God and the family
This morning is the first week of a new series on ‘God and the family’ that will run over the next 5 weeks on Sunday mornings. This week will be a kind of introductory week laying the foundations, and then the topics over the next four weeks will be Husbands, wives and God; Parents, children and God; Singles, families and God; and finally, Church as the family of God. That’s the shape of the weeks ahead, but before we jump straight into it, I wanted to say a few things at the start about the reasons behind the series – why a series on ‘God and the family’?
In my mind there are three big reasons. The first one is because of how important family relationships are in themselves. Families shape who we are, and family relationships are such a crucial context in which our lives shape and influence and affect others. Whether it’s our aging parents, or the children God has given us, or the brothers and sisters we grew up with, or the marriage relationship we have, or used to have, or would like to have, or have decided not to have – this is a subject that touches all of us. That’s the first reason – the importance of family in and of itself.
The second reason behind the series is the relationship between family and church – the fact that family is overwhelmingly the favourite metaphor that the New Testament uses to talk about the people of God. And it’s more than a metaphor – if we are in Christ then we really are brothers and sisters; God really is our father. That means if we understand family right, it’ll help us understand church right; and if we get family wrong we’ll tend to get church wrong too. That’s the second reason, and we’ll talk about it a whole lot more in the last talk of the series.
There’s one more reason, and that is the importance of family issues in our relationship with the society around us. It seems to me, as I listen to the radio and read the paper and talk to non-Christian friends – it seems to me that our society is at a really interesting moment in its experience and its views about the family. In the sixties and the seventies our society went through massive changes in the way that we think about family, and the way that we practise family relationships – we went through enormous changes, and the dust is just beginning to settle, and people are beginning to ask what was good and what was bad about those changes; what worked and what didn’t. Whether it’s work/life balance, or the role of fathers, or the pros and cons of childcare, or the arguments about gay marriage and civil unions – there’s just no escaping conversations about family. In a context like that, the way we do family and the we understand family and talk about it will play such an important part in our role as missionaries in this society – either to adorn and confirm the gospel or to deny and undermine it.
You might remember that picture Lyndal described of their life in Kazan, amidst a generation that grew up in the orphanages and child care centres of post-Stalinist Russia, with all their friends watching them to see how they do family, and that girl Alfiya whose friends even asked her to take notes for them. Our situation is nowhere near as extreme as that, but there is a similar dynamic at work, I think. The way we do family – biological family and church family too – the way we do family has a crucial missionary function in our society today.
So there’s three reasons – and you can probably add four or five more to the list without to much trouble; but we won’t – we’ll keep on moving!
What is family?
You’ll see on the outline, after “Why ‘God and the family’?”, the next big question is: ‘What is family?’ I have to confess that I umm-ed and ahh-ed about whether to include this section in the talk at all. Definitions are hard work and it can feel like wasted work and wasted time – you might remember the ‘International Year of the Family’ back in 1994, and the way it seemed to turn into the the international year of arguing about definitions of the family. But I think it is still worth doing. If you can understand what a thing is, it does help you to understand how to love it, and how to appreciate it, and how to live in relation to it.
So I am going to have a go at answering that question, ‘what is family’, and here’s how I’m going to do it. In the first place, the definition I’m going to suggest is conceptual not demographic. That is to say, my aim is not to look around at contemporary society and observe all the different ways that people experience cohabitation and connectedness, and all the different arrangements people have for bringing up children, and then provide some sort of definition that fits them all in. That’s not what I’m trying to do; instead, I want to look at how the concept of family and the language of family get used in the Bible, to get to the heart of what the concept of ‘family’ means according to the Bible.
