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I never cease to be amazed (and deeply grateful) for God's great mercy toward modern-day parents in the abundance of substantive Bible study resources that are available for teaching children the oracles of God. Through a recent conversation with Paul Tripp, I discovered another incredible resource that had somehow escaped my gaze: a set of Bible commentaries for children. Yes, Bible commentaries for children. Author Nancy E. Ganz has written commentaries on the first four books of the Bible (with many more to come!) that open up Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers to children and parents. They detail, not only the texts, but their place in the storyline of God's redemptive plan that finds its fulfillment in Christ.

Published by Shepherd Press, the series is titled Herein is Love and is designed for parents to read to their children in family worship or in informal or formal Bible study sessions. Each chapter includes additional texts, particularly New Testament texts that show fulfillment in Christ, for study in conjunction with the OT story. The reading level would allow for older children (8-12, depending on how well/much your kids read) to absorb and benefit from the commentaries. There is so much substance in these commentaries, parents will benefit greatly as well. Each commentary includes a helpful teachers guide with many penetrating questions for understanding and application as well as recommended visual aids, memory verses, Psalms to sing and appropriate memory verses. Over the next two days, Gender Blog will provide a few excerpts from first four books to give our readers a bit of the flavor of these excellent books.

From a chapter on the Fall in Genesis 3, "War in Heaven:"

The war in heaven is a battle on earth. It is a war between the Holy One and the Evil One, a battle between good and evil that sweeps the entire span of earth's history. The Bible, from the beginning to en, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks of this battle. In this war Satan is continually, definitively, and ultimately defeated. Satan's "casting out" and "hurling down" seems to be a past-present-future event which has happened, is happening, which will happen.

From a chapter on Genesis 22, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, "The Lord Will Provide:"

On that day God had another Lamb waiting, one who had been waiting from before the foundation of the world, and who was still waiting for the appointed time. The ram slain on Abraham's altar was only a shadow of the One who was to come. Two thousand years later in those same mountains would stand a city called Jerusalem, and on Mount Moriah would stand the temple of the Lord. At that time and place another son of Abraham would be "led like a lamb to the slaughter" (Isaiah 53:7). He would carry a wooden cross upon his shoulders, and this Promised Child, this Son of Abraham, would be sacrificed for sin. There would be no last minute rescue for that son. His body would be broken and his blood would be poured out . . . unto death!

From a chapter on Moses being cast away on the water as a baby, picking up on Hebrews 11, "By Faith, He Left."

Moses was born an Israelite. By God's grace his life was spared and by God's grace he spent the first few years of that life in his own home with his own family. During those few short years, Moses' father and mother must have taught him all they could about the LORD, the God of Israel, and the promises that He had give to His people long ago. They also must have told Moses about his own birth and the amazing way that God had delivered him from death. However, that precious time of loving and learning passed quickly. Too soon the day arrived when Moses' mother could no longer keep him. Once again he had grown too old; once again she had to let him go, entrusting him to the care of Almighty God. Yes, the sad day came when Moses' mother had to take her little boy to Pharaoh's daughter, and he would not come home again, for now Moses would be the son of an Egyptian princess.

All four books are available here from Shepherd Press.

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Last week, USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham asked a question surrounding the recent Tiger Woods revelations (sadly, his marital infidelity most of you surely know by now) that I have not seen posed elsewhere: How did Tiger's golf-obsessed father prepare him for life? Wickham set up his question by summarizing Earl Woods' obsessive drive to make his son a hall of fame golfer:

Shooting a 48 at age 3 must have both pleased Tiger and whetted the voracious appetite of his father, Earl Woods, to push the young Woods to reach golf's loftiest heights. At 8, Woods won the Optimist International Junior World Golf Championships, the first of a long list of amateur and professional titles. For now, that run has ended, at least until Woods straightens out the part of his life he was least prepared for by his father, or apparently anyone else.

Wickham's most compelling line, one that should strike a cord in Christian fathers, is this one: "It does not take a psychiatrist to appreciate that a childhood spent under the iron fist of a determined father in obsessive pursuit of the mastery of sports, music, or other such parental passion, comes at a great cost."

