Today I am deviating from the Thanksgiving posts, and will pick back up tomorrow.
A few days ago I saw on the news a video clip of a father spanking (more like beating) his teenage daughter. The anchor commented on how disturbing the video was, so I watched it in its entirety on YouTube. Disturbing was one of many adjectives I could use to describe the video. As I watched, my stomach did several flips, my mind screamed, This is wrong!, and my anger at the parents boiled.
Over the past year, as I’ve learned about grace, God has changed much about my life. As I’ve begun to understand verses in context, and understand the difference between the Old Covenant and the New, God has brought about changes in the deepest parts of me. I’d already been questioning the practice of spanking when I watched the video a few days ago…questions like: Why do we spank our children, then tell them not to hit others? Why do we spank our children, but adults don’t hit each other when we do something wrong? Does spanking really correct behavior, or just make children fear {rather than respect} authority? At that point, I had more questions than ever, the most predominant being: Is the practice of spanking really Biblical?
I began to pray for clarification with the prayer I’ve often prayed during the past year: God, show me. I need to know what You say about this. I started looking up verses, and looking up original definitions of words in Scripture in Hebrew and Greek. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t make spanking reconcile with what I was reading in Scripture. In my Internet search of the original Hebrew definition of rod, I came across a couple of articles which God used to confirm my inability to reconcile spanking with Scripture {specifically grace}. You can read the articles here and here.
My husband and I have been discussing the issue over the last couple of days, and more than likely, we will be abandoning the use of spankings in our home, and begin to practice grace-based parenting…the way in which our Father corrects us when we’ve done wrong. We hope to correct and guide with discipline. We have a lot to learn!