So it’s a conceptual definition, and secondly it’s a cumulative definition. That is to say, some of the elements included in it are added into the definition not so much to sharpen the boundary lines but rather to help describe the essence of what’s inside them. So you can look at the definition I came up with, and you can start taking away elements, like ‘initiated by marriage’, or ‘united by a common name’ or ‘a common home’ – you can take out elements one by one and then ask: Is it still a family? And to start with at least, the answer is probably still going to be yes; it is still a family; but it’s a family that has lost something that contributes to its ‘familyness’; and eventually, if you take enough elements out, you have to say that you’re describing something that’s not really a family at all. It’s a cumulative definition.
And thirdly, as it says there in the third little dot-point on the outline – what we’re trying to do in this definition this morning is not to draw up a list of criteria to see if people qualify for some benefit, but rather to describe something that is in itself a blessing. If we were the tax department or the department of family and community services it would be different. Our goal would be to draw some sharp clear lines, and then if you fall within the lines you get a particular burden or benefit allocated to you. That’s what legal and bureaucratic definitions are all about. But that’s not what we’re doing this morning. We’re not really trying to define a group who are worthy to receive a particular blessing that God is going to allocate to ‘families’; we’re trying to describe a thing called ‘family’ that is in itself a blessing. It’s a blessing that comes with responsibilities, of course, and it’s a blessing that we do terrible damage to because of our sinfulness, but in and of itself, as we’re going to see, it’s something that’s created and given by God as a blessing.
So enough preliminaries – what is a family? What does the concept of ‘family’ mean in the Bible. Here’s my attempt to describe it: ‘A family is a unit of belonging given by God the Creator initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption, united by a common name and a common home, generating responsibilities prior to all other human claims.’
Six phrases – let’s look at them one by one.
a unit of belonging (eg. Gen 2:18-25)
First, a family is a unit of belonging. That is to say, there is a oneness to a family, a solidarity, an identity. When you look at a family, you’re not just looking at half a dozen individuals; you’re looking at something that has a life of its own – you’re looking at a unit made up of various members.
You can see that right back in the beginning of the Bible, in the story of Adam and Eve and the creation of the very first family. God looks at Adam and he sees that it is not good that he is alone; and the answer that God gives for his aloneness is not just plurality but oneness. God doesn’t just create a whole lot of other Adams to be mates together and eat Pizza and play X-box. He creates the beginnings of the first family. He answers aloneness not just with plurality but with oneness. So the narrator says: ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’.
given by God the Creator (eg. Gen 2:18-25)
Secondly, and we’re still in Genesis 2, a family is a unit of belonging given by God the creator. In our culture we tend to think of family as a human construct, as a lifestyle choice. In the Bible, family is a gift from God, a thing that God has created. The assumption of the Bible going right back to this second chapter of Genesis, is that there is a thing called family, and that it’s something real – not just a cultural construct or a lifestyle choice – and that it’s something God has created.
initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption (eg. Mal 2:14-15, Job 31:16-19, 22, Eph 1:5)
Thirdly, a family is a unit of belonging given by God the creator, initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption. The unity of family grows out of the one flesh unity of marriage; marriage is like the seed crystal out of which family grows.
The normal way that happens, of course, is by birth. In our culture, children are increasingly viewed as an optional extra to marriage – as a choice that you may or may not want to opt for. In the Bible, children are at the very core of the purpose of marriage and sex. So the prophet Malachi says to the men of Israel - Malachi 2 verse 14: “the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. Has not [the LORD] made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.” “Why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring.” Now the Bible writers know as well as we do that not every married couple ends up being able to have kids; but childlessness in the Bible is never a lifestyle choice - it’s always a great sadness.
There’s another way a family grows, according to the Bible, and that’s adoption. The Bible speaks of God as the father of the fatherless, and adoption as an act that imitates the heart of God. You can chase up the reference in the book of Job. And in the New Testament, of course, the Bible talks about adoption as the way that we came into the family of God – for example in Ephesians chapter 1.
united by a common name (eg. Gen 48:16, Eph 3:15)
Fourthly: A family is a unit of belonging given by God the Creator initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption, united by a common name. It’s part of the oneness of the family that we’ve already spoken about, isn’t it. A family is one, and it can be named with one name. Now of course in the Hebrew and Greek cultures of the Bible this wasn’t usually done through surnames (though I think it has implications for how we use surnames in our culture) – but in Hebrew culture it wasn’t done through surnames; it was done through patronymics. That is to say, it was done through the members of a family carrying their father’s name.
