6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9 (NIV)
The constant drip, drip, drip of the secularizing media is maddening. When they choose to advance an ungodly lifestyle, they do so in a thousand ways, day after day, year after year—with sympathetic television characters, talk show bookings, generous coverage of photo ops, and adoring documentaries. Equally, secular foes can destroy a good man’s reputation through their standup comedians, snide newscasters, and editorial cartoonists. Though the success of their relentless advocacy can be discouraging, it is also instructive. God’s people can win through persistence as well.
God places high value on educational repetition and reinforcement. While observers award highest marks for innovation and fashion, the Lord is more impressed with reiteration of the great truths. On His model, Israelite children would hear the Shema (“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”—v. 4) at the dinner table, on the way to visit relatives, at bedtime, and with the “alarm clock” at dawn. As they entered and exited the house, they passed reminders of the Torah’s truth. (Today, the mezuzah, or small box containing Scripture, can be seen on the entryways to many Jewish homes.) As they met religious leaders, these young people saw small Scripture containers bound to their foreheads and arms. (Orthodox Jews still wear these phylacteries, i.e., “protectors.”)
Jesus, of course, criticized the Pharisees for their pretentious phylacteries (Matt. 23:5) and “vain repetitions” (Matt. 6:7 KJV). But the problem was not in the phylacteries and repetitions; it was in their pretense and vanity. Public usage had outrun private reality. In attending to regimen and ceremony, religious leaders had forgotten the first principle, that devotion to Scripture was essentially a matter of the heart (v. 6).
The drumbeat of heresy and perversity is incessant. Orthodoxy and wholesome counsel should be just as persistent. Children in particular need healthily repetition, coordinated between Church and home—in thoughtful mealtime prayers, continual Scripture memorization, biblically acute Sunday School, etc.
Reiteration does not have to be dull. When the word comes from the heart of an anointed pastor to the hearts of anointed listeners, the effect is electric. And though Christians do not wear phylacteries, the pulpit can become a phylactery for them as they bind its biblical preaching to their lives, year in, year out. Steady, steady, steady.