THE TEXT:

Genesis 1:26–31; 2:15–25

INTRODUCTION

The title of my sermon today is “A Primer on the Family.” By this, I mean a theological or biblical introduction to a right understanding of the family as it exists from God and for his purposes in the world.

But before we dive in, I want to note here at the start that there are going to be a few temptations present as we consider these things. For many of you, you’ve heard these sorts of things for years, and the temptation for you this morning might be to confuse hearing these things with the assurance that you’ve actually been internalizing them and are currently seeking to live them out—that you’re actually taking these things to heart and you’re actually working to order your homes and fulfill your duties as God would have you do them. Now, many of you have been faithfully laboring for years and decades, and I’m not undermining that or saying that your labors are in vain. Our labors bear fruit. Look at your fruit. But remember that James warns us about making sure we are doers of the word and not hearers only. It is easy to confuse hearing the Word, and agreeing with it, affirming that it is good, and right, and true in principle, and actually internalizing and doing it, actually putting it into practice. So my encouragement to you is to be a doer of the word and not a hearer only. And remember Paul’s word to the Philippians, that to repeat things they needed to hear was good for them. So I encourage you to take these things to heart as if you’re hearing them for the first time, put them into practice, and I assure you that God’s Word will not return void in your life. 

Another temptation is for those of you who are single, or divorced, or are currently having a difficult time in your family—or maybe you came from a very broken family. When you hear about the inherent goodness of Christian family—the glory of the family when it is rightly ordered and seeking to fulfill God’s purposes in the world, when you hear about domestic happiness and the fulfillment and satisfaction and joy that is offered in Christian marriages—its easy to let a critical spirit well up within you when you don’t find that to be true for yourself. Its easy for covetousness to rise within you. And from there you can start to think “That’s an idealistic view.” OR “If its so good, why is God withholding it from me?” “I would love to have a happy marriage but my spouse was or is so unreasonable and doesn’t want to work at it with me.” As the glory and harmony of Christian marriage is presented to you, you can choose to react with disgust and disdain or you can choose to affirm what God’s word says about these things, and continue to ask God to fulfill the desire of your heart, and seek to be faithful in everything, even this current affliction, that he’s given to you. “God, You say this is good. I want this for myself. I trust that you have good for me.” And remember that this isn’t a zero sum game. Other people’s happiness does not detract from your own happiness—or at least it doesn’t need to. If you frame your life around the idea that because others have, I cannot have, you will be miserable. The solution isn’t to say, “God, its really unfair of you to give them so much and to give me so little.” It’s to say, “I worship a God who gives abundantly, like he’s done for them over there.” 

Don’t try to minimize in your own mind the goodness of the household, or the goodness of marriage, or the goodness of parenting to appease any discontentment in yourself. Don’t try to convince yourself that you don’t really need a spouse if the Lord has in fact impressed upon you a desire to be married. The way to fight discontentment is not by trying to minimize the value or glory of a good thing that you don’t have; but rather by affirming and exalting the goodness of that thing while recognizing that God gives abundantly more than we could ever think or ask. 

As we dive in, I have two basic questions we’re going to ask and answer today as an introduction to or primer on the Family. 

1. What is a family?
2. What is the family for?

WHAT IS A FAMILY?

The State of the Family – Individualism

The first question is simply, What is a family? We may think its almost silly to ask such a basic question. But definitions matter. The fight over the family is a fight over the dictionary. The modern definition of the family is almost entirely antithetical to the Biblical vision. Moderns think of the family as consisting of virtually any amalgam of people agreeing to live together. This can be two men, two women, a married couple with a third sexual partner, a couple of college students and their cat, anything you can imagine. 

This comes from an understanding that as individuals, we get to define ourselves and determine for ourselves what life means for us. Nobody gets to determine what I am or what I’m about or what my purpose in life is. This is what Carl Trueman calls “expressive individualism.” The idea that the most fundamental thing about me, my identity, is unrelated to my connections to other people, whether biological or social. The fundamental thing about me is my own individuality. My own self-definition and self-expression. Nothing outside of me gets to impose its will or obligations or relations on me.

And if thats the case for us as individuals, if that’s the kind of beings we are, then of course the same goes for those same individuals when they form any kind of group. The social group does not cohere because of any transcendent reality, imposed from outside determining what the group is, but rather the community exists only as an expression of the individual’s desire for companionship. They can’t escape that. Its hardwired into us to want to be part of a community, to be in fellowship with others, to be part of a family. But what that community is, according to the world, is something self-defined, self-determined, and self-named. If the two men living together want to call themselves a family, if they want to call that marriage, who are we to say otherwise? They get to determine that for themselves, according to modern thinking. 

