Family Is Sacred

The nuclear family is unique among all human institutions in that it is the only form of human organization for which God formulates and maintains the rules. People can form governments, businesses, and bowling leagues to operate according to whatever rules they choose. They cannot, however, form a nuclear family on their own authority. The nuclear family remains sacred among all human institutions because God has architectural control over it. This is how it was in the beginning, and it is how it will always be.

Family in the Beginning

In the Gospels (Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9), Jesus teaches that, in the beginning of creation, God established that a man should leave his father and mother, be joined to a woman, and the two would become one flesh. Jesus was quoting from the creation account given by Moses (Genesis 2:24). Jesus goes on to say that what God has joined together, man must not put asunder (that is, separate, rearrange, or deconstruct).

With a couple of temporary exceptions I’ll highlight in the next section of this chapter, family is the only human institution for which He was the designer. God did not start human slavery. He did not tell nations how to form or define their governments. He certainly didn’t start all those non-Christian religions and Christian denominations whose founders claimed He did. He did not start the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts. He did not tell Henry Ford how to manage his automobile company, or construct any other business endeavor. He did not write the by-laws for the Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary Club, Sertoma, Optimists, or any other service club. On and on it goes. The list of human institutions that God leaves entirely up to humans to manage is endless. He’s given us complete freedom in establishing the way we associate and cooperate with each other. He’s only retained for Himself the right to regulate one human institution: the nuclear family. Oh, and here are those two temporary exceptions.

Temporary Sacred Institutions

God formed the nation Israel as His means to bring salvation to the world through the appearance of a Messiah along with a documented plan for how the world would be saved through Him. Thus through the Jews we have received Jesus and the Old Testament. But Israel was not to be a permanent part of God’s plan. Israel was like the rocket that gets the capsule into space. Once Messiah came, Israel gave way to the church.

The only other human institution God directed was the New Testament church. It left us the evidence of Jesus. And like Israel, It gave birth to an institution greater than itself – which was the kingdom of God. However, the kingdom of God is not a human institution. Humans are subject to it, but its administration is by heaven, which is why it’s also called the kingdom of heaven. All creation is now subject to the kingdom of God which is headed by the King of kings: Jesus Christ our Lord.

Both Israel and the church were designed by God, but they were like scaffolding for Him to build the kingdom of God. Once the building is constructed, the scaffolding can be taken away. Thus the nuclear family stands unique among human institutions because God is its architect and its protector. As long as the earth exists, family will be sacred and thus unique from all other human institutions.

Family Pathologies

Except for Adam and Eve, every human being that has come into this world has done so in a completely helpless state. This was even true of Jesus. And it takes roughly two decades from that point to produce a responsible adult. Family is God’s machinery for turning a helpless infant into a responsible adult. It wasn’t just about the man and the woman that God was speaking when He said that it was not good for the man to be alone (Genesis 2:18); it was also about the children that would result from the joining of the man and the woman. Children need family. By design. They cannot survive without it.

It’s proverbial that if you go to a therapist for counseling you’re going to be asked about your family of origin. For if a human being is going to get off track, the seeds of that waywardness can be found in troubled family relationships – mother, father, sister, brother. Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There is one general way family can go right…and it’s the way of God’s design; yet there are innumerable ways family can go wrong. In the same way, there is only one right answer to the question “What is two plus two?” but there are an infinite number of wrong answers.

The Bible has a great deal to say about family. Instructions come through Israel’s prophets in the Old Testament and Jesus’ apostles in the New Testament. The very first story in the Bible after creation and the first sin was the first sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel. Throughout the Bible, we read stories of all sorts of family conflicts: between husbands and wives (like Abraham and Sarah or Ahab and Jezebel), parents and children (like Saul and Jonathan or David and Absalom), and more sibling rivalries (like Jacob and Esau or Joseph and his brothers). It stands to reason that if God is responsible for the proper administration of family that He would provide adequate training on the subject. Thus is the Bible full of wisdom on the subject. Following God’s principles for family brings blessings; ignoring them brings curses.

