Our kids know that they aren't supposed to tease each other. They understand that if they do it, they are being disobedient. Nevertheless, the regularity with which they tease one another must border on legendary. Twin boys, age 6. A younger sister, also age 6. Three kids ten months apart, all of them in their teasing prime.
So there they are. Knowing that "obedience" and "behaving" is a positive quality that we would like to help them learn. And yet, battling daily with their internal desire to tease. On the way to school each day, it is nearly inevitable, except on those rare days when God is gracious to us, that at least two of the children will begin to tease one another. The third will be silent. We will remind. We may scold. Finally, we may yell. And when we are close to silencing the teasers, so that three children are once again in line with our expectations, the third will finally speak: "Daddy, I'm the only one behaving." He may as well add a "nanny nanny boo boo" for effect.
And thus, all three children descend into rebellion.
Someone said that God gives us children so that we will understand what it is like to create someone in our own image who denies our very existence. It isn't that they pretend we're not there; they just completely ignore our "sovereignty" over the situation as parents. They know the rules, they just have a really hard time keeping them. The internal push to do the wrong thing is too strong. It's almost worse than pretending we weren't there. They look us in the face and do exactly the opposite of what we asked them to do, and what they know they should do.
Of course it really is just a microcosm of our own rebellion. It's the reason that religion doesn't work. The internal push to do the wrong thing is too strong; the rules only highlight our desire and make it worse, like someone telling us "not to look" at something. Our first reaction, without even thinking, is to look. Had no one ever told us not to look, we may have never looked, or at very least, we wouldn't have known it was wrong to look. It's when we hear the law of not looking that our desire becomes evident and we do the one thing we aren't supposed to; we look. But the problem is deeper.
Even if we don't look, and we don't descend into obvious rebellion, we still end up in the wrong spot. We say, "See, I didn't look." But our heart (and our tone!) reveals what we really mean: "see, I knew I was better than all those lookers; all those rebels." It's a much more subtle form of rebellion; an implicit rebellion; a rebellion couched in righteousness. A rebellion that elevates our selves and denigrates others because, after all, we really are better than them.
Religion creates rule breakers and rule keepers and neither of them are righteous.
The only one righteous is the one who not only kept all of the law, but loved keeping it, not because anyone would notice, but simply because he delighted in God and delighted in keeping his ideals. There was no self-interest involved; only God-interest. He fulfilled the law not because he was a law-lover, but because he was a God-lover. He loved God fully, so he loved others fully. So love is the fulfillment of the law.
What does that mean for three kids who tease each other incessantly? I don't really know. But what I do know is that they need grace more than they need law, and I need grace more than I need another parenting manual. That doesn't mean I don't help them to behave, it doesn't mean I don't give them rules, and it doesn't mean that they don't have consequences. It just means that the first thing they get when they get to school is a hug and an "I love you", and that's the first thing they return to every day. And they get it regardless of whether or not they teased each other in the car.