Fathers & Their Little Platoons

The Fear of the Lord as the Foundation of Fatherhood

Hope everyone's having a good morning, and happy Father's Day. It's a glorious day for a lot of reasons. If y 'all want to turn with me to Psalm 128, we just sang this psalm a moment ago. We're going to take a closer look at it here in just a moment.

Psalm 128, and that is where we will be parked for today. As we contemplate some of the blessings of fatherhood, let's take a look at this together. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this wonderful day.

We thank you for bringing us together. We thank you for every Lord's Day, for every opportunity to open up the pages of Scripture, to hear your Word proclaimed. But we thank you for traditions that we have come up with as well, such as things like Mother's Day and Father's Day, just a moment to commemorate a particularly special thing that you have ordained, that you have instituted, in this case, fatherhood.

We thank you for an opportunity to get to look at that a little bit, to consider it in light of your Word, and in light of what it pictures, ultimately. We ask that today you allow every word to be consistent with your Word, and that it's a blessing and something that is refreshing for all of our fathers, but for all of your people, certainly.

We love you, and we ask all these things in your name. Amen. Now, before we get back to this particular psalm, which we will in just a moment, I want to give you a brief analogy that will apply throughout today.

And in warfare, we know that in Scripture, warfare is used as an analogy in a number of different contexts. In modern warfare, you have a pretty robust military structure that has a very tedious chain of command, something, of course, that evolved greatly over time.

Within a single army, you might have a number of corps. And within a single corps, you can have multiple divisions. And then within a division, a single division, you have a number of brigades. And within a brigade, you have a number of regiments.

And within the regiments, and this may be the most important part, you have, within a single regiment, you have several companies. And those little companies are the building blocks of the entire army.

Every company has their own captain. And that's really where you see the camaraderie that we appreciate so much when we see, you know, dramatizations or novels or real just historical accounts of anything from Alexander and his men all the way through to trench warfare in modern times.

All of these different things, when you see the men and the bond they have in the foxhole, let's say, those are men within a particular company. That's, again, where bonds are forged. And the action of that particular small company, of course, compounded upon many of them, make up all of those other very specific divisions that ultimately make up the whole army.

Now, as I mentioned a second ago, warfare can serve as a useful analog for a lot of different things, for many different contexts. We understand them because of how vivid warfare is to us. We can picture, when we are able to come up with an analogy, using warfare as the picture, we're able to better understand the thing that we're saying it's analogous to because, again, how vivid warfare is in the minds of just about everybody.

For example, Paul uses the terminology of war to describe how we are to outfit ourselves for our spiritual battles. And we can understand what he's talking about because we picture the warrior. We picture him putting on his armor and being prepared for what is to come.

And so with that in mind, I want us to consider the gravity of fatherhood in light of the greater spiritual war and the way that it's fought on the spiritual plane. There are many fronts to it. We know that.

But ultimately, God has instituted an army filled not so much with corps and multiple divisions and multiple brigades and all these types of things, but really he instituted his army to be filled with what you might call little platoons.

And little platoons, that is a term that was coined by an amazing man. His name was Edward Burke. He was a Christian philosopher, a politician near the end of the 18th century in Britain. And he was extremely critical, of course, of what was happening with the French Revolution.

And he was trying to point people back to what makes up a sustainable social fabric. And, of course, that coming back to true religion, things like that. But just as importantly, the family. So he coined this term, the little platoon, to refer to the family unit and to the part that they would play in a healthy society.

And so if we were to just borrow his term for the day, we could say that God has instituted an army filled with many little platoons. And this works well because the commander-in-chief in this context is the chief of our salvation, Hebrews 2 .10, unifying a people unto himself, allowing these distinct yet very unified platoons to fight their own battles while contributing to the whole war.

Now, if you were to make up an army with a fallible commander, it may not work quite as well as it works within the confines of Christianity. And comparing it to this analogy, like I mentioned before, in modern warfare you have this very tedious chain of command because there are a lot of mistakes that can be made.

And so there are plenty of checks and balances put in place. But in the case of what we are dealing with, the spiritual war, we have an infallible commander, like I mentioned a minute ago, the chief of our salvation.

