[post_intro]“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.”[/post_intro]
A lonely Sunday evening in McPherson, KS.
I didn’t feel much like preparing dinner, so I drove to Hunan, the local Chinese food dive, and ordered the Vegetable Delight with steamed rice. I took it to go and ate it in my car in Hunan’s parking lot.
There was nothing on the radio, so I settled for a Christian radio station … just for the hell of it. I listened to a Christianized news break. Each story ended with a, “Won’t you pray for such-and-such?” For example, “Edward Snowden fled Hong Kong and is believed to be on an airplane headed to Russia. Won’t you pray for his eventual capture and inglorious return to the United States?”
At any rate, after the news break, a pastor began a sermon about family relationships, particularly the relationship between children and their parents.
For this pastor, the subject was cut-and-dry, because Paul had articulated the matter rather succinctly and impressively in Ephesians 6:1:
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.”
The pastor went on to say how millions of word in print have tried unsuccessfully to shed light on the child-parent relationship, but nothing has come close to the simple, inarguable truth of the Bible.
However, during this sermon, one hypothetical question dogged me from beginning to end. Suppose a child’s parents were, for example, Satanists, and the child wanted to become a Christian, but the parents refused. Should the child obey his parents, as the Good Book suggests?
Such a question might make the pastor’s head explode.
