising up of Samuel here involved the personal intervention of God the Son.

That's who the angel of the Lord is. That's Christ himself, the messenger of Jehovah, the messenger of the covenant. Here is one of those pre-incarnation appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ as the angel of God.

He comes, so he has to come. Brethren and sisters, he has to come. He has to step into our meetings, he has to step into our churches, he has to step into our homes, and it's a home situation here. It's so instructive to see that.

He personally stepped down into the home life of two aged saints in Israel and he said, I've got news for you. I am going to raise a deliverer. Revival starts in the most unlikely places, you know. It started here with an old pair in the tribe of Dan because God the Son one day stepped into their lives and said, I'm going to start.

I'm going to do something. Now, Manoah and his wife eventually came to recognize this. This is what lies behind Manoah's somewhat surprising expression in verse 22. We have, we shall surely die because we have seen God.

It eventually dawned on him who he was dealing with. Oh, they were prepared to see God's hand in it, but indirectly at the start. Manoah's wife, you will remember, spoke of the man of God. She thought this was a prophet.

And just as an aside, it's always interesting to see that that's how the word of God describes angels in scripture. They were commonly mistaken for men. They looked like men, dressed like men, spoke like men.

You just remember that the next time somebody tries to present you with pictures of angels. Here's this woman says, I've seen a man, I've met a man of God, I've met a prophet. Now, she was obviously therefore acknowledging God has said something here.

The Lord has worked, but he's worked through a man, at least as she understood it. So often our human vision is so limited. We see the man. We don't see the angel of the Lord. It's certainly something I think to be happy for in the case of these dear saints of God, that they got beyond the man or the idea of the man.

We have seen God. And this is what is needed today. We need to get beyond man. We need to get beyond personalities. God help us, we need to get beyond these things. Because nothing is going to be done, either in our homes or in the church at large, unless the angel of the Lord himself steps in there and takes a direct hand in the affairs of our homes and of the church.

Do you want to see a strengthening of the cause of Christ today? We don't need champion evangelists. We don't need super preachers. We don't need big buildings. We don't need radio, TV, or any of those things, however useful they may be in their place.

That's not the need of the church today. We need the God-man, the man of God, the angel messenger of Jehovah. We need him to come. This was seen to be a work of God in another sense. When you think of the unlikely source from which the Deliverer came, who would ever have thought that in a home like that of Manoah and his wife, there would have been a judge, a champion raised up.

Even if Manoah, and we're told nothing of his background, but even if he was recognized in his community as a forthright man of God, I believe he had a tremendous testimony. I believe he was a good man, an exemplary character, not a question about it.

Maybe there was somebody in Manoah's neighborhood that knew Manoah well and had observed, you know, if only Manoah had a son, maybe he could do something. But look at the age he is, and look at his wife, and they have no family, and we're not even told the woman's name.

But you see what we are told about her? Verse 2, his wife was barren and bare not, and for good measure it's repeated in verse 3, thou art barren and barest not. That simple piece of information is there so that we understand this was a work of God.

This was no freak of nature, this was no accidental thing where suddenly an aged couple are visited with a late arrival. They were beyond natural childbearing. This is a work of God. Did God work through natural processes?

Of course he did, he always does. Even when he works miracles, he works miraculously through natural means. The raising of a Savior from such a source required a miraculous act of divine power. In some ways, can we not see Manoah and his wife as being an illustration of where the church is at today in its barrenness?

God can work. God can raise out of a barren environment a champion for restoration. We're talking here about the potential at this point that Samson has. We lay aside for the moment the tragedy of his life that developed, but as God worked, he's working to raise something of a spirit of revival and restoration, and he does it in the most unlikely place.

It's a work of God. Verse 24 tells us that Samson grew up under the direct supervision of God. The woman bare a son and called his name Samson, and the child grew, and the Lord blessed him, and the Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshdoah.

God supervised those early years in Samson's life. It was God who influenced him, even in these early years, the Spirit of the Lord, the Holy Ghost began to move him. And the idea in the word that's translated here is that the Holy Ghost began to drive him, began to impel him, to thrust him out, driving him forward.

At this point, Samson's only a teenager. His ministry lasted twenty years, and you remember he was born and died inside that forty-year period. So the absolute maximum he could have been when he started his public ministry was twenty.

I think we have to see that he was some years younger than that even, as he begins his work for God under the supervision of the Holy Ghost. You know, really in a nutshell, that's what we need again. God the Son to step in, to stir and to raise by the miracle of his own power, spirit of resistance to the enemy, a spirit of revival and restoration.

Only he can give it, and when he does give it, it will be exercised and developed under the supervision of God the Holy Ghost. That's what we need to see. The emphasis of all of these simple, natural details is that God must work in a direct fashion if we are ever to see a return to the days of triumph and victory, a deliverance from the days where the enemy has the upper hand, where God's cause is impoverished and weakened and helpless and powerless.

If we are ever to see that change, we need to see the Lord Jesus step into our churches, step into our home, and then to see what he starts nourished and strengthened and guided by the power of the Holy Ghost.

That's what we need. God is sovereign in how he works. You see that here? He takes the initiative. He works the miracle. He steps in. He begins to energize Samson to be a force for God. But divine sovereignty never ever destroys human responsibility either in salvation or in the Christian life.

God could have sent an angel to do far better what Samson did, but God worked through a man. And to begin with, he worked here through Manoah and his wife. God works to raise a deliverer, or as we're applying it to ourselves, he works to raise that spirit of deliverance again within his people.

The Home as a Means of Spiritual Formation

And he worked here to do that by giving certain duties to Samson's parents. It's through them he works in the child. It's under their influence under God that the child is given, nurtured, taught, and prepared for service.

We have those words of the Apostle Paul when dealing with fathers in Ephesians chapter 6 and the verse 4. Ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.