Family Tradition: Hank, Sin, and Redemption

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When I tell folks from the South that my name is “Hank”, a large number of them tend to break out in song, asking me if I know that song that goes like….”Don’t ask me, Hank, why do you drink?/ Hank, why do you roll smoke?/”, etc., etc. And typically, rather than simply answer their question, I’ll just join in on the chorus “Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?” - showing them that yes, I know the song, and yes I enjoy singing it just as much as they do.

The song they’re alluding to is a Hank Williams Jr. song (his nick name is Bocephus) called Family Tradition, which talks about the lifestyle of drinking and drugging that Hank Jr. inherited from his father, the original Hank Williams (who is the actual Hank from which I got my nickname). It talks about Hank Jr. being disowned from the ‘country music family’ for his wayward ways, and is mostly centered around his response that it’s “just a family tradition”.

Like most older country music, this song lays sin bare - giving its audience a hefty dose of the cultural (and even a sense of the biblical) understanding of the “familial fallen nature” of man that is passed on from parent to child. As it has been since Adam, so it was for Hank. But like many sinners (especially in this physco-theraputic age that we now live in) who are approached with their guilt and shame; the primary blame is put on genetics, or upbringing, or even the oft heard - “well, this is just how I was made.”

And in a very real sense, that is true. But we are not merely sinners because Adam sinned those many, many years ago in the Garden. We are sinners because 1) we inherited a sin nature from Adam and 2) we sin ourselves. We sinned today, we sinned yesterday, and unless Jesus pierces the Eastern sky tonight - we will sin tomorrow. Family tradition it is, but not in the abstract - rather, each of us was born into this world as children of wrath, depravedly bent towards sin ourselves, haters of God, and rejectors of the Truth.

But praise be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, that we were not left to rot in that wicked, sin-enslaved family tradition. No brothers, by the redemptive work of Christ on the cross - in his dying in our place as a substitute for us, taking the curse for our sin upon himself, and living in perfect obedience to the righteous requirement of the Law - the Father has adopted us into his family, made us joint-heirs with Jesus, and sons of the Living God.

And the family tradition we now have is one that calls us to hate our sin, for it cost our Savior his life - and it calls us to cling to his cross, and to glory in the blood that was shed there; for it brought us into His family, and will bring “many sons to glory” still. This is the one family tradition that we were made for…

‘BH

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