The Bible Study Podcast, episode 175. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of fruitful parenting.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. We continue the study of

fruitful parenting today, and first of all, let me apologize for my voice. I have come down with a cold, so this is going to be a little harder to listen to than usual. And hopefully I won't blow my nose in the middle of the podcast, which I'm told I did sometime recently and failed to edit out. If someone will tell me where, I would be glad to go back and take that out of that show.

We're going to look today at some biblical examples of parenting.

We're going to look at specifically some biblical examples of bad parenting or questionable parenting in the Bible.

And you'd be surprised, I think, how many there are.

Or at least I'm surprised how many there are.

If you go back to the first parents, Adam and Eve, they clearly had no how-to guidebooks.

They clearly had no Dr. Spock or how to raise healthy children or anything like that.

But their first two kids, they had, Kane and Abel, one murdered the other.

Now, you'd have to say that in most families, a 50% murderer rate would be a higher number than we desire.

And things don't get a whole lot better after that.

Abraham, we know, was a man who was faithful to God, and part of that faithfulness included taking Isaac and binding

him to an altar to sacrifice him. Now, again, I'm not saying that he was wrong, but certainly

if you tried that today, child services would take your child away. Isaac's parenting skills

are certainly worse than Abraham's. Abraham, at least, was following what God wanted him to do

and trusting that God

would provide a way out. Isaac had two different children who were different from birth, as children

often are, and clearly had a favorite. Isaac had Esau and Jacob, and clearly Esau was the one that

he liked, and Jacob was his mother's son, and Jacob turns out to be a trickster,

one who steals his brother's birthright. Again, having 50% of your children being thieves

is, again, a higher percentage than most of us would like. But fortunately, Jacob learned from

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