And he has unified his people and he unifies these little platoons to fight his war on his behalf. And so, like I mentioned already, these little platoons, as you might call them, are families. And the captains of these little platoons are fathers.

And when we get this picture, when we get this analogy in our minds, now we can start to better understand Satan's ground game when the captains of each of these little platoons go down, what happens?

The platoon scatters and chaos ensues. And so for the past number of decades in the West, there has been a systematic assault on the vocation of fatherhood, hitting the mass media outlets with caricatures that would make any person create kind of an internal aversion to the type of person they're portraying.

In other words, any person in their right mind would look at the sitcom dad or the way that dads are portrayed in comedy or the way they're portrayed in just about anything, and they would look at a person like that and think, yeah, guy's a bozo, guy's a dunce.

Who would respect a person like that? And that is all intentional. That is a subliminal marketing scheme, essentially, that the devil has employed to, again, systematically assault the vocation of fatherhood.

And when the devil is doing this, he is doing this because he recognizes something. He knows something about human beings that often we are too quick to forget. And what that is, is that people become that which they are told that they are.

And so you can start to understand, again, the ground game of the devil in this spiritual war and why it is so important for him to subvert this particular position of fatherhood because he knows that these men are the captains of God's little platoons.

And so subconsciously, men start to believe that they're not good for much more than the job that merely contributes to putting bread on the table. He convinces men, and frankly, the women as well, that men don't have what it takes to lead their little platoon and that family unit will never experience the benefits of the psalm we just finished reading, Psalm 128.

He knows that. He knows that if he can take down the captain, that Psalm 28 can't be experienced in these families, in these family units. A well-ordered home is perhaps what scares Satan the most because the fruitfulness of a well-ordered home carries a compounding effect across generations.

They're strung together, and it, again, is compounding. It's getting stronger. It's adding to something with each and every generation that comes. But we have to remember, when I say a well-ordered home, that doesn't necessarily mean external organization alone, like the Von Trapp family or something, with the dad with his whistle, and the kids are perfectly buttoned up and look fantastic, but they have all of these problems on the inside that their nanny is having to recognize and try to point out to Mr. Von Trapp, and he doesn't want to hear it, and all of these types of things.

That's not what we mean by a well-ordered home. Like true religion itself, it has to begin internally with a Godward heart that knows its feebleness in light of the holiness of the commander that we have.

A Godward Heart and the Compassion of the Heavenly Father

And like our Heavenly Father, who is one of compassion, fathers are to exhibit this exact same attribute toward their children, again, understanding their own relative weakness and many shortcomings compared to the Father of Heaven.

In Psalm 103 .13, it says,. And I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, paraphrase from the Old English. So, God uses a comparison here to again illustrate one of his own attributes, that of compassion, comparing it to a good father that has compassion on his kids, and so that is what a godly, God-fearing father is to have and to exhibit, which of course begins internally.

It has to begin there, otherwise it wouldn't be true compassion. And so externals alone aren't enough. That is not what we mean, biblically speaking, when we talk about a well-ordered home. But the glory of all of it is that the right internals will lead to all the right externals, which is where, of course, the well-ordered home begins to take shape.

And Matt spoke to this a little bit in Sunday School this morning, in a slightly different context. It was in the context of work, but the point being is that you can't focus on the results of your work, or else it will essentially, you know, you'll be at the end of your days, and you have a heap of ashes over here that are meaningless, and something that you can't take with you, and all of these types of things.

You're the man that filled his barn, but then died before he could actually use any of it. But that's not to say that the results of your work are a bad thing. What it's to say is that in order to give it meaning, you have to start somewhere different.

You can't start with the thing that you're after, the thing you're pursuing. You have to start with the fear of the Lord that grounds it all, that anchors it all. And then all of a sudden, everything that happens afterward, again, starts to take shape, starts to have meaning.

Such is the case with the household. Such is the case with fatherhood in general, but the household more broadly. It begins with the internals, and then a well-ordered home begins to take shape after that.

And so as a leader of this little band, this little platoon, with a right heart toward God, a father is able to show what godly order looks like in the life of a believer. Wielding a controlled posture of dominion, another thing Matt talked about, and living out the orders that were given by our great commander.

How do we put this on display? How do we show the world what all of this looks like? It begins with a right heart toward God and a fear of the Lord, which just so happens to be exactly where the psalm begins.

