Bible Commentaries
Exodus 2

Verse 9

HOME TRAINING

‘Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages.’

Exodus 2:9

I. To none is God’s commendation vouchsafed more fully than to those who love children for Christ’s sake. The presence of childhood represents and brings back our own. It is then that our Divine Master seems to repeat His words in our ears, ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Children confide in those around them with a sweet and simple faith. They obey from affection, and not from fear. And so our Father, which is in heaven, would have His children trust Him, casting all our care upon Him, for He careth for us.

II. Children teach us reverence as well as faith. They listen to us with a solemn awe when we talk to them of God. They tread softly, they speak with bated breath, in His holy place. Our age has need to learn from them that we cannot serve God acceptably without reverence and godly fear.

III. Children teach us to be kind, pitiful, and tender-hearted. They cannot bear to witness pain. They do all they can to soothe. Have we these sorrowful sympathies? Do we ‘keep the child’s heart in the brave man’s breast’?

IV. If the love of Christ is in our hearts, it should constrain us to do our very best, thoughtfully, prayerfully, generously, to preserve in the children and to restore in ourselves that which made them so precious in His sight, and makes them so like Him now—like Him in their innocence, their sweet humility, their love.

Dean S. R. Hole.

Illustration

(1) One cannot fail to be impressed by the number and the tenderness of the references to the little folks in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Letters. He carried an observant and gracious heart in him.

Thus: ‘It is wonderful how that child remains ever interesting to me. Nothing can stale her infinite variety, and yet it is not so very various. You see her thinking what she is to do or to say next, with a funny grave air of reserve, and then the face breaks up into a smile, and the word is said with that sudden little jump of the voice that one knows in children; and, somehow, I am quite happy after that.’

And again: ‘I sometimes hate the children I see on the street—you know what I mean by hate,—wish they were somewhere else, and not there to mock me; and sometimes I don’t know how to go by them for the love of them, especially the very wee ones.’

And again, from San Francisco: ‘My landlord and landlady’s little four-year-old child is dying in the house; and oh, what he has suffered!… The child weighs on me, dear Colvin! I did all I could to help; but all seems little, to the point of crime, when one of these poor innocents lies in misery.’

Let us covet this open eye, this interested mind, this overflowing heart, these ministering and succouring hands.

(2) Let parents concentrate themselves on their children. Never entrust their training to a third party. Be willing to forego the pleasure of society and public life if there is any fear that absorption in these things should take you away from the evening prayer and talk, or the Sunday nurture and admonition. Make your children your first charge. In them lie the germs which will eventuate in whole careers of good or of evil, of blessing or of curse!