The Sexual Revolution Is an Assault on the Sacred

The so-called “Sexual Revolution” that was launched in the 1960’s with the advent of “The Pill” has continued to metastasize throughout human consciousness ever since. This social movement can be best understood as an attempt to replace divine rules for sex with human rules. Its results so far have been uniformly disastrous, and yet its proponents just push all that much harder for their next rule change. The best example of this in the last decade is that the Supreme Court’s legalization and normalization of same-sex “marriage” in 2015 led almost immediately to the promotion of transgenderism. In a seeming instant of time, sexual revolutionaries started acting like changing from one sex to the other was a self-evident truth that no one should deny – even though most of those advocating for it had no history of advocating for it. Yet overnight your employer’s health insurance was supposed to consider the idea as routine as a knee replacement. Without debate or any sort of due process for changing attitudes that had existed from the beginning of human consciousness.

At this point, someone will object that I have been talking about family in this chapter and have now switched the subject to sex. But that perception itself is a symptom of the sexual revolutionaries’ warped thinking. For marriage and sex are not different subjects – they are the same subject. That’s an aspect of God’s rules. Sex is for marriage and marriage is for sex. For example, the apostle Paul was explicit that an act of prostitution had the same effect as marriage (1 Corinthians 6:16 quoting Genesis 2:24). Thus the sexual revolution is a revolt against God’s design for family, and revolutions against God never go well for the revolutionaries (Psalm 2:1-5).

So, the sexual revolution is a revolution against family by challenging who gets to make the rules about sex. The primary ethical requirement of the sexual revolution is that sex must take place between consenting adults. (Sexual revolutionaries have no logical basis for specifying any limit to the number of adults involved – only tradition, meaning that limitation is already beginning to fade.) Some might think that such a minimalist requirement would be easy to keep, but oh no, we have the #MeToo mess on our hands to prove there’s a lot of contention about what is and what isn’t consent. Under human rules, that contention is never going to stop. Only returning rule-making authority to the Creator of sex (family) is going to bring peace.

One of the sexual revolution’s worst pathologies is abortion. But a close second is largely hidden from public view. It is Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). This is the use of medical science to support the production of children, which on its face might not sound like a bad thing. But without the governing rules of fertility provided by a wise and loving Creator, this makes medical science into a rather large shop of horrors. Would-be parents (of any number and of either sex) with enough money can pay one party for the sperm, another for the egg, and another for the surrogate pregnancy. And that’s not even counting the caregivers they hire to raise these children for them. Who’s thinking about the child produced by such a process? Note that such a child will have been intentionally and systematically separated from either mother or father…and maybe both. Medical science – since it has chosen to be secular – has no adequate governing mechanism to stop it from commercializing any and every sexual tendency that might arise in a human being. Such an environment is cancerous to family.

The pathologies of a dysfunctional family have always been bad, but the sexual revolution has multiplied the dysfunctions and their toxicity beyond measure. Only by giving up the revolution and pleading for mercy from the King of all creation can we hope for healing from the devastation our ideas for rules have brought to the nuclear family.

(By the way, it is rightly called “nuclear” because when it’s split there are explosive consequences.)

The Redeemer of Family

There is One who can redeem family – the same one who created family in the first place. God came to earth as Jesus in order to restore the family to its rightful place as the most foundational of all human institutions. In Him, all the families of the earth can be blessed – and this happens when we turn from our evil ways toward Christ (Acts 3:25-26). Most fundamentally, this means the man as head of the family and Christ as the head of that man (1 Corinthians 11:3). This arrangement can, in due time, turn any cursed family into a blessed one.

The redemption of family is the redemption of the world. Get the man right, and the family will be right. Get the family right and the nation will be right. Get the nation right and the world will be right.

If we can submit to Christ and make the family right, human beings will be able to manage any and all problems that arise in the many other human institutions that exist or that will be formed. the world. If we can follow God’s rules for family, we’ll become capable of managing all other human organizations ourselves. But let us immediately stop thinking that we can re-formulate the rules for family. These rules are designed into the very fabric of the universe. To oppose them is to oppose nature – which is to oppose reality itself. As the law of gravity cannot be repealed or changed, so it is with the dynamics of the nuclear family.

We can probably manage a bowling league, but managing a family is way above our pay-grade. Family is God’s domain. This is why family is sacred in a way that no other human institution is.