How Important Is the Family?

One of the most profound aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ is what it says about the importance of a human being. God became one!

From the very first page in the Bible, we knew that humans were made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). But we had to wait on the New Testament to find out that the image was so strikingly close to reality that God was able to pass as one of us.

In the six days of creation, there was a progression underway such that man was God’s crowning achievement. After that, there was nothing else for God to do but rest. That alone implies enormous dignity for human life. But when God hung on the cross to suffer for our sins, rising from the dead just days later, He implied something about human life too profound to put into words.

No matter how great the entirety of creation is ever measured to be, it will not eclipse the importance of a single human life. How privileged, how blessed we are to be human. Perhaps the greatest lie a person could ever believe is that he doesn’t matter.

Having pondered, ever so slightly, the importance of a single human being, we are now better prepared to appreciate what makes the family so important.

The Importance of the Family

The family is the mechanism designed by God to transition a dependent, infant human being to an independent, mature human being. This process takes about two decades. When you consider the intricacy and delicacy involved in the design of a human being, the design of family must be similarly sophisticated.

There is no conflict between the importance of the individual and the importance of family because the purpose of the family is to support the individual in the maturation process. God brought Adam and Eve into the world full-grown, but all the rest of us start off microscopically – not even able to draw breath. That comes nine months later. Even when we come forth from our mothers’ wombs, we cannot survive on our own. If we do not receive nurture and care, we soon die. It’s another year before we can even take a single step by ourselves. And it’s roughly 20 years after that before we no longer need parents to give us a roof over our heads and put daily food on the table. When you stop and think about it, raising a human being to maturity seems like a project on the order of planning and executing a trip to the moon. No wonder family is so important – it’s the spaceship to get us to our destination.

Lots can go wrong with this project…and often does. This reveals the presence of sin in the world. Whenever a troubled person seeks psychological help, the conversation always includes a debrief on what it was like growing up. Understanding the dynamics of “the family of origin” is considered key to understanding the person. Although there are exceptions, the more dysfunction found in the family of origin, the more dysfunction will be found in the “adults” it produces. I put “adults” in quotation marks because some individuals never reach maturity because of the setbacks they experienced in childhood.

So great is the importance of the family, that it’s fair to say that the well-being of the nation depends on it.

For the world to be right, the nations need to be right.
And for a nation to be right, its families need to be right.

If you have good families, you’re going to have a good nation.
If you don’t have good families, you can’t have a good nation.
As the family goes, so goes the nation.

Individuals are the building blocks of family, and families are the building blocks of the nation. It’s possible for an individual to overcome a bad family…but it’s not easy and it’s not normal.

From Creation to Redemption

Of all societal institutions, family is the only one designed by God. For example, God does not design how nations operate; He leaves that to human beings to figure out. Oh, yes, He did design ancient Israel’s government, but remember that was temporary until Messiah came. Not just nations, but all human organizations – whether it be armies or bridge clubs – are designed by human beings. But God designed the family.

People today are acting as if God did not design the family. Family has become a DIY project. Some folks prefer two dads and no moms; others, two moms and no dads. And that’s just the beginning of variety folks seem to think they’re entitled to impose. The problem for all these synthetic, artificial family structures is the same problem you’d have if you set out to design a man-made human being. The job is just too demanding for us. If our desire to create a human being is that great, we should just let that creation take place the way God designed. As with a human being, so it is with family. We need to leave with God those things that only He can do.

God created the family when He put Adam and Eve together (Matthew 19:3-6). In the last 6,000 years, that structure has not changed because it has not needed to change. There was no design flaw. What flaws there are come from individuals seeking to satisfy themselves rather than their Creator. In a word, sin.

In His plan for redeeming the world, God promised to redeem families. This promise started with Abraham (Genesis 12:3), and was consummated in Abraham’s greatest descendant – Jesus Christ our Lord. Each individual must accept the authority of Jesus in his heart for the redemptive process to begin, but one of the very first steps for that individual is to recognize the design and the importance of the family of which he is a part.