Reuben took one of his father Israel’s wives Bilhah to bed. She was the mother of two of the twelve sons of Israel, Dan and Naphtali.
Israel, also known as Jacob, heard of it and did not speak of it until many years later when he addressed all his sons on his deathbed.
In the time David was King of Israel, his son Amnon raped Tamar, Amnon’s half-sister. Two years later, Absalom, another of David’s sons, killed Amnon. David did not speak to Absalom for five years.
These true life accounts from the Scriptures illustrate the depth of injury that fathers suffer when sons offend beyond the unthinkable.
Our republic simmers with multiples of this same reality:  There are sons who married with no one’s consent; whose grieving fathers have died without setting their eyes on the offspring (grandchildren) from those marriages. There are sons who have despised their fathers, and those parents have taken their injuries to the grave. There are sons who have violently avenged their fathers’ ill-treatment of their mothers and not heard words of forgiveness till the fathers have passed on.
The biblical accounts demonstrate that a son may inflict on his father a wound too ghastly for that parent to cast eyes upon – which is materially true in the physical. Certain accidents may injure a person so badly that people at the scene will at first flee in fright instead of lending a helping hand.
Only that when it comes to offences of great moral gravity, the trauma doubles:
First of all, the offence is beyond scandal; it becomes a calamity because it is too deep and too evil. Secondly, the offence cannot be discussed without injuring the aggrieved party even further. This is why few women report rape to the police because the lengthy court processes tend to reopen heartfelt wounds by merely discussing the matter.
Criminologists have said that sexual defilement affects not only children in the family; sons have in some cases repeatedly overpowered and defiled their grandmothers. That kind of offence is unspeakable, therefore the old woman suffers in silence – and where her son, the father of the offender, knows what has happened, the sense of injury has no description.
Sexual deviations, biblically described as abominations, are numerous.
Reality
This is the sort of reality Israel wrestled with when he heard what his first son Reuben had done (Genesis 35:22). He was unable to speak to that reality for many years. In other words, he suffered for many seasons.
By the time he addressed the matter as he lay dying in Genesis 49, one of his sons Joseph had become prime minister of Egypt.
Considering that Jacob lived in Egypt for 17 years before he died, and considering that Joseph had oversight over Egypt during seven years of agricultural plenty and seven years of famine, you are talking of a space of possibly 30 years of silence.
Who can bear a broken spirit, the Bible asks in Proverbs 18:14? And more so, broken by a son? Proverbs 19:13 says a foolish son is destruction to his father. Proverbs 17:25 describes a foolish son as a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him.
You can only imagine what was running through Jacob’s mind all these years – most likely he did not touch Bilhah ever again. And most likely he did not entrust Reuben with anything of importance from that time on.
The heart of a parent, in this case a father, is that all-important runway from which sons take off – or fail to take off. When the Ten Commandments state that there is long life for the child who honours his or her parents, it means that all is well for the child who brings honour to the parent; and all is not well for the child who brings dishonour to the parent.
It also means that all is not well for the child whose father is chronically angry with him. Fathers should not think of their children with grief, but many are those who do. It is all because the children are disgracing them, which in itself is unbearably hurtful; but on top of that more children today are very defensive of their disgraceful behaviour. Those defences are even posted across social media.
Such children have a hollow, shallow and visionless sense of selfhood. They have no sense of grace. One of the causes is bad company, and bad company by nature aggressively recruits good boys and girls and aggressively injects strong doses of badness into its victims.
Deathbed
On his deathbed, a father has divine authority that no sane mind dares dispute. The last words of a dying father predetermine where the son and daughter will end up, educated or uneducated; wealthy or poor; well-connected or not connected.
Son, do you remember what your father said to you as he passed on? Or what your mother said before she passed on? Or if you were not there, were you not concerned about what words they reported to you?
Jacob, speaking as Israel, the father of the nation God promised to Abraham before him, told Reuben (Genesis 49:3 and 4):
“Reuben, you are my firstborn; my might and the beginning of my strength, preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power. Uncontrolled as water, you shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father’s bed; then you defiled it – he went up on my couch.”
Note carefully that Reuben, as the first son, lost his birthright when he shared his heart with his mother Bilhah. By the time Jacob was speaking to the twelve on his deathbed, he had already spoken first to Joseph and his sons Ephraim and Manasseh and blessed them ahead of the whole family! Reuben had already been upstaged, displaced!
The father took away his first son’s preeminence in dignity and power, leaving him a mere son. Years of contemplation, years of hurt, had now led the father, whose son had outwitted him in matters of father’s bedroom, to strip the son of everything first born sons are made of.
Even God noticed this scenario because nearly 500 years later He brought the matter up just before another great and powerful man, Moses, died.
Having led Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness for 40 years, and having seen the beginnings of the allocation of the Promised Land to the children of Israel before they crossed the Jordan, Moses blessed the children of Israel.
Note his words in Genesis 33:6, “May Reuben live and not die, nor may his men be few.”
We thought the passage of Israel sealed Reuben’s fate, but the God of all mercy and grace was watching! This portends many things for fathers: make the effort and the decision to forgive.