So, for example, in Genesis 48:16, Jacob – whose name has now become Israel - blesses his son Joseph, and his two grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, and he says: “the Angel who has delivered me from all harm — may he bless these boys. May they be called by my name and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they increase greatly upon the earth.” He passes on his name to them, and they become known as children of Israel. And within the tribes and clans and families of the Israelites, the same thing was true. A family carried the name of the father and was united by that name.
The same thing is true, once again, for the way that the family of God’s people works, if we want to keep tracing that analogy through in those references in italics. So Paul says in Ephesians 3:14 – “For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” A family is united by a common name.
and a common home (eg. Gen 28:20-21, John 14:2)
And then fifthly, similarly, a family is united by a common home. In fact, this is where the very word for ‘family’ in Hebrew is derived from. The word for ‘family’ in Hebrew is a little compound word ‘beth-ab’, which means ‘father’s house’. Your family is ‘the house of your father’. So Jacob makes that vow in Genesis 28:20, and he says: “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God…” and so on. And Jesus says in John 14: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.”
You’ll notice how patricentric the Bible’s picture of family is – it’s the father’s name, the father’s house. There’s no escaping that, and the contrast with the way our society views the place of fathers in families is stark, isn’t it. In our society, fathers are often viewed as quite peripheral to families. Because fathers in our culture are so unreliable, so absent, so uninvolved; because they are sometimes violent and abusive; because they come and go in the flux of relationships, and sometimes they are not even there from the beginning; because their traditional role in the family is so inconsistent with the feminist project – because of all these reasons and more, fathers are viewed in our culture as quite peripheral to families. So Richard Fletcher, from the University of Newcastle, writes about the way that ‘hospitals, schools, childcare centres and other bodies responsible for the welfare of children’ tend very often to treat fathers as ‘inconsequential… sometimes to the point of invisibility’. And he is one of a number of researchers who are just starting to get a handle on the massive social consequences of the failure of fathering and the marginalisation of fathers in our society.
In the Bible, the father is at the very centre of a family; if the father leaves or dies, that is not just a sadness; it’s a catastrophe. Which is why the Bible is so emphatic about the need to protect and care for widows and the fatherless. A family in the Bible has a common name and a common home, symbolising the responsibility and the authority and the accountability of their father.
generating responsibilities prior to all other human claims (eg. Eph 5:28, Mark 7:10-12, 1 Tim 5:8, Gal 6:10)
Finally, sixthly, a family is ‘a unit of belonging given by God the Creator initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption, united by a common name and a common home, generating responsibilities prior to all other human claims.’
There are no human relationships that are closer than family relationships. According to the Bible, your family are not just your closest neighbours – they are ‘your own flesh and blood’. So in Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands to love their wives ‘as their own bodies’. In Mark 7, Jesus attacks the Pharisees for using religious excuses to avoid their responsibility to care for their own parents. In 1 Timothy 5, similarly, Paul says that ‘if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.’ No other human relationship generates claims that are prior to the claims of family, because they are own flesh.
So that’s my attempt at saying what a family is, according to the Bible: A family is a unit of belonging given by God the Creator, initiated by marriage and added to by birth and adoption, united by a common name and a common home, generating responsibilities prior to all other human claims.
Two last points to make, on the basis of that definition, about the place that family has within the scheme of things. First, I want to say: God is for the family, and second, family is not God.