And so what are the results of this well-ordered home? What are the results of this little platoon? Again, that's just an analogy. We're not talking about literally dressing our kids up ready for physical battle.

But when that analogy is applied to this particular psalm, this is what victory looks like. This is what victory looks like on the landscape of the spiritual war that we are fighting alongside our families.

The Fear of the Lord at the Beginning of Psalm 128

Look at verse 1 one more time. A song of degrees, or a song of ascent. Pause there for just a second. And take note of the fact that just as the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord, likewise the beginning of fatherhood is the fear of the Lord.

You cannot have a man fill this role adequately by any standard, certainly not God's, unless it begins with the fear of the Lord. Just as any knowledge that a person attains is not really all that much of anything if it doesn't begin with the fear of the Lord, the same is true with fatherhood.

The beginning of fatherhood is the fear of the Lord. Being the head of a household requires a sense of fearfulness when considering the Father of Lights is overseeing you and your watch care over your family.

And it requires a sense of dread at the thought of ever sinning against Him while holding that particular position. We don't want to mess this up. He put us here as stewards over the family that He gave us.

And that, of course, should demand a healthy fear of the Lord. And that's where the psalmist begins here. In verse 2, he goes on to say,. And so here, what we see is the result of a proper fear of the Lord in the context of ruling a home and ruling it well is to experience a measure of the Garden of Eden once again where the labor is fruitful, where the atmosphere is one of happiness, and well-being is the effect.

That is the result of a well-ordered home beginning with a father that has a healthy fear of the Lord. Happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. In verse 3, he goes on to say,. And this is a beautiful picture.

You have to put yourself a little bit in the Hebraic mind of the time the psalm was written to really understand the significance of the choices of pictures here. When a man assumes the role of responsibility that only he has been given and no one else, it creates a glorious chain of effects that includes his wife to appear and to act as a fruitful vine.

Now what is that? Well, certainly in the mind of the readers of this psalm when it was written, but even in our minds today, even though we're a little less in tune with agricultural pictures like this, the fruitful vine is an image of beauty, it's an image of refreshment, it's an image of delight, and it's an image of shade from the harsh elements.

And so when a man approaches his household and orders it grounded upon a fear of the Lord, one of the results, one of the blessed results is a wife that is a fruitful vine that can offer him shelter from the storm, shade from the harsh elements, refreshment, delight, and of course, the beauty of her presence there in the home.

He goes on from there and he says that the kids in the household will be like olive plants. And this is an interesting one because obviously it's a plant. So there you have a picture of fruitfulness. You have children as a result of the fruitfulness of this marriage.

It's a picture of fruitfulness, but it's of the delicate sort. It's the delicate result of the fruitfulness because this is still a young plant. This is a plant that needs to be cared for. They're precious.

They need careful and gracious attention. But the thing about the olive plant is even though you're having to approach it with care, not to damage it, but to give it exactly what it needs, the exact kind of nourishment that it needs, it's also loaded with potential at the same time.

And interestingly enough, the preceding psalm of the one we're looking at in Psalm 127, you're already there, you just look at it really quick. In that particular psalm, Solomon basically shows us the potential realized.

He shows us what the potential is like after the days when they're in that delicate phase of needing that tender and gracious care. He says in verse 3 of 127,. Children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

His arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

And of course, this is a different picture, a different analogy, but a very potent one just as much as the olive plant because you can picture a day coming when the father no longer has the strength to fight the battles he's been fighting.

So what do you do? You send your arrows forth, you cast them out, and they are going to be continuing the work well after you're gone. And so here, back to verse 3 of Psalm 128, when it's talking about children is the olive plants.

It's a picture of that fruitfulness. It's a picture of something that requires delicacy, that requires a delicate care rather. It requires a type of graciousness and a gracious attention. But it is loaded with potential because of what they will become as they grow up.

And so the integrity and the godliness of a father, when it is found, brings the entire family to life, nourishing everybody there, nourishing the entire household, and setting them up for the most success while also blessing the father himself.