That one plea for Reuben, a disgraced first son who plummeted from grace to grass, is the voice of Jesus Christ whose blood speaks of better things than the complaints of the blood of Abel which complained against Cain who killed his brother Abel.
Evidence would indicate that in this life, those fathers who have complaints against their  wayward sons are greater in number than those fathers whose hearts are filled with praises for their excellent boys. Many are those Jacobs who have borne their Reubens’ offences in quiet anguish for many long years.
But if the offspring shall see the light of day and behold the grace of God, if the family as a whole should live again, fathers have the responsibility to forgive that offence and get it out of the way. If that offence is not forgiven, it lives and breathes: it limits and cripples life.
If God will address Reuben’s case 500 years later (after Joseph died the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians for 430 years), this indicates that the root of that un-forgiven offence will stretch and affect and influence family fortune for generations hundreds of years hence!
Murder
After Absalom killed his half-brother Amnon for violating Tamar, he fled to Geshur. He was there for three years.
It took the pleas of army commandant Joab for the king to allow Absalom to be brought back to Jerusalem. Even then, King David did not see Absalom for two years (2 Samuel 14:21-33). Father did not speak to son for five years.
The point is that son had killed son; brother had killed brother. No father could ever cope with that. To David’s mind, setting eyes on Absalom was going to hurt as sharply as the first news of the murder itself.
Absalom fought hard to be restored to his father as a son. Quite miserably, he set fire to Joab’s field of barley to force the army commandant to organise a meeting with the king. The king forgave Absalom for the murder. All was well: father had forgiven and released his son.
But murder forgiven in the family is still a capital crime in most parts of the world. Thus the king should have allowed the law to take its course, and he did not.
Since the violent spirit in Absalom had not been humbled, the boy still rose up to overthrow his father and sleep with father’s ten concubines.
This probably explains why Joab, who had acted to help Absalom reconcile with King David, and whose barley field Absalom had set ablaze, eventually decided enough was enough and speared the boy to death (2 Samuel 18).
Great as King David was, there is no record of an active, purposed father-son relationship in his family. There is no record of father disciplining his sons.
Discipline
The Bible recognises a period in the life of a son when there is hope. “Discipline your son while there is hope, and do not desire his death,” says Proverbs 19:18.
There are fathers whose fault is that they obey their sons’ desires and instill no discipline at all. The sons grow to have a controlling influence on their fathers, and at that stage there is no hope. Our continent has examples of presidents whose time in power was ruined by sons who were allowed to run helter-skelter all over the operations of government.
A father like that, the Bible says, looks forward to the death of his son.
In today’s rational post-modern thinking, discipline is fast becoming inappropriate. As a direct outcome of this, sons are losing their worth as sons. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him,” Proverbs 22:15 says.
Before your son reaches a stage where he is fearless (devoid of moral sense) and crosses boundaries that others avoid, drive that foolishness out of him. The point is not to negotiate that foolishness out of him, in the name of dialogue, but to drive it out.
If a child will learn to fear evil, the rod of discipline is there to demonstrate a measure of the pain one suffers if he offends in life outside the home. The person that faces no consequences whenever he throws temper tantrums and contravenes every rule in the house during childhood will grow up with an incorrigible mentality of entitlement.
Some men do what they do because in their sub-conscious it is their right; they are entitled to do what they do and it is correct. That is foolishness rooted and firmly grounded because father and son did not gel and become friends from day one.
Absalom had a burning sense of entitlement to his father’s throne. If you follow his life story from 2 Samuel 13 onwards, he took steps to demean his father’s rule, then plotted to overthrow him, and in the process took steps to humiliate him by having sex with all his mothers (David’s concubines) on the roof of the palace (2 Samuel 16:15-23).
David did not even have a chance to contemplate this scenario and decide whether or not to forgive his son because Absalom was eventually killed by the army commander.
The father who forgives his son sets his entire family free to advance beyond the environs of that offence. The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 committed the sort of financial offence that destroys families. His father forgave him and everyone had a fresh start.
Sons should learn to see wrong as wrong. No matter who else wallows in such wrongdoing, every wrong is wrong and has no defence. No matter what made you do it, sin is sin. If sin is not repented of, not regretted, not turned away from, it destroys.
Pride goes before destruction (Proverbs 16:18), and there is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Proverbs 16:25).
Return
Son, return to your father: humble yourself before him, confess your error, admit your wrong and ask to be forgiven. Heroism which insists on standing tall in the face of injury to others and damage to the family name is always self-deception. It kills.
If you truly seek forgiveness and father refuses to forgive you, you are released because you have done what God requires of you and He can accept your worship at the altar (Matthew 5:23 and 24). If forgiveness is denied you, see to it you do not hit back in any way or repeat the offence: you will show yourself insincere in your plea to be forgiven.
Fathers, let us be man enough to grieve over our son’s disastrous offences. Every person’s abomination hurts those who learn of it, especially so the parents.
After sorrowing, invoke God’s grace to enable you to forgive and let go.
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