And as soon as an individual within the group no longer feels that they are capable of rightly or fully expressing themselves, then they are free to go with absolutely no consequences. You’re free to enter into this community, into this arrangement, whenever you want and you are free to go whenever you want—whenever you feel your not living up to your full potential, whenever you feel the others are holding you back, whenever your just not in love anymore.

So if we start with this individualistic, self-centered view of the kind of beings we are, then of course we will end up thinking that the family is a mere expression of that individuality that is only useful or meaningful as long as it serves the individual’s own purposes. 

The State of the Family – Feminism

More than merely advocating for this alternative view of the family, we live in a culture that has been Hell-bent on destroying the biblical understanding of family for quite some time. They have not only changed the definition of what a family is, but they’ve attempted to destroy the Christian view of family. 

This has been the agenda in our country for decades. Now, the attempts to destroy the family go back to the garden when Satan sought to undermine the family by subverting Adam’s authority, by empowering Eve to make her own decisions. Let her wield the fate of the family. But now, we are living in the wake of a massive satanic revolt on the family that has been moving in earnest in our country for over 100 years. And many of us, if we haven’t been brought up with an alternative positive biblical vision for the family, we don’t realize just how affected by these ideas we really are. These ideas are largely baked into our collective consciousness as a society. No hierarchy, no order. 

And as Christians, seeking to live faithfully to God, we need to battle these assumption in our own lives as if our lives and the lives of our children and the lives of our children’s children depend on it. Because they do. That is what’s at stake here. The lives of our children and our children’s children. The purposes of God in the world to fill the earth with his image-bearers, that the knowledge of his glory might cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. That is what’s at stake in defining what the family is. Now, of course we know how that ends, but it doesn’t end without us living out our lives faithfully according to God’s word and conforming our own families according to his great and glorious vision for them. So for the sake of our progeny, for the sake of our country, for the sake of the glory of God, we need to return to the Scriptures in order to define what the family is. 

Divinely Ordained

Returning to our question, What is a family?

Doug Wilson in his book Why Children Matter offers a helpful definition: “The family is a divinely ordained community. The institution of the family—consisting of one man, one woman, and their children—was created by God, not by people. It is not an arbitrary collection of individuals, and it is not something that mere creatures get to define.” (Why Children Matter, 3)

We see this in our passages we read earlier. Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Now you might point out that that passage never mentions “family.” But we have to understand that marriage—the coming together of a single man and woman—is at the center of the family. New families start with new marriages. I’ve heard a lot of young married couples talk about when they want to start a family. By this, they mean, when they want to start having children. That’s not when the family starts. The family starts at the wedding, when a man and woman are pronounced husband and wife. That is the moment that establishes, that creates, a new entity. Before that moment, July 3rd, 2016, the Wilke’s did not exist and after that moment, they do exist. There’s this new thing called “the Wilke household.” A new household, a new family, has come into existence. 

Now, as Pastor Wilson points out, children are part of the family too, but that’s exactly what they are, they are additions to what is already an established household. Marriage is at the center of the family. And the family is at the center of the household. (I might get into that in a future sermon, Lord-willing).

And who created the family, who establishes it, who defines it, ordains it? Its not the officiant. Its not the couple. Its not the parents. Its God. This is what Jesus reiterates in the Gospels, What God has joined together, let not man put asunder. It is God who created the institution with Adam and Eve. He’s the one who ordains and gives this institution its purpose. AND he is the one who establishes every subsequent family stemming from our first parents. 

In Ephesians 3:14–15, Paul describes God the Father as the one from whom every family in heaven and earth is named. We often think of referring to God as our Father as an analogy of our earthly fathers. God is like my earthly father and so its a fitting title for him. No. Its the exact opposite. God is the archetypical Father. He is the Father of fathers. And all fatherhood, every family on earth, is derived from his fatherhood. 

Covenant Union

So a family is a divinely created, ordained, defined, and named community consisting of husband, wife, and children. But exactly what KIND of community is it? We have lots of different kinds of communities, right? The local Kiwanis club is a community. Your coworkers at the office is a community. Your bowling team is a community. What kind of community is the family? It is a covenantal community. This isn’t just 2 people agreeing to live together for a time as a form of self-expression or simply because of their sexual attraction and mutual affection. No, this community is established by covenant. 

