Imitating and Not Imitating

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Ray and I recently spent a couple of days with our daughter Bethany and her husband and children. Everything about the visit was fun. One of the many highlights was watching the children imitate their mama and daddy.

The little one loves to talk on the phone (a dollar calculator from Dollar Tree) and push the buttons and say “Bye.” When the four-year-old and I played restaurant, she asked if I wanted a table or a booth. When I ordered pizza, she asked if I wanted a salad. My drink choices were coffee or tea. When we sat in our “car” (which was actually a hearth), we went on a trip to Tennessee — Ray and I are glad that’s a fun place to pretend to go.

Sometimes when children are imitating, their Little's get to pretend, too.
Sometimes when children are imitating, their Littles get to pretend, too.

Obviously the kids are watching and listening to what their mama and daddy do. All boys and girls are learning from what they see and hear in their everyday world. It’s their parents’ job to make sure that what their children see and hear are worth imitating.

In Deuteronomy, as Moses continued to remind the Israelites of what God wanted them to do when they entered the Promised Land, he warned them about things they should not learn from the culture around them. God warned the Israelites that people already living in the Promised Land were doing things that were detestable to Him. He did not want them to imitate what they did.

The specific detestable things the current residents of the Promised Land were doing involved witchcraft, sorcery, and efforts to contact the dead, but God told the Israelites:

You shall be blameless before the Lord your God.
For those nations, which you shall dispossess,
listen to those who practice witchcraft
and to diviners, but as for you,
the Lord your God has not allowed you to do so.
Deuteronomy 18:13-14

In this passage, God talked about specific things not to imitate, but there is a larger general principle that wise parents follow faithfully. They don’t only guard their children against physical dangers such as disease and bad strangers, they also guard what their children see and hear and are therefore tempted to imitate. They take this warning seriously:

When you enter the land
which the Lord your God gives you,
you shall not learn to imitate
the detestable things of those nations.
Deuteronomy 18:9

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