Produced grief to Isaac and Rebekah:“When Esau was forty years of old, he took as wives Judith, the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath the daughter of Elon, the Hittite, and they were a grief of mind to Isaac and Rebekah” Gen 26:34, 35.
A father who is concerned for the spiritual life of his children told me recently, “I have sent 1000 rupees for my elder son last month, to the young partner’s scheme of a Christian leader, and will send for the other son soon.
The Bible says that the incidents in the Old Testament had “happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition” I Corinthians 10:11. Let us see some of the mistakes of the Old Testament parents to avoid committing such mistakes in our family.
The family is the first institution established by God after the creation of man. In Gen 2:15, we read that God created Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it. The Lord looked at Adam in the garden and found that he was alone and incomplete in certain respects
“I was baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness in 1960 at age 26 with my wife, Marjorie. We had studied together with the Witnesses and were converts. As a member in good standing I served as an appointed congregation Elder since the mid-1970.
“Now there was a certain man… and his name was Elkanah… He had two wives: the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. This man went up from his city yearly to worship and sacrifice to the Lord of hosts in Shiloh…
“There will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction
Even from the first century, the early Church was attacked by various heretical teachings. To counter these heresies, many Church Councils gathered again and again, to finalise and guard the biblical truth. Here are the four major councils of the early Church and their outcome.
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple… Then I said: ‘Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts’.
One God-Allah: Allah is the one true God. Muslims deny the trinity and the Lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Allah is omnipotent, omniscient and absolutely sovereign. God is responsible for all that happens in the world.