It is clear to anyone following these Pages that I am much taken with family. These Pages are first meant for my own family generations, and to those I feel make up my family of students, persons who came my way in professional life and preparing for life experience and service. Since then these Pages have spilled over to others outside my first audiences, to those of my invisible congregation. The purpose has become a focus on spiritual, educational, personal insights – related to both common grace and divine grace.
Family, man’s first institution under God, is God’s favorite analogy in Scripture, related to life – mortal and immortal. The family of God is used as a major analogy of himself (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and is related to understanding of meaning in generations, including the family of God composed of those persons he joins to himself. Further, the family is the foundation of society and is part of the mystery of life and death. One who understands family, as cast in Scripture, gains information for family love and solidarity, as well as about God. If I were the enemy of mankind I would attack the family to weaken it, to break it, to distort it. Persons improve themselves when they build family, serve the members of the family, and find some identity as functioning members of a family, either their own, or their parents, or surrogate families. Mary, Martha and Lazarus, all single in status, were representatives of family as surely as were Mary and Joseph, Abraham and Sarah, and others. The unmarried extend a line from their parent family, as do the persons who marry extend the lines in their children. The former holds until the next is installed, without leaving the old. The genius of the family was partly in the miracle of life descended from a physical blood line, in the comfort and strength of love, and the duty to serve – first in the family and by extension onward to serve others. The lists of the Old Testament tribal families comprise force for these claims.
Love and family are closely identified with each other. According to Scripture, love is in the nature of God. It can enter, remain, or never enter and never be found, in a family. Such a marriage/family fails God, even without divorce. It will lead to some sorrow, and loss of meaning about life. But every marriage of a man and woman, in its own culture touches on who God is and is doing. Confronted by Jesus, the woman at the well had botched her marriages, and was living in common law. In the context of values, the woman had lost her way. To break a family for any reason is to distance, perhaps segregate, that marriage from God’s meaning. The loss is human and divine. We belong in the family of God, unless we are prodigal, and all who are joined in his kingdom belong to his family. Many concepts of heaven may miss the context. Were we to understand the meaning of the family, we would choose to be adopted into it. We were first the children of God by creation. Mankind dropped out in Adam/Eve (became prodigal). Admission to God’s eternal kingdom is by adoption back in. A lad lost his model fire engine, found it in a hut days later, and bought it back from the beachcomber for a quarter. He walked away and was heard to say: Engine, you’re twice mine, I made ya’ an’ I bought ya’. It seems simple enough coming from a child. We may be too sophisticated to function within those logical boundaries.
For the family, the evasion of relationships, the breakdown of discipline, the ease of divorce, the infidelity (disloyalty) to its rightful exclusiveness, and a score of other enemies have undermined the human analogy of the family to that of God’s. God chose a family in Abraham through Jacob’s sons. Israel survived for hundreds of years as family tribes, nationalized eventually under Moses with a theistic unity, but much to do with children promised in number as of grains of sand by the sea. Israel’s family held special place with God that even Israel forgot from time to time, but regenerated in revivals. Saul introduced royalty. David and Solomon as kings demonstrated how the concept could succeed – practical context for physical and spiritual life. Under God, first priority is personal followed by family, for all generations. There is in this spiritual model a sense of meaning, belonging, reflecting the relationships – joy, magnificence, and immortality maintained in the Christian family model. Society loses an evidence of God in the move to segregate individuals from the model family organism of obligation (serving others). *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020