You may think this children’s story title an odd title for a post of Christian Social Witness on a blog for sharing our “Biblical” faith in Christ Jesus as Lord.
Bear with me; I’ll get to ‘the rest of the story’ (as a favorite commentator once put it) in another chapter.
IF you have NOT already taken time to watch the Hosea Movie of a previous post, it is related to this series and I recommend it. Watch it as a family, if possible (80 min.); especially your teens.
Roger Harned
HANSEL & GRETEL – Chapter 1
When I was a young child my mom would often read bedtime stories to us. We had illustrated children’s story books and lots of imagination for wandering little minds about to embark into the unseen lands of sleep.
Aesop and Grimm were not names uncommon as now are these to children. Neither were the Old Testament Heroes of another Book.
One of my favorite stories of childhood was Hansel and Gretel. I’m not certain why.
It had all the intrigue of good and evil for unfamiliar tender souls so secure in the love of both parents, which showed two young children able to outwit adults, as often we three thought that we had.
Most certainly, as to the important things, we had not outwitted either parent.
Perhaps by their inattentiveness (an ever-increasing parental inattentiveness of these last days), we had, on occasion, been neglected by our parents in some matter of our childish cleverness. Yet we could comfortably fall asleep knowing our mischief, while secure in the watchful loving oversight of a mommy’s bedtime story.
This is no longer the scene of our homes where now both parent and child fall into lonely sleep to separate television-depicted evils.
I introduce my thoughts on parent-child relationships in this way because of the great brokenness of our twenty-first century families.
We can be certain that the wickedness of Satan has achieved victory in many battles of the family. Broken homes, broken marriages, broken husbands, broken wives and many broken children…grown-up into broken youth, and then they become broken young men and broken young women still lost in the woods of life… then again, broken moms and broken dads with generationally broken homes.
I am most thankful for the faithfulness of my dad and mom to have been examples of God’s faithfulness to His children by their own marriage of over sixty years. I grieve (as do many parents) over that lesson not learned by so many children of two-parent marriages.
How many children (even of a faithful Christian parent) have compared their ‘step-mother’ to a wicked witch?
How many children of a father who wandered into a wood far from their home or had a father escorted from the home of his children have bought the fairy-tale fiction that he does not love them? How many children of broken homes have lived the hopelessness of Hansel and Gretel? (It’s an all-too-familiar story they do NOT want to hear.)
I will survive by my own cleverness, they conclude.
I do not need my mom or my dad.
Deuteronomy 5:12 “‘Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
How sad the children who are caged in their own cleverness.
How sad the ‘single-moms’ (really, divorced-moms) who must rule their fabled gingerbread house that they now own as neglectful witches who fatten up their children for worldly dreams and destine them for the slavery of serving only their self.
How sad the ‘single dads’ (really, divorced-dads) who must neglect the bringing up of their children in the broken homes.
How sad their broken marriages in the broken places throughout our broken lands.
How sad the great brokenness of rebellion against a loving God, a faithful Father.
How sad the broken relationships with a Son of our redemption, the Namesake of our Christian Faith.
Is Jesus Christ Lord of your home?
Is Jesus Christ Lord over you, beloved husband?
Is Jesus Christ Lord over you, dearly beloved wife?
Is Jesus Christ Lord over the children of your marriage?
To be continued…
God’s judgment compares rebellion to witchcraft. (Children know instinctively that the witch in Hansel and Gretel is evil.)