That’s a popular word in our circle, and sometimes we can let it gloss over us. But Pastor Wilson defines covenant as “A solemn bond, sovereignly administered, with attendant blessings and curses.”

A marriage is a covenant union, a bond, established by the taking of vows before God and human witnesses. These are vows of commitment to seek one another’s good, to fulfill one’s duties, to bestow mutual affection and love, and preserve sexual fidelity and exclusivity. Wives vow to respect and obey their husbands. Husbands vow to love and cherish their wives. And these vows are taken in the sight of God. He witnesses these vows, he ratifies them. Those words you say to your spouse on your wedding day, they matter. God holds you to them. They are binding realities. You are responsible to uphold your end of the bargain, your end of the covenant. And whether or not you uphold your end of the covenant, determines whether or not you will receive covenant blessings or curses. 

Covenant Blessings

What are the blessings of marriage? Of course, they are many. The blessing of mutual love and affection in sexual companionship, the delight of bearing and raising children as the fruit of this affection, the pleasure of imaging the Gospel of our Lord in how a husband loves his wife and how a wife respects and obeys her husband. The puritans felt perfectly comfortable summing up the blessings of marriage as simply domestic happiness. By this they didn’t mean a short-lived burst of dopamine—the way we sometimes use the word (happiness as a lesser version of joy)—but rather what the greek philosophers would call eudemonia. The happiness of living life to the fullest. When a man and woman join together in this union, there is potential for joy inexpressible, full satisfaction and delight in what the Lord has to offer in this covenant union.

These blessings are not the result of mere works—nor does God dispense them like a cosmic vending machine—put the prayer in, out pops the blessing. These blessings are covenantal blessings bestowed on faithful men and women by the Father of lights from whom all good and perfect gifts come. Like a good father, God the Father delights in blessing his children. He blesses according to his good pleasure. He delights in his children’s obedience and like a good father, he delights in blessing his children as a reward for their obedience. 

This isn’t some prosperity Gospel, where God is the great vending machine in the sky who dispenses blessings when you put a dollar in the tithe bucket. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the blessings of a good father who delights in blessing his children when they seek to obey him—when they seek to fulfill the duties he requires of them in this covenant union. 

So often we think that pursuing blessing, working for a reward makes us less godly, or less holy. We think, “if I was truly holy, I would fulfill my duties for their own sake, not because I wanted anything out of it.” Is that what Jesus does? Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus endured the cross, why? “For the joy that was set before him.” Jesus didn’t go to the cross expecting to get nothing in return. No he went to the cross because he knew joy was on the other side. He endured the shame because he knew there was a reward for him on the other side. He knew the promise of Psalm 2. He knew that the Father was going to give him all the nations as is heritage if he endured. Jesus wanted blessing. Jesus wanted happiness. And that drove him to be faithful no matter what his spouse did.

Are you doing that in your marriage? It doesn’t matter what your spouse is doing. It doesn’t matter what the kids are doing. It doesn’t matter if they’re failing in their duties. You’re going for the reward! You’re going after the blessing that comes from being faithful to your vows. I’m sure you didn’t add any contingencies to your vows. “To death do us part…if you’re nice to me.” No! You vowed to be faithful no matter what. So do it. Be like Jesus. Go after the blessing of domestic happiness. Be faithful to your duties—what the Lord has called you to do—no matter what. 

Covenant Curses

The covenant of marriage also contains covenant curses. If fulfilling the covenant duties of marriage results in great domestic happiness, what results from the failure to fulfill these duties? Domestic unhappiness, marital strife, bitterness and resentment, broken relationships, burned bridges, children that won’t talk to you, a cold and distant wife, an angry and abdicating husband. Failure to do family the way God tells us to results in the family’s own death and destruction. Sin only begets more sin. 

Have you considered this? If you’re unhappy in your marriage, most likely you’re the problem. Does that mean your at fault for everything? No. Does that mean your spouse is perfect? No. There are plenty of situations in which a spouse or a child can make things extremely difficult for you: addiction to pornography, alcoholism, physical and verbal abuse, refusing sexual or emotional intimacy. There are plenty of sins that your spouse might be doing. But what you need to understand is that your happiness is your responsibility. Are you fulfilling the duties that God has given to you? Are you respecting  and obeying and submitting to your husband whether or not he is respectable? Are you loving and cherishing and leading your wife whether or not she is full of bitterness and resentment? Are you doing these things even when you don’t feel like it in the moment? Did Jesus feel like going to the cross? O course not! He asked God to take the cup from him. Did he go anyway? You bet. For the joy that was set before him. 

