Our four-year-old son was lonely because all his older siblings were at school and his younger sister wasn’t old enough yet to play with him. Often he would beg me to read to him. So together we made a plan. If he would play happily with toys and things I provided for him while I was busy, after lunch I would put the baby down for a nap and he and I would enjoy an hour together— just us two. Since his favorite choice was to have me read to him, I majored on Bible stories, right from the Bible itself. The ones he liked best were Jonah, Joseph, Daniel, and Peter in prison. I read the whole book of Jonah, Genesis 37, Daniel 6, and Acts 12 so often that if I should drift off to sleep, our son would just keep on “reading” from memory.
Harold taught me a few things during these happy reading sessions. One day he said, “Wow, Mom, God must have smote [sic] Herod really hard (Acts 12:2323And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost. (Acts 12:23)), but He just smote Peter a little bit” (vs. 7). Before that I hadn’t realized that God used the word smote in relation to both men.
Another time we had taken two days to read through Genesis 9. (That little fellow had so many questions!) When we finished the chapter, I said, more to myself than to Harold, “I wonder why Canaan was cursed when it was Ham (Canaan’s father) who had seen Noah’s nakedness.” Harold answered indignantly, “God just blessed Ham yesterday. He can’t be cursed today!” It seemed that Harold had already learned the truth that David declared in 1 Chronicles 17:27: “Thou blessest, O Lord, and it shall be blessed forever.”
May we eagerly snatch up every opportunity that offers itself to read God’s precious holy Word for ourselves and to share it with our children.