Today, in the course of the performance of my responsibilities as a teacher, I read an article that discussed the awarding of diplomas to high school students who did not meet the requirements to graduate, essentially passing them along. Many of those students, as recorded in the article, upon reaching adulthood and its realities, expressed anger with the adults in their lives who never corrected them, and in doing so, encouraged their destruction.

I’m not proud of this, but my first thought was: “Why are they blaming others because they didn’t take responsibility for themselves?” Immediately I knew better, though. Can we expect a child, left to himself, to make good decisions? Of course not; that’s what adults are for. We are to blame if we will not correct our children when they are wrong. Many of our unwritten social rules, educational policies, and (in some cases) even laws have the apparent purpose of impairing our ability to correct our children.

It would be easy to say: “At least I’m not actively modeling destructive behavior for my children,” but that would be a lie. When we neglect our responsibilities to raise, discipline, and train our children we are leaving them to their own devices. We are actively reinforcing the lie that there is no God, there are no absolutes, morality is arbitrary, and life has no meaning. If that lie is accepted on even a small scale, we could reasonably expect to see an increase in immoral behavior: promiscuity, violence, dishonoring of parents, disregard for law and authority, etc. To test the hypothesis, observe; we do see the moral decline. According to the deception, we would suffer no ill effects from our “liberation” from God and His morality. Again, we can observe the self-evident truth to the contrary.

Psalm 19:1 reads: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Each of us knows that the universe could not have created itself. The implication that we are accountable to our Creator is what we have to come to terms with. So, will we acknowledge God for who He is, or won’t we? Will we repent, call upon Him, and entrust ourselves to the work of salvation that only He could accomplish, or will we create our own images of gods to suit ourselves?