Wickham's thoughts are personally relative (and I suspect for many fathers reading this post) for two reasons: 1. I have two sons. 2. My family is possessed of a deep love for the games people play. These thoughts certainly apply to fathers with daughters as well; as a former sports journalist, I have seen many fathers living beyond the bounds of reality, living and dying (read: idolatry) with every swing of the bat, every tackle, every smooth backhand or every three-point shot undertaken by their high school sons and/or daughters. Above all, as a broken down actor living on a broken down stage, I can see it in myself. Thus, Wickham's question has deep relevance for all fathers and here are some of my answers to Wickham's important question, or they might best be called five fatherhood lessons I want to take from the Tiger Woods affair and teach my sons (my daughters still think sports are "yucky") at the intersection of sports and the Christian life:

1. Sports, like all other parts of the created order, are a good gift from God, but they must not serve as a Christ-replacement. See Romans 1.

2. Winning isn't everything. The Gospel is.

3. Play hard at all times, play to win, play sports (or a musical instrument or do math or fill in the blank) to the glory of God, but lose with grace because you have learned the wisdom of lessons 1 and 2.

4. Do not dream of playing sports for a living; the life of a professional athlete is mostly unsettled and fraught with unimaginable temptations. The athlete spends much of his time away from his family and away from the body of Christ. The athlete's family desperately needs him and he desperately needs the body of Christ.

5. If your children have no talent or interest in sports, do not push them to play. Do not live vicariously through them. God is the giver of gifts and all his gifts are good. For boys, participating in sports must not be confused with authentic manhood. Many of the best athletes I have known, covered or watched over the years, have also exhibited an ungodly, female-objectifying, hubristic, chest-thumping machismo that is the opposite of genuine, Christ-exalting manhood. I know carpenters and realtors and musicians and teachers and writers and brick masons and ministers and salesmen and truck drivers and professors and plumbers who possess little to no athletic ability, but who shine forth a glorious picture of biblical manhood.

I pray that God will be pleased to use Tiger Woods' circumstances to awaken him to the reality of his deepest need (the Gospel), one which his own father may have neglected, and to remind fathers like me that teaching their sons how to throw a curveball is a great thing, but not the best thing. 

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Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, recently posted 16 tips for Dads on leading their families at Christmas time. Each tip ends with a question designed to promote action on the part of the Dad. Just to give you an idea, here's Driscoll's tip #3:

"Dad needs to carve out time for sacred events and experiences to build family traditions that are fun and point to Jesus. Dad, is your calendar ready for December?"

You can check out the entire list here .

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Here are the final ten attributes of a godly man according to Puritan divine Thomas Watson in his 1666 work The Godly Man’s Picture Drawn With a Scripture Pencil. A godly man will be:

1. A zealous man. “Grace turns a saint into a seraph,” Watson writes. “It makes him burn in holy zeal. Zeal is a mixed affection, a compound of love and anger. It carries forth our love to God and anger against sin in the most intense manner. Zeal is the flame of the affections; a godly man has a double baptism—of water and fire. He is baptized with a spirit of zeal; he is zealous for God’s honor, truth , worship.”
2. A patient man. A godly man is patient in: waiting, bearing trials, when God removes any comfort from him, when God inflicts any evil on him.
3. A thankful man. “Praise and thanksgiving is the work of heaven and he begins that work here which he will always be doing in heaven.”
4. A man who loves the saints. “The best way to discern grace in one’s self is to love grace in others.”
5. A man who does not indulge himself in any sin. “Though sin lives in him, yet he does not live in sin. Every man that has wine in him is not in wine. A gladly man may step into sin through infirmity, but he does not keep on that road.”
6. A man who is good in his relationships. Two of the most crucial relationships for Watson are marriage and fatherhood. A godly man, Watson says, fills up the marital relationship with love in accord with Eph. 5:25. “The vine twisting its branches about the elm and embracing it may be an emblem of that entire love which should be in conjugal relationship. A married condition would be sad, if it had cares to embitter it and not love to sweeten it. Love is the best diamond in the marriage ring.” A father’s duties to his children are threefold: “he must drop holy instructions into his children, he must pray for his children and he must give his children discipline. Of the latter, Watson writes, “The rod beats out the dust and moth of sin. A child indulged and humored in wickedness will prove a burden instead of a blessing.”
7. A man who does spiritual things in a spiritual manner. “Spiritual worship is pure worship…A wicked man either lives in the total neglect of duty or else discharges it in a dull, careless manner…A godly man spiritualizes duty; he is not only for the doing of holy things but for the holy doing of things.”
8. A man who is thoroughly trained in religion. “A godly man strives to walk according to the full breadth and latitude of God’s law. Every command has the same stamp of divine authority on it, and he who is godly will obey one command as well as another.”
9. A man who walks with God. Walking with God, for Watson, includes five things: Walking as under God’s eye, the familiarity and intimacy that the soul has with God, walking above the earth (has his heart fixed ultimately on eternal matters), visible piety and continued progress in grace.
10. A man who strives to be an instrument who makes others godly. “He is not content to go to heaven alone but wants to take others there. Spiders work only for themselves, but bees work for others. A godly man is both a diamond and a lodestone—a diamond for the sparkling of grace and a lodestone for attractiveness. He is always drawings others to embrace piety. Living things have a propagating virtue. Where religion lives in the heart, there will be an endeavor to propagate the life of grace in those we converse with.”

