Deuteronomy 6:20 · World English Bible
Deuteronomy 6:20 Meaning When Your Son Asks You in Time
When your son asks you in time to come, saying, “What do the testimonies, the statutes, and the ordinances, which Yahweh our God has commanded you mean?”
What does Deuteronomy 6:20 mean?
What a child grows up asking will outlast every answer you ever gave them. Rules obeyed without meaning produce compliance, and compliance dies with the generation that still remembers the reason.
From the Self-Help reading below.
Deuteronomy 6:20 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Self-Help
SELF-HELP
Self-Help
What a child grows up asking will outlast every answer you ever gave them.
Rules obeyed without meaning produce compliance, and compliance dies with the generation that still remembers the reason. So a home gets arranged until the child raises the question himself, because a question a person asks on his own behalf sends his mind hunting, and what a mind hunts for it finds, believes, and eventually lives.
The answer prescribed next is an account of slaves whom Yahweh brought out by a strong hand, which tells a father that meaning arrives as rescue rather than as a defense of the rule. What a parent controls is not the child's obedience but the question planted early enough to run for sixty years. A house that never provokes the asking spends everything it has on behavior and hands a grandchild nothing he can use.
Self-Help lensGo deeper in the app
Self-Help lens
Live Deuteronomy 6:20 today
- Instead of explaining why you do something today, do it where someone can see and let the question come to them. A question they ask themselves outlasts any answer you volunteer.
- When your kid or a friend asks why you bother with something, answer with the story of what it got you out of rather than the principle. People remember rescues, not rules.
- When you are tempted to shut down a hard question because you are tired, say you do not fully know and that you will think about it with them. An honest unfinished answer keeps the asking alive.
What question are the people around you growing up asking because of how you live?
The same truth in other traditions
Confucianism · Analects
Confucius said he only opened the subject when the student was genuinely asking, since teaching that outruns the question is wasted. The hunger has to come first.
Zen
A koan is given so the student carries a question for years. What a person works at on their own goes deeper than any answer handed over.
Judaism · Passover Haggadah
The whole evening is arranged so the youngest child asks why this night is different, and the answer told back is a story of rescue, not a rule.
Free · No account needed
Read all of Deuteronomy 6 through 17 lenses
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store