That is what is in view in these pictures that we have in verse 3. Really, really beautiful pictures. In verse 4, we see a little bit of refrain from calling back to verse 1. He says,. And so we are being reminded once again, this is where it all begins, but it is also the anchor that is ever-present or should be ever-present in the life of the father.

Verse 5 goes on to say,. Now, the only way for such a thing to happen, such as seeing your children's children, or literally in the Hebrew, your son's sons, is for the family to be stable. For the family to be stable, for the father to raise his children in the nurture, in the admonition of the Lord.

In other words, passing down the faith to them, teaching them why they have what they have, and the way in which God has blessed this family. And of course, the further back you can go in showing them their heritage and their lineage, and where they've come from, the better, because it really impresses upon their mind the way in which God works, which is through generations.

If you have the blessing of being able to go back six generations' worth in your family, and for some people far more than that even, you begin to really feel a sense of connection to all that they were able to do, all that they were able to accomplish by God's strength that got you here in the first place.

And it gives you a zeal to continue that and to drive it on once again. And so, the only way you'll ever see your children's children in the sense of a blessing, like we see here in verse 6, is again to be stable, passing down the faith, nurture in the admonition of the Lord, and in addition to those things, for there to be a special harmony within the home, to be present, all working together as a family unit, as a little platoon, working toward multi-generational goals.

And what is all of it anchored by again? The fear of the Lord. And you have to teach that. The father has to teach that to his wife and to his children as well. It doesn't stay just with him. It's the anchor for everybody so that these things can be accomplished.

And so what we have here is a picture. We have a picture that is full of life, that is full of happiness, that's full of beauty, all of which begins with the man of the house, who recognizes that high patriarchal calling, which again is grounded in the fear of the Lord.

Happiness, Discipline, and Multigenerational Blessing

Now, this idea of the fear of the Lord leading to these things that the entire world, the entire human race desires, happiness, fulfillment, things like that, the idea that any of that could flow from something as harsh sounding as the fear of the Lord, that runs completely contrary to kind of the post-modern view of Christianity.

You know, some version of happiness could never flow from something like the fear of the Lord, from dogmatic preaching, from doctrine, from constraining and having a moral compass and having limiting principles as to not allow for a household to not succumb to the scruples of society that they're living in and the day that they're living in.

All of these types of things are just, there's no way that could ever lead to happiness that's authoritarian. These are things that should be suppressing the happiness of a household and all of these types of things.

But what we learn in Scripture, when it is lived out faithfully, of course, because we know that being sinners, any household can abuse anything, we realize that that is a reality. But when the home experiences the steady grounding of a father that holds his eyes and his hands up toward Christ the Lord, happiness is exactly what the result will be.

And I will just say this to all of our fathers in the room, all of our husbands in the room, is that when we show the world what a jovial home looks like and what happiness looks like and we see that, no, we are going to, we're going to follow the Word of God to a T, including the, quote-unquote, troubled passages that so many people, even in the church, have difficulty grappling with in this particular age.

You know, we're going to follow all of it. We are biblical absolutists. What the Bible says, we will live out. It is sufficient and it is our guide, it's our lamp. When we do that, we tell the world that we're doing that.

And then they look and they turn and they see a happy home. And they see joy and they see laughter and they see beauty and they see these types of things. That is one of the most potent ways in which you can share the gospel that you could possibly do, that you could possibly bring to the table because they start to see that there is something different there, that there is something real, that there is actually a spirit behind him, but behind it.

And that spirit is a person. And that all of these blessings aren't arbitrary, but rather they are flowing from promises that were made by a God that cannot lie. They see all of these types of things.

And so as fathers, when we ground ourselves and then ground the household in the fear of the Lord, happiness is exactly what the result will be. If I could take just a moment, slight rabbit trail, not in my notes at all, but just popped in my mind, is I'll give you one other example of the devil and his very sneaky tactics, trying to, again, subvert the little platoon and bring the captain down so that the whole thing can be brought down with him.

Is we have this kind of pithy adage that we, you know, going back decades at this point, I guess, of happy wife, happy life. We all recognize it. And it's one of those things that we see pop up in some of those sitcom contexts that I made reference to earlier.

And the problem with it is that it is absolutely an awful standard. It's a terrible, a terrible standard that will ultimately leave everybody frustrated. Because if you make happiness in the moment, the standard, over against that which is good and true and grounded in Scripture and the fear of the Lord and all of these types of things, the happiness will be fleeting.