Let me suggest five reasons why I say that God is for the family. The first reason has to do with the nature of God himself. At the very heart of the Trinity, within the substance of God himself, is a relationship of Fatherhood and sonship – a relationship from which the Spirit of God proceeds, and a relationship into which the Spirit draws us as we enter into the Sonship of Jesus. You see that, for example, in the prayer that Jesus prays for his disciples in John 17. When God created family, he was creating something that reflected his own character and being. God is for the family because God himself is trinity, Father, Son and Spirit.
Secondly – back in Genesis – God is for the family because God is the creator of family. When we honour family we are honouring God by receiving and valuing one of his good gifts.
Thirdly – and you can see the list of examples there from proverbs and the psalms – we can know that God is for the family because of the way the Bible so consistently describes family relationships as a gift and a blessing. In Proverbs 18:22 it’s marriage; in Psalm 127 it’s children; in Psalm 128 it’s children and grandchildren; in Psalm 133 it’s brothers – “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity! 2 It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard… It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion” and so on.
Fourthly, you can see that God is for the family from the long list of ways in which the law of the Old testament provided for the protection and the integrity of families – not just the ‘family’ of the nation but the individual families within the nation. I’ve given a few examples there from Exodus and Leviticus; you can chase them up at your leisure one rainy Sunday afternoon!
And then finally, fifthly, we can know that God is for the family from the way that he commands us in the New testament to honour and care for and take seriously the responsibilities of family. So in Hebrews 13:4, for example, he reminds us that marriage should be honoured by all, and in 1 Tim 5:4 Paul says that if we having aging parents or grandparents, we should ‘put our religion into practice by caring for our own family… for this is pleasing to God’.
God is for the family. Whether your family is Christian or non-Christian; whether your family relationships are easy or difficult; whether you live in a culture that is family-oriented or one that is deeply individualistic; God is the creator of family, and he wants us to take family seriously, and to receive it as a blessing from him, and to be wholehearted in living out the pleasures and the labours and the responsibilities that go with it.
God is for the family. And yet, finally this morning, family is not God. We’ll have more to say about this in the weeks ahead, but we need to say it right here in the foundations of the series as well. Family is a good gift from God, but family is not God. Jesus demands an allegiance to him that comes even before our allegiance to father and mother and children and husband and wife.
One of the great paradoxes of how our society functions is the way that it simulatenously devalues and idolises family. On the one hand, our society devalues family by making it merely a lifestyle choice, and optional extra, a cultural construct that we can reshape into whatever we want it to be; but then at the same time – perhaps because we think it is the work of our hands – we tend to lift it up and worship it and idolise it. We marry later and later and our marriages are less and less permanent, but we spend more than ever before on weddings, because we think of a wedding as a celebration of something we have made, and not an entry into something God has given. We have fewer and fewer children and we spend less and less time with them, but we make each child into a little project and we ferry them round to soccer and ballet and maths coaching and piano lessons, and we shower them with money and toys and designer clothes. We make our homes into little family shrines, with stainless steel kitchens and a bedroom for each child and a plasma screen TV – and then we have to work ridiculous hours to pay off the mortgage.
The Bible encourages us to see family not as an idol that we construct and worship, but as a gift that’s given to us by God. And like everything God has made, it exists for something beyond itself – ultimately for the glory of God. And so we honour God by giving thanks to him for family, by taking seriously the real responsibilities that go with it, and by learning to live out a family life that points beyond itself, to the glory of the God who created it.
More about that in the weeks ahead! But first, let’s pray.
It’s a bit like if you try to explain to someone what a house is, and you say: Well, it’s a building you live in, that has walls and a roof and a kitchen and a bathroom and somewhere to eat and somewhere to sleep. You can start taking out those things, can’t you, and for a while you’ve still got a house, don’t you. You can take the roof off and put a tarp over it; you can take out the kitchen and cook on the barbecue or eat take-away; you can take out the bathroom and do your ablutions down in the bush – you can add things in, too, like a shop or a home office. You can stretch the definition, but eventually you break it altogether, and you have to say it’s