1 Samuel tells us that Eli did not restrain his sons. They would abuse their position as priests and take what did not belong to them. They would take meat from the sacrifices of the people. Then they would have sex with women in the temple itself.
God would later tell Eli that his sons would die on the same day because of their wickedness. And God specifically let Eli know this would happen because he did not retrain them.
The responsibility of a father is to remove wild behavior from his sons. We all grow up wild and uncivilized. Especially as boys, we are violent and cunning. These talents should be out to productive uses rather than be abused.
We learn from our fathers about how to interact with other people, especially other men. They teach us manners and the proper way to behave. At every turn, if you have a present and good father, he is correcting your behavior somehow. He does not have to do this forever, only until you can manage yourself with a reasonable level of efficiency.
What is the result when fathers do not restrain their sons? You likely see the result every Sunday at your church services. you will see children who obviously have no father in the home.
And make no mistake, just because there is a male in the house does not mean there is a father in the home.
There are many kids who just run wild. They have no discipline, they have no father restraining their behavior. It is obvious that they do whatever they want whenever they want. There is no discipline. For most of us, behaving like most kids today would result in the beating of a lifetime. And the cumulative result of those beatings is that we are decent men.
Eli did not restrain his sons.
They ran wild. They did whatever they wanted. Eli had no problem rebuking Hannah for drinking alcohol in chapter 1 of 1 Samuel (a false accusation for which he also had no proof). Yet for whatever reason, he was not willing to restrain his own sons. Later in the book we see that Eli confronts his sons for their behavior, but by then it is too late.
The roots of their behavior had already grown into the tree of their character. there was no going back to repair who they had become. They were men of the world, the hypocrites that are deplored by religious and non-religious alike.
We have a responsibility to restrain our sons as well as to restrain ourselves. If you want to raise a son who is well-behaved as an adult, you have to guide and restrain him while he is young. It is impossible to make up for lost time with regard to discipline. Once the young men grow up, they are who they are. Whatever they are is what you have made them into. If you do not want them to be atrocious little minions, discipline them.
One of the 12 rules in Jordan Peterson’s first book is to not let your children do anything that would make you dislike them.
Because if you dislike them, the rest of the world will certainly dislike them as well. If you dislike your children, you will take out your frustration on them. This will lead to you treating them worse and them becoming estranged from you.
There are not many kids I like. too many people in my generation have opted to not discipline their children. They have decided to “talk about decisions”, or discuss the various wrong with their kids. Because that is highly effective.
What never fails is a simple stimulus-response equation for correcting behavioral difficulties. Kids will quickly learn that certain behaviors (stimuli) lead to a swift strike on the behind (response).
I have often jokingly suggested that there should be a deacon in the church in charge of spanking kids. He can conceal carry a nice wooden spoon in his suit and whip it out whenever there is bad behavior being displayed by kids. Everyone knows those kids who need it. At my church, an old woman was knocked to the ground by a bunch of rampaging children. She broke her femur, and the kids still run around every week.
Free-market spanking is one of the things the Presbyterians get right.
Though having a deacon over child discipline is funny to think about (and somewhat strange), it could never be enough to correct the behavior of children. they need their father. Those kids would just learn to be well-behaved for an hour or so and then they would go right back to being little devils.
If you have sons, restrain them. If you were not restrained as a child, now is your time to correct your behaviors and become a man. There is far more at risk when it comes to raising sons than we realize at first glance.
