It’s All in the Family
It’s not for nothing He said we should call Him “Father.”
In Scripture, the family is the anchoring point of all human activity. This is perhaps one of the most difficult claims to make in Western societies, particularly in the US. Anyone currently alive is unlikely to remember when American families were anywhere close to the God’s ideal. We understand it’s importance as an economic unit, but we simply have no cultural background for understanding how critical it is for grasping the moral fabric of the universe.
Family is God’s idea. Not simply the nuclear family, but the extended family. We have no concept in our society for that. Cultivating warmth we get; cultivating the divine miracle power of kinship piety is totally absent. We don’t even have a proper concept of what it means to put your family first in your life. A threat to your family stability isn’t merely a threat to you, as well, but a threat to the stability of the universe.
In ancient times, your family was the only thing keeping you alive most of the time. That dire necessity helped people to understand the fundamental welding of affection between blood kin. Even when life generally became tamer and easier, people still held to the instinct that your family was your highest human loyalty, and it was altogether an overwhelmingly powerful loyalty. In the process of living, your family was your home team. By extension, they were your identity. There might be conflicts, but no one ever questioned the necessity of maintaining the family integrity against a hostile world.
We talk today of bad marriages and irreconcilable differences. That was so utterly rare in ancient times that we cannot imagine. People didn’t simply suppress their individuality to fulfill some artificial social demand. They realized individuality could be an excuse for destroying what God built. It wasn’t airy fairy perfect happiness all the time, but the social structure of the Bible was pretty harsh on mean fathers and husbands, and simply could not tolerate a bitch. Instead of blindly making all things about yourself, you actually acknowledged a duty to other humans. You learned how to make room for other folks to be different, to be human and individual, or you ran into serious trouble quickly. No one would help you when you needed it, and it was unheard of that folks never needed help of some kind. If you don’t need help, you aren’t human, but a serious danger to other people. Petty bickering was deadly. Human existence could never be perfect and you weren’t somehow psychically damaged by letting some portion of your personal dreams slide into oblivion. You didn’t allow that fund of painful frustration to build; this life wasn’t all that important in the first place.
This business of husband and wife competing against each other is anathema. If they aren’t picking up the slack for each other, it isn’t holy matrimony. When you hear phrases like “he needs to” and “she had better” then you know it’s not a family as God sees things. It’s bad morality to take petty internal quarrels to a third party. Biblical morality says husband and wife are no longer individuals, but welded to each other as a single unit. Not a surrendered identity in His courts, but a surrendered independence from each other. The needs of one are the needs of the other. We so very much deserve the wrath of God on this point.
At the same time, it was considered a rich blessing from God that someone in a position to actually help was aware of your personal business. Isolation was inherently sinful. Snooping might lead to mischief, but in general it was benign and expected. If you weren’t paying attention to your neighbor’s daily condition of life, you were scandalously derelict in your social duties. In our late Western society, we can’t imagine that. The failure to imagine is a red flag, a warning we have a very long way to go trying to understand what it means to be morally good.
The major flaw in modern society is confusion about whom we should trust. We are trained to develop a residual hostility to the intrusion of actual kinfolk, the people who know us best. Our social instinct is to push away in some idolatry of false independence. Instead, we are encouraged to pursue opportunities to unload our intimate thoughts with people who share only the most shallow connections. We make far too much of the weakest casual links, and dump our souls out to strangers, while denying that same trust to the folks with whom God Himself placed us for those very same needs. Our society consciously attacks real kinship with talk of rights against each other. It’s hard to convey just how awful and sinful that is.
Your household should be several generations in close physical proximity. While there would surely be some privacy, it would be highly limited and that was altogether proper and necessary. Your private space was far smaller, and subject to a great many more limitations. You were treated as a threat if you got grouchy about it.
Our Western prickly confusion about physical contact among men is frankly a slap in God’s face. Tenderness in our world is reserved only for sexual manipulation, so when a man acknowledges a need for genuine masculine warmth, he has no choice but to be queer. What God says is normal male bonding included things we insist means perversion. Nobody will demand you break all the social taboos of your current context, but you need to be aware how wrong your society is, and how the biblical version is still superior. You cannot understand biblical morality without recognizing your own social mythology as wholly false.
More than that, Israel was never allowed to forget that any child of the Covenant was a brother or sister. Sure, they tried hard to pervert that into thinking only Abraham’s DNA was “holy.” God steadfastly reminded them often that it was adherence to the Covenant that made all the difference. Breaking the Covenant meant rejecting the family protection. It meant threatening society. Worst of all, it threatened to break God’s protection. With Christ, this was shifted to a higher plane, where shared spiritual identity takes precedence over DNA. While Jesus spoke in the stark terms of hating your kin by comparison, He also pointed out how His Father considered marriage a sacred bond regardless of any perceived mismatch. Your ability to be righteous with your earthly family is a reflection of your understanding of spiritual kinship.
No one can write a comprehensive guideline on how to keep peace with your Western family in a society consciously designed to destroy the family unity. All the whining about patriarchal oppression assumes a woman is not necessarily on her husband’s team. Satan loves that one. The only reason Western men are ogres is because our social mythology won’t even permit the biblical ideal of manhood to be mentioned. When we read the Bible describing men like David, we read our Western mythology back into the narrative. Flaws and all, David was man after God’s own heart, a man who genuinely sought to please His Lord. We have no such concept in our Western society. David was a shepherd to all he met.
That didn’t keep him from killing the enemies of his people, but Western society is afflicted with the most perverted understanding of war and killing of any civilization so far in human history. We have no clue about a gentle and caring shepherd male leading his household in pleasing God, which included defending by any means necessary what God called him to build. We misread how the Bible uses “hate” and believe we have to utterly despise — whipping up some deep emotional resentment against — someone who simply doesn’t understand or accept the limits God told us to guard. You can respect your enemies even as you kill them, with all the valiant bravery marching alongside sorrow at the necessity of taking their lives. We either do it too willingly or whine about it.
Our conceptual model for handling emotions is about as perverted as it gets. Our Western perversion of what the Bible calls proper morality in the family is one of the biggest barriers we have to living in God’s justice. When you step away from God’s justice, you walk face first into the Devil’s domain. Just because your senses and logic don’t see a threat doesn’t mean there is none. Recognize the barriers but don’t wait on anyone else to do the right thing.
Stay close to your family.