You may make a call as a dad because you have been catechized to believe that happy wife, happy life must be the answer. So you just do whatever you need to do in the moment to appease the family, the wife and the kids.

And then you move on from there, I guess, you know, thinking, okay, we got past that one. The problem is, is that the father, when he is grounded by the fear of the Lord, will ultimately have to, at some point in a lifetime, and there are many days within a lifetime, have to make tough calls that in the moment may not yield a happiness in that moment, but that are contributing to the happiness of the household that actually has legs on it, that actually has some longevity to it, a happiness that won't be fleeting in seasons, but will rather be generational.

We're coming up on the 250th birthday of our country. And I can promise you that the wives of the men that were at Valley Forge were not happy in that moment. And we know that while they didn't have happiness, they instead had grief.

Some of them retained that grief afterward because not every man made it out of there. Not every man made it through the battles that were before them after Valley Forge and the dread that was there. But many of them did experience the happiness of embracing their husbands again after the husbands had to make the tough call to fight a moral fight, to fight a moral war for the independence of their families from a tyrannical government that totally abandoned them, that lied to them, that totally threw all of their written charters in the trash and said, no, we're going to oppress you anyway.

It was a moral war. And those men had to make the tough call to put the momentary happiness to the side for a minute and march into a bloody battle. But what did that bloody battle secure? It birthed a nation.

It birthed a nation. It birthed a light on a hill that has thundered the gospel for two centuries. And by God's mercy, we will have that again in the way that we once had it. There will be times where the father, grounded in the fear of the Lord, has to make a call that may not leave the wife happy in the moment or the kids happy in the moment.

But if it is truly grounded in the fear of the Lord, it will be the right call. And it will contribute to a lasting happiness, one that is multigenerational, as I said. This is why fatherhood is to be honored to begin with.

It's a position. It's a calling. It's a ministry that was ordained to display a tiny glimpse of the strength, of the wisdom, of the magnanimity of our Heavenly Father. If fatherhood is meant to be an echo of the Father of Heaven, how could the echo of a voice so strong ever be treated with anything other than high honor?

And this, of course, heightens the responsibility of men to shoulder this position well because the honor attached to it is intrinsic. The honor is there in fatherhood whether you perform well or perform poorly.

And so if you are going to be put into an honorable position, we must live up to it. We must live up to it and show the world how to act honorably in that honorable position. And this is, of course, why we see the Apostle Paul in Ephesians.

Of course, it's the Lord making the command through the Apostle Paul for wives to respect their husbands. And what's interesting about that command is that the implication is that they should respect their husbands even when the husband isn't acting respectable.

Otherwise, the command wouldn't be made. It would just be—it wouldn't really make any sense if it, of course, is contingent upon the husband acting in a respectable manner. We live in a fallen world, do we not?

And so the Apostle Paul—again, it's the Lord moving Paul to write these words— makes this particular command because of the fact that the position in which he finds himself in is one of honor whether or not he is totally living up to it in every single moment or not.

As it was once said, respect begets respectability. And so that's just a note to wives and to mothers. There may be times when you recognize that your husband is a sinner just like you are and that respect can be given even if it just isn't feeling right in the moment.

But as the principle goes, that respect births or begets respectability. When you show respect, what happens is it drives the man and it gives him a zeal to actually want to be as respectable as he possibly can and to make you proud and to make God proud and all of these things.

But there's another implication on the other side of the coin when the Lord commands wives to respect their husbands. The other implication is that as husbands, we should live in a way that is respectable.

And for the sake of whom? It's for the sake of our bride and also for our children as well because we're representing the whole household. It's not just ourselves. And so when we hear that commandment for wives to respect their husbands, a husband should latch onto that and say, I want to be as respectable as I possibly can.

And what's the driving motive there? The fear of the Lord, right back to that same principle. So to do this, to live respectably as defined by God, is to bless your house for a thousand generations as Moses tells us in Deuteronomy 7 -9.

He says, Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him, keepeth commandments to a thousand generations. That's the definition of living respectably as a father, loving God, obeying His Word, and having a desire to please Him in all that we do.

