A letter I submitted to the ‘Belfast Newsletter’, back at the beginning of April was some 1000 words long!
Original Letter: Reply to NSPCC’s blasphemy
That was understandably too long for the ‘letters column’ of that newspaper.
However, I was contacted and asked if I could edit it. This I did and I submitted the following which was published yesterday, 20th April.
I appreciate the ‘Belfast Newsletter’ printing my comments in answer to the evil words from the NSPCC!
Rev Ivan Foster
Letter: The Bible teaches clearly that ‘corporal punishment’ is essential to proper disciplining of a child
A letter from Rev Ivan Foster:
The views of Caroline Cunningham, policy and public affairs manager, NSPCC Northern Ireland, as published in your newspaper (End the physical punishment of children, Letters, April 1), are most offensive to those who love and live by the Bible, believing it to be the very Word of God.
Some campaigners say physical punishment of children should be banned.
But the ‘rules of life’ in God’s Word have been set aside at the behest of false prophets.
The Bible teaches very clearly that ‘corporal punishment’ is essential to proper disciplining of a child.
“He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes,” Proverbs 13:24.
Please compare Proverbs 22:15, 23:14. 29:15, 29:17 and the same God-ordained truth is set forth.
There is no justification offered in these verses for the brutalising of children that is often the consequences of alcohol or drug taking. The NCPCC ought to be campaigning against the availability of all dangerous drugs, especially alcohol.
The problem is not Bible’s code correction and discipline but the cruelty of depraved and sinful adults.
There is no more harm in Bible discipline, indeed most often far less, than that suffered by a child undergoing surgery or other medical procedures in order to restore health and often to save its life.
Why does the NSPCC include not the sufferings in the children’s hospital in their condemnation? The physical punishment commended in the Word of God is far more beneficial than that of any life-saving procedures in a hospital.
The Word of God declares that our Heavenly Father engages in disciplining His spiritual children. Please read Hebrews 12:5-11.
The example set by our Heavenly Father, the very epitome of parental love, is to be noted and copied, irrespective of the campaigning of the NSPCC.
The fruit of a failure to obey the Bible’s counsel on child discipline is demonstrated on the streets and in the schools of the nation. Those engaged in knife crimes and rioting, looting, and general defiance of authority are not just the progeny of homes dominated by alcohol and drugs.
The ‘rules of life’ set forth in God’s Word have been set aside at the behest of false prophets, modernists in the main churches and benighted organisations such as the NSPCC.
Society, under the most foolish guidance of the modernists in the main churches, has utterly forgotten that it is stated: “God . . . hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead,” Acts 17:31.
On that day, the NSPCC and all who support its evil notions, will wish most fervently that they had not despised and rejected the Word of God.
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd),
Kilskeery, Co Tyrone