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This is part two of our series on Puritan divine Thomas Watson’s attributes of a godly man from his 1666 book, A Godly Man’s Picture Drawn With a Scripture Pencil. A godly man is:

1. A man who prizes Christ. “Put a glass under a still (water container) and it receives water out of the still, drop by drop,” Watson writes. “So those who are united to Christ have the dews and drops of his grace distilling on them. Well, then, may Christ be admired by all those who believe.”
2. A man who is an evangelical weeper. What is meant by ‘evangelical weeping?’ Watson says a man who weeps in an evangelical way sheds tears over indwelling sin, over clinging corruption, over the notion that he is not more holy, over God’s amazing love for him, because, in some sense, the sins he commits are worse than the sins of others. Watson calls it “sorrow of the soul.”
3. A man who loves the Word of God. Watson said a godly man loves: the counseling part of the Word, as it is a directory and rule of life, he loves the threatening part of the Word and the consolatory part of the Word—the promises.
4. A man who has the Spirit of God residing in him. “I conceive that the Spirit is in the godly, in whom he flows in measure,” Watson writes. “They have his presence and receive his sacred influences. When the sun comes into a room, it is not the body of the sun that is there but the beams that sparkle from it. Indeed, some divines have through that the godly have more than the influx of the Spirit, though to say how it is more is ineffable, and is fitter for some seraphic pen to describe than mine.”
5. A man of humility. “He is like the sun in the zenith, which when it is at the highest, shows lowest,” he writes. “St. Augustine calls humility the mother of the grace.” But Watson also warns of the existence of a false humility: “A man may be humbled and not humble. A sinner may be humbled by affliction. His condition is low but not his disposition. A godly man is not only humbled but humble. His heart is as low as his condition…A humble man is always preferring bills of indictment against himself. He complains, not of his condition, but of his heart.”
6. A man of prayer. “As soon as grace is poured in, prayer is poured out…Prayer is the soul’s traffic with heaven. God comes down to us by his Spirit, and we go up to him by prayer.”
7. A man of sincerity. In modern parlance, he is what he is. Watson writes, “A godly man is plain-hearted, having no subtle subterfuges. Religion is the livery a godly man wears and this livery is lined with sincerity.”
8. A heavenly man. “Heaven is in him before he is in heaven...A person may live in one place, yet belong to another…A godly man is a while in the world, but he belongs to the Jerusalem above. That is the place to which he aspires. Every day is Ascension Day with a believer.” He lines out six ways a man is to be heavenly: In his election, his disposition, his communication, his actions, his expectation and his conduct.
9. A zealous man. “Grace turns a saint into a seraph. It makes him burn in holy zeal. Zeal is a mixed affection, a compound of love and anger. It carries forth our love to God and anger against sin in the most intense manner.”

You can read the first part here . We'll conclude the series tomorrow.