And we see blessings flow for a thousand generations from such obedience. And so men, as men, we are captains of our little platoons, and this is not something to take lightly, but it's also something to be greatly thankful for.

So this isn't a burdensome calling. It's not something we can be nonchalant about, but it's not a burden either. It's something to be grateful for, to be thankful for. As a father, you have been called to lead in a way that echoes the fatherhood of God Himself, and to shine in your home like the presence of the bridegroom.

And to close with the analogy that we began with one more time, we can recognize that the effectiveness of the individual companies, the platoons, the bands, the little platoons that we've been talking about, the effectiveness of them is the building block for ultimate victory.

They have to be successful. They have to be effective. They have to be well-ordered in order for victory to take place. Without them, the general, and I'm using the analogy at the moment. I'm using the picture of a battlefield.

Without the little companies being successful, being effective, doing what they were called upon to do, the general is just sitting alone on a hill surveying a battlefield that is now against him. At the same time, we also know that if the general up on the hill goes down, the companies are scattered.

So there has to be this interplay taking place in order for success and ultimate victory to happen. Now, on earth, regardless of how great a general is or how strong his divisions and brigades and regiments are, they are still fallible men that make mistakes, that make the wrong calls.

And in the end, they can be defeated. You can have a man. I'm reading a book right now that is incredible about the Battle of Gettysburg. You can have a man as formidable as a leader as Robert E. Lee himself, the man that Abraham Lincoln wanted to be the commander of the Union Army before he said, I have to fight for my family.

I'm not going to fight against them. I'm going to fight with them. You can have that man, that general, with an army below him filled with an incomparable zeal, willingness to fight, the will to attack and to bring victory and all of these types of things.

And victory can feel like it is in your grasp. And then you look up and you see the army of the Potomac digging into the hill, digging into Cemetery Hill and raining down fire and artillery and all of these types of things upon you.

And before long, you realize that even though you had, by all accounts, the greater military leadership and, again, an army of men whose zeal was not to be messed with, it was a very frightful thing, regardless of all of these types of things, mistakes were made.

Serious blunders were made. And what would have, from the human viewpoint, been seemingly a pretty robust victory that would have absolutely changed the course of history, you had defeat. And it's because these are fallible men.

It's because they're men that can make mistakes. It's because we can't rely perfectly upon even the greatest, strongest, most formidable leaders that history has ever given any of us. And so on Earth, regardless of how great a general is or how strong his army is, in the end, they can be defeated.

And that is where the analogy fails. That is where the analogy we've been using doesn't work anymore. Because while we are certainly responsible as fathers to ensure our little platoon is healthy and capable of supporting the Lord's work on Earth and can therefore, because we've been put in that position, fail from the human viewpoint in some of the most vital areas that we can, we have a responsibility to perform well.

We are human beings made in His image. We are not puppets on a string. Even though that is still the case, our great commander is not one that can fail. And his victory is secured. And because of that reality, in our darkest moments as fathers, wondering how we can possibly live up to this high and holy calling in the face of such an onslaught from the wicked enemies around us, we can always look up that hill to our great commander and know that he won't falter.

He's not going to falter. And like the Apostle Paul, we can be reminded in those moments that when I am weak, then I am strong. Because it's the Lord's strength that sustains us as fathers, that sustains us in the most difficult times that we will face.

And so we keep fighting the good fight. We lead well. And in the end, we will share in the spoils of the Lord's war with our wives and our children by our sides. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this wonderful day.

We thank you for bringing us together and giving us an opportunity to talk about your word and to apply it to our lives and to see such a glorious picture of your fatherhood in the real-life, day-to-day grit of fatherhood on earth and all of the godly men that we have around us.

We thank you so much for the men that we have in this church family. We thank you for the kinds of fathers that they are and for what they bring to the table for their children, for their wives. We know that it's by your strength alone that any of us can do anything worth being a part of this great mission that you have given us.

And so we ask, Father, that you continually remind us that we need your strength, that we need to look to you, that we need to look to our commander and be reminded that he is who gives the orders, and without the orders, we are not going to be able to build anything sustainable.

We have to go by his orders. We have to look into his eyes and see the strength and see the victory that is already there so that we can press on even when the days are dark, even when the battles are tough.