Some years ago a father in the counseling room told me his son had stopped believing, and I gave him this verse as comfort and watched it land as an accusation. It guarantees nothing.
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)
Read as a promise, it carries a second clause nobody prints: if he departed, you did not train him. Scripture’s own stories show why the verse cannot mean that, beginning with a prophet’s sons.
What a proverb is
A proverb tells you how life generally runs. That is its job, and the book shows it on purpose, once printing two sayings one under the other, in Proverbs 26:4-5, that cannot both be rules for every case. Proverbs 13:24, the verse people hear behind “spare the rod,” is a saying of that same kind. The proverb says what usually becomes of a child raised in a way. Usually is the word it needs, and a guarantee is what people hear.
Samuel’s sons
The clearest test is the man who anointed Israel’s first two kings. His mother gave him to God as a small child, saying in 1 Samuel 1:28, “as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD.” He heard God call him by name, and he judged Israel all his life. When he was old he made his sons judges, and the record of how they judged takes one verse:
And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment.
1 Samuel 8:3 (KJV)
The text never blames Samuel for it. When the people used his sons as a reason to ask for a king, God told him in 8:7, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me.” And when Saul was made king, Samuel spoke to all Israel, and later in the same speech, in 12:23, he said this: “God forbid that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way.” He promised to keep praying for the people who had asked for a king in his place, and to keep teaching them.
The kings tell the same story. Of King Hezekiah, 2 Kings 18:5 says, “after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah.” When he died, “Manasseh his son reigned in his stead,” and Manasseh “did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD.”
Manasseh, and the hope
Manasseh is also the best case for the hopeful reading. Second Chronicles adds what Kings leaves out. In 2 Chronicles 33:11-13, carried to Babylon in fetters, “he besought the LORD his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers,” and God heard him and brought him home. Some readers see the proverb coming true at last. The text, though, credits his affliction, his prayer and God’s hearing, and says nothing about his father’s training. And the next generation went its own way again: Manasseh’s son Amon, says 33:23, “humbled not himself before the LORD, as Manasseh his father had humbled himself.” The hope in the story is real, and it rests on God, who heard a man carried off in fetters, rather than on a formula.
What a parent answers for
Eli is the case that seems to cut the other way. His sons were corrupt, and God judged his house, says 1 Samuel 3:13, “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.” Eli was judged for his own part: he saw it and let it go on. Parents answer for their own part, and Scripture is plain about that.
What Scripture does not do is lay the grown child’s choices on the parent. The exiles in Babylon had a proverb of their own, quoted in Ezekiel 18:2: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” and God answered it.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
Ezekiel 18:20 (KJV)
What parents are given
The Law of Moses gives parents a purpose in Deuteronomy 6:2, “That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God… thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son,” and a practice in 6:7: “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” Four settings, which together are a whole day. It describes a household life, offered with hope, with no promise about what each child will choose.
A grown child’s leaving does not prove you failed. Eli was judged for his own part, “he restrained them not,” not for his sons’ choices alone. And the parent whose child has gone is left where Samuel stood: free to keep hoping, because God heard even Manasseh, and free to keep praying, the one thing Samuel said it would be a sin to stop.