Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century doctor of the church who penned the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” opens his devotional classic On Loving God with the following words: “You wish for me to tell you why and how God should be loved. My answer is that God himself is the reason why He is to be loved. As for how He is to be loved, there is to be no limit to that love.” Similarly, the Shema leads us from a contemplation of the being and essence of God to our response in loving Him. For this article, we will consider particularly the duty (and delight) of parents to instruct their children to love the Lord God.
Even this parental obligation is rooted in the nature of God’s oneness as it unfolds into His eternality. Because God is, as Moses writes elsewhere, “from everlasting to everlasting,” while the span of a man’s life is like that of the grass that quickly flourishes in the morning only to be cut down by evening (Ps. 90), then one way to ensure that our love for Him has “no limit” is to labor generationally, the current generation praising His works and declaring His mighty acts to the next (Ps. 145:4).
Not only does the worthiness of God call for generational love, but the work of God is also necessarily covenantal, so that every command and confession, including the Shema, is given for “you and your son and your grandson” (Deut. 6:2). This may also be related to the eternality of God’s oneness. His address to mortal Abraham, for example, inevitably included the tacked-on phrase “and to your descendants after you” (Gen. 17:7–8)—gracious, to be sure, yet sobering as well. More to the point, God’s plan to fill the earth with worshipers is worked out covenantally so that “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) becomes inseparable from “teach them diligently” (Deut. 6:7).
We find a beautiful expression of this idea as we compare the call of Abraham, the climactic goal of which was to bless all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:3), with the Lord’s remark later on that He had known Abraham “that he may command his children and his household after him … so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen. 18:19). Thus, we see that one of the most consistent means by which God’s end to bless all the families of the earth progresses is through the little schoolroom—or, perhaps better, “little church”—of the Christian household.
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