Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Posterity
Proverbs 13:22
A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, but the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.
This verse from the Proverbs is one of the verses often misused by Christians in teaching and prayer. There is an assumption that the wealth of the guy down the street could be yours because he is not a Christian, in other words, he is wicked. There are Christians in prayer naming and claiming the wealth of hard working people rather than praying for the salvation of those persons’ souls.
That approach misses the very plain teaching of this proverb. The proverb contrasts two men, the good man and the wicked man (sinner). These two men take different action for their generations. The good man secures generational wealth which the wicked man doesn’t.
The teaching of this proverb is that when men fail to leave arrangements in place for inheritance that others get their wealth. It is wicked not to provide an inheritance for your children.
This is a principle that we often fail to teach our young men, that they ought to work and provide for their families while they live and after they are gone. I was never thought this in church over all the decades of my life spent there.
The Apostle Paul also made the point when writing to the church at Corinth. He wasn’t addressing this issue specifically, he was merely making an illustration or drawing a parallel, but we have the truth from him anyway that “the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.” 2 Corinthians 12:14.
This concept of one generation providing and preparing for the next is all over the scripture. Whenever we read through the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, we are struck, by the number of genealogies included, everywhere we are told who begat whom and whom begat whomever. It is as if all through Scripture God is telling us something about generations and posterity.
Abram understood this clearly as we see in his lament to the Lord. “Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold.” Genesis 13:2. However, the absence of offspring made all of his wealth seen pointless to him. “Abram said, “Lord God, what will You give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” Then Abram said, “Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house is my heir!” Genesis 15:2,3
Posterity, here, is not merely referring to the father being responsible for the next generation being born by providing critical genetic material. We are moving to the fact that most of us do what we do out of a sense of posterity, a sense that we are making things better not just for now where we are but for the generations to come.
Sometimes we see this deep-seated sense of posterity come out in the oddest things. Like the old-fashioned father who has several daughters and should be happy but instead, is disappointed in the fact that he has no son to “carry on his name”
David Brooks, in a July 28, 2009 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times writing about “The Power of Posterity” said “…we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.”
The point that David Brooks was making is that most of our grand designs as people are as a result of our understanding that we have a heritage of our forefathers’ efforts and we are working to leave a legacy. We inherited land and legal systems, patents and principles, things and thoughts and our development of these things will leave a legacy for the generations to come.
For an individual man, it may just be the house he bequeathed in the will, or the investments whose value continues to rise, or that dream passed on over nights at the dinner table. Whatever it is, there is that force of posterity driving us even when we have not thought it through this way or acknowledged it. However, the individual man defines it, we understand this responsibility for the next generation.
Some wayward and wicked men take no responsibility, and their children’s upkeep in the present is left to others, and their future to chance. But most men have a basic sense of this responsibility. The challenge is to teach our young men that this responsibility is not merely exercised in a little money at weekend and a few things when there are moved. This responsibility for the next generation also has spiritual, emotional, social, and cultural components that are equally important.
And so, we come back to the proverb. A good man, therefore, is one who is seized by a sense of posterity, one who is not living for today only, one who is not focused on himself only. A good man is one who is constantly making provisions for generations. One who is inspiring his children to climb on his shoulders and reach farther that he did.
The wicked man, the sinner, is a man who makes no provision for the future generations, who consumes everything on himself and today’s pleasures. That is the man who will eventually lose everything to another, if not in this generation then in the next.
Think on these things:
- Is there a pattern of things being handed down in your family?
- Did you or will you inherit anything from your father?
- How can we better teach this principle of posterity to our young men?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today for the fathers in our family and our church that they would be good providers and be blessed to leave resources for the next generation.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex