Chapter 9

A Gracious God and a Mixed Multitude

What the Kindness of God Means for the Children of Believers

The last chapter set your child beside Israel and said: he stands where they stood — inside the privileges, not automatically inside the promise. This chapter presses into what that actually means when you are the one raising him, and it asks the questions a parent actually lies awake with. Do I tell my child to “know the Lord” as if he already should? How does discipline work on a child who may be holy but not yet saved? How much grace do I hold out, and for how long? Is there ever a point of cutting off? And underneath all of it: what kind of God am I trying to show him?

I want to answer these the way the Bible answers them — not by starting with the rules, but by starting with God’s own posture toward a mixed multitude. Because that is what your household is, and that is the thing we have to understand first.

And I want to put one picture at the head of this whole chapter and keep it in view the entire way through: the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15). Hold him there, because he is the truest portrait we have of a godly parent facing exactly what this chapter is about. Look closely and you will see that his household is a mixed multitude in miniature: two sons, and both are a problem. One demands his inheritance, ruins himself in a far country, and comes home; the other never leaves the estate and yet, at the end, stands outside the feast, bitter, having served for years without ever knowing his father’s heart. A rebel who returns and a dutiful son who is a stranger — that is the believing household, and that is Israel, in a single family. Everything this chapter says about kindness, about warning, about discipline, about the last extremity of cutting off, has to answer to that father, because he is the one who did it right. When we reach the hard questions, we will keep asking: what did that father do?

Your children are a mixed multitude — with no remnant promised

Israel was never a nation of the uniformly regenerate. It was a mixed multitude — the phrase is Scripture’s own (Exod 12:38) — believers and unbelievers under one covenant, circumcised alike, catechized alike, and “not all Israel is Israel” (Rom 9:6). The people of God in the Old Testament always contained, side by side, the truly faithful and the merely-belonging.

Your children, considered as a group across all believing homes, are the same. Some will believe; some will not; and from the outside, for many years, you often cannot tell which is which. A believing home does not produce a uniformly regenerate set of children any more than the nation of Israel produced a uniformly regenerate people. This is not cynicism. It is the sober truth the whole Bible tells about the children of the godly, from Cain to Esau to the sons of Eli.

But here is the hard place, and I will not soften it, because softening it would be a lie that could not survive contact with real life: Israel had a guarantee that your children do not have. God bound himself to preserve a remnant in Israel — “God has not rejected his people” (Rom 11:1–2); “a remnant, chosen by grace” (11:5). However faithless the nation became, there would always be a seed, always a preserved core, because the promises to that nation were national promises. There was a floor under Israel.

There is no such floor under your children. And — this is the part worth sitting with — the missing floor is not a defect in the Baptist position; it is the direct result of the best thing about it. The whole glory of the New Covenant is that it is new: no longer a bloodline, no longer a nation, no longer “you and your descendants after you” as a genealogical guarantee, but a people gathered from every family and tongue, entered one heart at a time by the new birth. That newness is our comfort for the church — no one is in it who is not truly the Lord’s. But the very same newness removes any promise attached to our bloodline. Israel’s children had a national floor precisely because Israel’s covenant was national. Our children have no such floor precisely because our covenant is not. God has made no promise to save the children of believers as the children of believers. He has promised to save all who believe.

So we love our children with no net. Nothing genealogical catches them. This is not despair — we will come to the kindness of God in a moment, and it is vast — but it is the true weight a believing parent carries, and every honest answer to the practical questions has to be built on this ground and not on a floor that is not there.

Two households, and your child lives in both

Now a distinction that clears up more confusion than almost any other, and that we have to make carefully, because a word is doing double duty and hiding a whole argument inside itself. Scripture calls the church a household — “the household of God, which is the church of the living God” (1 Tim 3:15); you are “members of God’s household” (Eph 2:19). And Scripture also means the ordinary thing by “household”: the family under your roof, with its children.

These are two different houses, and your child lives in both — but he enters them by two different doors.

The first house is your natural family. Your child is in it by birth. He belongs there, fully; he is holy there in the sense this whole book has described — set apart, under God’s claim, drinking the rain, because he belongs to a home that belongs to God. Nothing he does or fails to do changes the fact that he is your son, in your house, by birth.

The second house is the household of God — the church, the family of the truly saved. And here is the thing that must not be blurred: you do not enter the second house by birth. You enter it by new birth. Membership in God’s household is not genealogical. Paul is emphatic that it is by adoption (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:5), by being “brought near by the blood” (Eph 2:13) — the very verse that calls us God’s household opens by reminding us we were once “strangers and sojourners” and became household members by being brought near, not by being born in. Jesus himself relativized the first house against the second: “Who are my mother and my brothers?… Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33–35). The true family of God is the born-again family, not the bloodline.

I am pressing this because the word “household” carries a hidden argument, and the argument runs the wrong way if you let it. It is tempting to reason: the church is like a household; households include children by birth; therefore the church includes my children by birth. But the New Testament uses “household” to teach the opposite lesson: that God’s house is entered not by birth but by new birth — which is the whole reason our children are not automatically in it. The church-as-household picture, read rightly, does not sweep our children into the covenant; it tells us why belonging to God’s family was never a matter of who your parents are.

So keep the two houses distinct and everything else in this chapter falls into place. Your child is fully in the first house — really yours, really holy, really privileged. Whether he is in the second house is the open question of his life, and it will be settled not by his birth but by whether the Spirit gives him a new one. Holy in the house of his father; not yet, so far as we can see, in the house of his Father.

The kindness of God toward those who do not yet know him

Now the thing this book has not yet said, and must, because without it everything above is only half the truth and the grim half. We have talked about rain that can end in burning, about warnings, about accountability, about no net. All true. But it is not the first thing to say about how God treats a mixed multitude, and if it is the loudest thing you say to your children you will have misrepresented God.

Here is the first thing. Paul, writing to the covenant insider who has every privilege and has not repented — the very picture of the merely-belonging child grown up — says this:

“Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Rom 2:4)

Read who that is addressed to. Not the pagan outside. The insider — the one with the law, the covenant, the privileges (Paul spends the next verses on exactly this person). And to that not-yet-repentant insider, what is God’s posture? Kindness. Riches of kindness. Forbearance. Patience. And the verb is a present, ongoing thing — his kindness is leading, right now, patiently, toward repentance. God is not merely tolerating the mixed multitude while he waits to judge it. He is kind to it, lavishly, and his kindness has a purpose: to lead it home.

This changes how you must see every privilege your unregenerate child enjoys. Earlier we said, truly, that privilege raises accountability — to whom much is given, much is required. That is real, and it is the minor key. But the major key is this: all that privilege is the kindness of God poured out on a child who does not yet know him, in order to lead him to repentance. The Christian home, the catechism, the prayers over his bed, the Bible he has heard since the womb, the means of grace he sits under every Lord’s Day — these are not first a bill running up against him. They are first a Father’s kindness, wooing a child who is not yet his, toward the day he might be. The rain that could end in burning (that was the warning) is the very same rain that “is meant to lead you to repentance” (this is the kindness). One rain. God is good to your mixed-multitude child — good on purpose, good toward repentance — and you must let your child see that goodness, because it is the truest thing about the God you are showing him.

But — and Paul says this in the same breath, so we must too — the kindness can be presumed upon. “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness…?” The word for presume there is a word for despising, for treating something precious as though it were nothing. The kindness is real and it is lavish and it is not a guarantee. It can be spurned; it can be stored up, Paul says next, into wrath (2:5). So this is the missing-remnant truth again, now in its kinder and more terrible form: God floods the mixed multitude with genuine kindness aimed at repentance — and that kindness saves no one automatically. It woos; it does not compel. A Father runs down the road with his arms full of kindness. He does not drag anyone home.

That is the God you are imaging to your children. Hold both keys and you have him right: kind beyond measure to those who do not yet know him, and not to be presumed upon. Lose the kindness and you preach a taskmaster. Lose the warning and you preach an indulgence. Preach both and you preach the God who is.

So — do we say “Know the Lord!” to our children?

Now the practical questions, each answered from that same posture — God’s kindness toward a mixed multitude, aimed at repentance.

First: do we command our children to “know the Lord,” when the New Covenant itself says its members already know him (“they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest,” Jer 31:34)? If knowing the Lord is what marks the New Covenant member, is it even coherent to tell a child who may not be one to know him?

Here is the resolution, and it turns the apparent problem into the very thing you are meant to do. Read the New Covenant promise again, closely: “they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord — for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest” (Jer 31:34). Notice what is being retired there. In the New Covenant, you no longer have to tell a member to know the Lord — because a member, by definition, already does. So the command “Know the Lord!” is not addressed to the New Covenant member. It is addressed to exactly the person who is not yet one — the insider who belongs outwardly and does not yet know God inwardly. Which is to say: it is addressed to your child. The very fact that you must still say “Know the Lord!” to him is the honest acknowledgment of where he stands. You would not need to say it if he already knew.

And this is precisely how God has always dealt with a mixed multitude. The command to know him, to seek him, to turn and live, is the covenant’s standing summons to insiders who do not yet know him. “Seek the Lord and you will find him, if you seek him with all your heart” (Deut 4:29). “Seek me and live” (Amos 5:4). “Seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isa 55:6) — every one of these is spoken to Israel, the privileged and circumcised mixed multitude, not to the pagan nations. The summons assumes the gap this whole book is about.

There is even a father in the Old Testament doing exactly what this section is asking about — saying “Know the Lord!” to his own son — and he shows us how. David, at the end of his life, to Solomon: “And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and a willing mind… If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will cast you off forever” (1 Chr 28:9). Watch what David does. He commands his son to know God — not presuming Solomon already does, not despairing that he never will — and he says it with both keys held together: the wooing (“if you seek him, he will be found”) and the warning (“if you forsake him, he will cast you off”). That is the model. A believing father telling his son to know the Lord, honestly, urgently, with kindness and with warning both.

But there is one more thing you must hold as you say it, or you will crush your child or yourself. The knowing you are commanding is not finally something the child can manufacture by trying hard. It is a gift. “I will give them a heart to know me,” God says (Jer 24:7) — the knowing is something God must give. So you command your child to know the Lord, and in the same motion you fall on your knees and ask God to give him the heart to do it. The command is real and you must speak it; the gift is God’s and you must beg it. That is why “Know the Lord!” on a believing parent’s lips is never presumption and never despair — it is summons and prayer in one breath. You say to your child, with your whole heart, Know the Lord! — the covenant’s own kind and urgent summons, the wooing voice of the kindness that leads to repentance — and then you ask the only One who can give the heart to give it. You are not lying to him about his state. You are doing to him what God does to every insider who has not yet come home: calling him in.

How discipline works — and how much grace

How does discipline work on a child who is holy but perhaps not saved? Here we are not left to guess or to borrow from the parenting shelf, because God spent the whole Old Testament showing us how a Father disciplines a mixed-multitude son — and He did it by pointing straight at human fatherhood as the pattern. “Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you” (Deut 8:5). Read that carefully: God did not invent a special divine discipline and then ask us to copy it. He looked at what a good father already does with his son and said, that is what I am doing with you. So when we ask how to discipline our children, we are handed back the very image God used of Himself — and everything He does with Israel becomes a lesson in what we do with our own.

And the first lesson is that discipline is one of two hands, never a lone fist. In the same book of Deuteronomy, a verse before the discipline of 8:5, God says He bore Israel through the wilderness “as a man carries his son” (Deut 1:31). Discipline and carrying — correction and tenderness — are both fatherhood, both aimed at the same son, in the same book. A father who only disciplines is not imaging God; a father who only carries is not either. God does both, toward the same mixed multitude, and so must we. Hosea gives us the tender hand at its most vivid: “When Israel was a child, I loved him… I taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up in my arms” (Hosea 11:1, 3) — God on His knees in front of a toddler, holding out His hands. That is the God who also disciplines. The image forbids us to set the two against each other.

The second lesson is what discipline means — and it is the exact opposite of what a frightened parent fears it means. Proverbs says, and Hebrews later takes it up as the charter of the whole subject: “Whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He chastens every son whom He receives” (Prov 3:11–12; Heb 12:6). Discipline is not the withdrawal of love or a verdict of rejection; it is the proof of sonship — the Father dealing with the child as a child, precisely because he belongs to the house. This is liberating for a parent of a mixed-multitude child, because it means your discipline is not you rendering a judgment you have no right to render (“you are a reprobate and I am treating you as one” — you cannot see that, and must not try; recall the sealed file, judge nothing before the time). Your discipline is simply you treating the child as a child of the house, which he is. It says nothing about the hidden heart. It says only: you belong here, and I love you enough to correct you.

And the third lesson is that God’s discipline had a destination — the same one the last section named. Why did God humble Israel in the wilderness, let them hunger, feed them with manna? “That He might make you know that man does not live by bread alone” (Deut 8:3). The discipline was aimed at knowing Him. It is the same in the promise that undergirds this whole chapter: “I will give them a heart to know me… for they shall return to me with their whole heart” (Jer 24:7). God’s discipline of the mixed multitude was never venting and never mere behavior-management; it was one more form of the kindness that leads to repentance, bent toward the day the child would know the Lord. So your discipline, too, is not an end in itself and not a settling of scores. It is kindness with a shape, aimed — like everything else in this chapter — at your child coming to know God.

So a parent’s discipline of a mixed-multitude child is patterned, hand for hand, on the Father’s: correction and carrying together, as the mark of belonging not the verdict of rejection, aimed at the child’s coming to know the Lord. It is, in a word, one of the instruments of the kindness of Romans 2:4 — not its interruption.

And how much grace, then? The measure is that same kindness: as much as God shows — riches of it, forbearance, patience, a kindness that keeps leading. There is no ration on the grace you extend a child, because there is no ration on the grace God extends the mixed multitude. What there is, is honesty: grace that woos is not grace that pretends. You may forbear endlessly and still tell the truth endlessly. The prodigal’s father ran to him with the robe and the ring — and that same father had, clearly, let him go, had told him the truth by the very freedom that let the son ruin himself. Lavish grace and unflinching truth are not enemies. They are, once more, the two hands of the one fatherhood — the hand that disciplines and the hand that carries, and they belong to the same God, and to the same parent who images Him.

What the Law itself teaches us about parenting

What, then, is the law to such a child? Two things, and the second is one most parents never think to claim.

First, the law does to your child what it does to everyone: it shows him God’s holiness, exposes his heart, and restrains his hands — it is the tutor (Gal 3:24). You teach it to him fully and require the obedience of his hands even before you can see his heart. (Obedience of the life is right to require, and is not the same as the regenerate heart you cannot command — there is a fuller treatment of that elsewhere.)

But there is a second thing, and here we should reach for something richer than the bare tutor. The Law of Moses is itself a manual for governing a mixed multitude — and so it is, rightly handled, a manual for parenting one. Think about what the Mosaic law actually was: God’s own wisdom for ordering a community of belonging-but- not-all-regenerate people under authority — precisely the community a believing household is. The subject matter is the same. And that sameness is exactly what lets us carry the Law’s wisdom across.

We do not do this woodenly. We do it the way faithful readers have always drawn abiding wisdom from Israel’s expired civil laws: by asking what general equity — what enduring moral reasoning — a given law was built to carry, and then re-expressing that equity in our own setting. The test is simple: where both the subject matter and the underlying rationale of a command still hold, its equity still holds, even after its particular Israelite form has passed away. And for the household, subject and rationale hold constantly, because the fifth commandment — honor your father and mother — establishes the very thing a home is: legitimate authority, beginning with the family. The case laws that surround and expound that commandment are, therefore, God’s worked examples of how authority and household are meant to run. They are wisdom a Christian parent may mine, not rules a Christian parent must reimpose.

So when we come, in a moment, to the hardest household law of all — the statute of the incorrigibly rebellious son — we will not ask “must I do that?” (its Israelite form, a civil death penalty, expired with Israel’s civil state). We will ask the better question: what enduring wisdom about a rebellious child did God build into that law, and what does it teach a parent now? That is how the Law becomes a gift to parenting rather than a threat.

And the gospel does to your child what it does to everyone: it holds out Christ, freely, to a sinner who cannot save himself. The kindness of God is the bridge between law and gospel — the law’s severity and the gospel’s sweetness held together by a God whose kindness, even in the law’s exposure, “is meant to lead you to repentance.” You do not choose between warning your child with the law and wooing him with the gospel. You do both, because God does both, toward the one end of bringing him home. Which is, once more, what the father in the parable did: he had given the younger son the law’s truth (the freedom that let him feel the full weight of his folly) and he ran to him with the gospel’s welcome the moment he turned.

Is there ever a “cutting off”?

Finally, the hardest question, and the one that needs the most care. Scripture does speak of cutting off. The Old Testament had a provision for the incorrigibly rebellious son (Deut 21:18–21) — and it was a death sentence, carried out at the city gate. Now here is exactly the place to use the tool we sharpened earlier: we ask not “must I do that?” but “what enduring wisdom did God build into that law?” The Israelite form — a civil execution — expired with Israel’s civil state; no Christian parent wields a sword. But the law’s equity, the moral reasoning underneath the form, does not expire, and when you read the statute closely for that reasoning, what you find is not a license to destroy a difficult child but a structure of astonishing restraint:

The penalty marked the gravity of incorrigible rebellion — God takes it with deadly seriousness, and no parent should pretend a hard child’s rebellion is small.
But the parents did not administer it. They “brought him to the elders at the gate” — the community judged and acted. Even at its most severe, the cutting-off was taken out of the parents’ hands.
Both parents had to agree; the son had to be not merely difficult but a settled glutton and drunkard, incorrigible after real discipline. The bar was set so high that the statute reads as almost impossible to satisfy — a ceiling, not a recommendation, with wide room for mercy beneath it.

So the equity of Deut 21 is not “here is how to cut off your son.” It is: incorrigible rebellion is grave; the ultimate sanction is communal, never the private act of an angry parent; and it is hedged about with so many gates of discipline and agreement and near-impossibility that mercy has enormous room to work beneath the ceiling. That is the wisdom God built in — and it points a Christian parent away from private, final judgment, not toward it.

And the New Testament confirms the trajectory: the Old Covenant’s civil severity is transposed into the church’s discipline — the unrepentant member is “handed over” and put outside the fellowship (1 Cor 5), and even that is aimed always at his eventual restoration, and even that belongs to the church, not the parent. So God’s people have always had, in the last extremity, a cutting-off — and have always kept it out of the individual’s hands and pointed it toward mercy. Does a Christian parent, then, have one?

Here we must make a distinction that the word “cutting off” hides, because two utterly different things wear the same phrase.

The first is protective removal. Sometimes a child genuinely cannot remain in the home — not as a verdict on his soul, but because his presence endangers the household. I know parents who adopted a boy from a hard place who repeatedly tried to set their house on fire; for the safety of the other children and the family’s very survival, they had to remove him from the home. That is a real and sometimes necessary thing, and it is a decision about the first house — the natural household and its safety. It is a stewardship of harm, the same kind of grievous triage a parent might make in any crisis. It pronounces nothing about the child’s standing before God, and it need not even end the parent’s love or pursuit. Notice, too, that even the Old Testament did not put the ultimate cutting-off in the parent’s hand: the father of the rebellious son did not strike him — he brought him to the elders at the gate, and the community acted. Even at its most severe, cutting-off was communal and protective, never the parent acting as private judge.

The second thing is disowning — declaring a child no longer mine, withdrawing the relationship itself as a verdict on the person. And here the answer is different, because this is a pronouncement no parent is authorized to make. It is a verdict on the hidden heart, and that verdict is God’s alone (judge nothing before the time). It is also contradicted by the deepest gospel picture we have of a father and a ruinous child: the father of the prodigal did not disown. He let the boy go — he did not chase him or cage him — but he did not strike him from the family. He watched the road. And while the son “was still a long way off,” the father ran. That is the posture the kindness of God presses on us: a parent may, in the last extremity, have to remove a child from the house for safety, and may have to let the church and even the state act where he cannot — but he is nowhere given leave to close the door on the person as a final verdict, because the God he images does not do that to the mixed multitude. He keeps being kind. He keeps meaning it toward repentance. He keeps watching the road.

Removal for safety, yes. Handing to higher authority, yes. Truth-telling to the last, yes. But disowning as a verdict on the soul — no. Even the covenant that could stone the incorrigible son made it nearly impossible to reach, put it in the community’s hand and never the parent’s, and hedged it with mercy. How much more the father who has seen, in his own Lord, a God who runs down the road.

Notes to self (not for the reader)

Renumbering: SETTLED. This is now Ch. 9 (Owen “Owen Was Here First” became Ch. 7 at the end of Part One; Israel is Ch. 8; this is Ch. 9). TOC is updated and authoritative. Filename is now ch09-* (matches canonical number). Cross-refs between chapters are by content/title, not number — safe. Part Two now: 8 Israel, 9 Mixed-Multitude(this), 10 Privileged-Unsaved, 11 Rain/Field, 12 Parenting-by-Law, 13 Warn/Woo, 14 Baptism. Part Three: 15 House-Holds-Everyone, 16 Family-as-Foundation, 17 Stable-Footing.
Firewall — the big one for this chapter: the OPENING framing (“Covenant of Grace and Israelite children”) is a trap. Kept the Covenant of Grace ELECT-ONLY throughout; Israelite children located in the Abrahamic/NATIONAL covenant, not the Covenant of Grace; our children on the holiness/contact axis. If any sentence implies our children (or Israel’s) are in the Covenant of Grace by birth, it breaches 1689 coextensivity — rewrite. Never “covenant child.”
The two-household frame is doing real anti-paedobaptist work — it fixes the arrow (household→church transfer REFUSED; God’s house entered by new birth). This also quietly answers the oikos-baptism texts (Acts 16) without ever entering the baptism debate (stays 3a/irenic). Do NOT let it drift into arguing baptism directly.
Kindness is the MAJOR key by design. Watch in edit that the chapter doesn’t tilt back to grim — the warning/discipline/cutting-off material must stay INSIDE the kindness frame (Rom 2:4), not alongside it. If a reader finishes this chapter more afraid than wooed, it has failed.
Deut 21 detail to verify before publication: the “father brings him to the elders, community acts, never recorded as carried out, near-impossible bar” reading — confirm the rabbinic ‘never carried out / to teach and receive reward’ point (Sanhedrin 71a) if you want to cite it; it’s strong support for “the Law made cutting-off maximally hard” but it’s rabbinic, not biblical, so frame as tradition not text.
Law/gospel section is deliberately thin — it leans on the fuller ch. 11 (Warn/Woo) and the “obedience of life vs. heart” material. Don’t duplicate; cross-reference.
Corpus check done: Rom 2:4 (χρηστότης, χρηστὸν… εἰς μετάνοιαν ἄγει present, καταφρονεῖς/presume, ἀνοχή, μακροθυμία); Eph 2:19 (οἰκεῖοι τοῦ θεοῦ vs ξένοι/πάροικοι); 1 Tim 3:15 (οἴκῳ θεοῦ = ἐκκλησία). All verified in patrologia corpus DB.