For the father whose son called it a myth over breakfast and meant nothing by it.
A question asked out loud at your own table is better news than the same question kept quiet in a bedroom, and you have been treating it as the opposite.
He said it at about twenty past seven with a spoon in his hand. They'd done myths and legends at school that week. He said the Noah one was in the same category, then went back to his cereal and asked for a little more milk.
He wasn't being clever about it. There was no edge in the remark at all. It was an observation from a nine year old who'd been given a filing system at school and had used it, correctly, on the material available to him.
You said something. You can't remember exactly what, and you have been going over it ever since, which is how you know it wasn't very good.
Then you did the drive to work with your jaw tight, and the sentence that kept arriving was that this is what it costs, and that a boy who sat somewhere every Sunday would never have said that.
A question is not a verdict, and he said it at your own table. The written Word the child's question into the plan rather than treating it as a failure of it, and the Spirit is in the asking as well as the answering.
A Category Error Is Not Unbelief
Be precise about what actually happened, because precision will settle you faster than reassurance would.
Your son made a category error. He was handed a set of features at school, ancient, story, flood, animals, and he sorted the material he knew by those features. That's what a well-functioning nine year old mind does, and it's the same skill that will serve him in every subject he ever studies.
Sorting is how children make the world manageable. They do it constantly and mostly correctly, and when they get one wrong the remedy is a better rule rather than an alarm.
He did not weigh the evidence and reject it. He didn't consider the resurrection and find it wanting. He sorted, using the only classification anybody had given him.
That's an intellectual tidying problem with a straightforward answer, and it's a world away from the crisis of faith you drove to work imagining.
The two feel identical from the inside, which is why the drive was so bad. A parent hears the content of a sentence and runs it forward twenty years in about four seconds. What a nine year old actually said and what you heard were separated by two decades you invented on the dual carriageway.
You are looking at a filing error rather than a rejection, and those aren't the same event. The Word says that the words in a parent's mouth for moments exactly like this, and the Spirit gives them when they're needed.
The Passage Assumes the Question
Here's the passage, and what it takes for granted is the useful part.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And 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.Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
Four times of day, every day, continually. That's a description of a household where the subject keeps coming up, and a subject that keeps coming up is a subject that gets questioned.
A few verses later Moses says plainly that when thy son asketh thee in time to come what these words mean, you are to tell him. The question is written into the plan. It isn't a sign the plan failed.
Those words went first to parents entering a new land where their children would meet other accounts of the world, and they arrive at a breakfast table without narrowing.
Your son's question sits inside the plan rather than as evidence against it. Scripture's instruction expects the child to ask and tells the parent to answer, and the Spirit is present in the answering.
Accuracy Will Serve Him Better Than Warmth
Say what you should actually do, which is narrower than what you have been rehearsing on the drive.
Don't give him a speech. Don't be warm at him about it, and don't correct him at a level he never asked about. He made a sorting error, so give him a better sorting rule.
Something like this: myths don't name kings, or dates, or places you can still travel to, and this book does all three constantly. People argue about whether it's right rather than about whether it's that kind of book. That's true, it's checkable, and it's the size of answer a nine year old actually asked for.
Give him the rule and then stop. If he wants more he'll ask for more, probably next week, probably while you're doing something else entirely.
Stopping is the part parents find hardest. There's a strong pull to keep going while you have his attention, to cover the resurrection, the reliability of the manuscripts, one or two remarks about dinosaurs. Resist it. A boy who gets a proportionate answer learns that his questions are ordinary. A boy who gets a lecture learns that his questions are dangerous, and he'll stop supplying them.
Tell him you don't know something if you don't. A father who says he isn't sure and suggests looking it up teaches a boy that this material survives being looked into, which is worth more than any answer you could give him.
You can hand him an accurate answer instead of an anxious one, and accuracy is the kinder thing. The written Word's instruction tells parents to answer the question plainly when it comes, and the Spirit makes a careful answer live.
I Am Not Telling You What He Concludes
Be plain, because there's no guarantee on offer here and pretending otherwise would be a sale.
I can't tell you what your son will believe at twenty five. His mind and his will are his own and they'll stay his own. Nobody has the standing to promise you a result about another person.
Nor am I telling you a Sunday room would have prevented the question. It wouldn't have. Children in those rooms ask the same thing, often at about the same age, and some of them ask it silently for a decade because the room made it hard to say out loud.
What I want off you is the word cost. Not the ambition for him. Not the tight jaw.
He Said It at Your Table
The turn here is about the location rather than about the content.
He said it to you, at breakfast, with a spoon in his hand, in the middle of asking for milk. No preamble. No sense that he was raising something dangerous. No checking your face first to see whether it was allowed.
Which means he's never learned that this subject is fragile in your house. He doesn't know that some questions make a parent tighten up, because you've never taught him that by tightening up.
A boy who says it at the table is a boy you can still talk to. The children worth worrying about are the ones who worked out at nine that the subject makes a room go quiet, and who never said another word about it to anybody.
Your son brought it to your table, which means nothing has closed between you. Scripture's instruction puts the answering in the parent's hands at the hour the question comes, and the Spirit kept the table open for it.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
You add nothing to this by saying it and lose nothing by saying it badly. Christ dwells in you, the Spirit carries the words, and God arranges what comes after in His own time.
Speak it where you stand, unhurried.
A question is not a verdict, and he said it over breakfast at my own table. It is written that when my son asks what these words mean, I am to tell him, which puts the question inside the plan rather than against it. The Spirit is in the answering, and He was in the asking. I am not looking at a rejection. A nine year old sorted material with the only rule anybody gave him, and he did it without once checking my face. I give the outcome to God and put the word cost down.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
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Deuteronomy 6:6-7
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