Those situations I mentioned are trials. They are extremely difficult trials to work through and to remain faithful in. But what does James tell us? “Count it all joy when you face trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect that you might be perfect and complete lacking in nothing.” Your happiness, your joy, in the midst of trials is your responsibility. Are you going to commit yourself to fulfill your covenantal duties no matter what? Jesus did this. He counted his trial as joy. He endured the greatest trial any human has ever endured and he did it with joy. Was his spouse a bit of a basket case? Yup. Was his spouse deserving of it? Absolutely not. And yet, he did it anyway. For the joy that was set before him. Because of the promised reward of blessing that the Father would give him. 

Most severely, failure to fulfill the duties of marriage and family results in death and damnation. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:9 that adulterers, those who break their marriage vow to sexual fidelity with their spouse, will not inherit the kingdom of God. Think about that, apart from Christ, apart from repentance of sin, breaking your marriage vows can send you to Hell. God takes these things seriously.

Now, in our current state, this isn’t the case, but in a godly society with a godly civil government that sought to order its laws according to the wisdom of God’s Word, the civil magistrate would exercise its God-given right to put adulterers to death. That is a legitimate power that God gives the civil magistrate (Leviticus 20:10). God thinks that’s a good idea. 

Our current leaders don’t wield that power, because they don’t value the covenant of marriage, they don’t value sexual fidelity. As we said before, you can just marry and divorce whoever and whenever you feel like it. This is wicked. Think about this, in our current situation, according to the laws on the books right now in the United States, you can be put to death for treason against the government, but if you commit treason against your own family, by committing adultery, there are absolutely no consequences. That shows you where our priorities are as a people. We don’t value what God values. We don’t value preserving the structure and integrity and stability of families. We’re not thinking about the massive, world altering ramifications that come upon families torn apart but infidelity. 

If you think that’s extreme that the government should exercise the power to put adulterers to death, keep in mind, God’s going to do a lot worse than simply putting them to death. And consider just how much we’ve lost the value of family. God says this community is so important, so valuable to human flourishing and to fulfilling his purposes in the world that an attempt to undermine its stability for temporary pleasure is deserving of death and damnation. God values the structure and stability of the family far more than we do. 

There’s a lot to unpack there that we don’t have time for today. But I want you to see that the duties God calls you to in marriage and family aren’t arbitrary. They’re not just a good idea. They are at the heart of what God designed marriage and family to be. 

What is a family? A family is a divinely created, ordained, defined, and named covenant community consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. 

WHAT IS FAMILY FOR?

OR, put another way, What is the chief end of the family? As a community of image-bearers of God, the chief end of the family is the same as the chief end of man: As the Westminster Confession of Faith says, To glorify God and enjoy him forever. That is what the family is aimed at. That is what the family is ultimately for: the glory of God. This purpose is to guide and direct all activity the family sets itself to. If any activity of the family is not in line with this primary end, this primary purpose, then it is sin and vanity. 

From there, the Westminster Confession of Faith gives us other purposes for the family in the chapter on Marriage. 

WCF 24.2 Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife (GEN 2:18), for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with an holy seed (MAL 2:15); and for preventing of uncleanness (1 COR 7:2).

You’ll notice that there are 3 purposes here for marriage specifically. The final purpose being the provision of a lawful sexual relationship. Now, because I’m focusing on the family generally, not marriage specifically, we’re going to focus in on the first two purposes and lord-willing, I’ll get an opportunity to address that third purpose of marriage at another time. 

1. For the mutual help of husband and wife (GEN 2:18) 

Genesis 2:18 And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”

The question we have to ask is, help for what? What task was Eve to help Adam accomplish? The answer is in 1:26–28 that we read earlier. Adam was to exercise dominion over all of creation. He was to take every part, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, every creeping thing, even the earth itself and he was to impose his will on it. He was to order it, structure it, subdue it, and bring it under his rule. He wasn’t meant to do this as a brute. He’s meant to image the Creator. Just as God created the world and created the sea and divided it and filled it and put animals on the land, Adam was to be like God. He is a subcreator. He’s to take what God created ex-nihilo (out of nothing) and “create” new things. And what’s the constant refrain in God’s work of creation? “God saw that it was good.” God delighted in his creation. As God orders and subdues, he does it with joy and he is pleased with the outcome. So too is Adam’s work of dominion to be a work of joy, of delight, relishing in the glory of his task and that which his work produces. And Eve is to help him in this task of dominion. She was to be by his side as a co-laborer in this work. 

This task, this calling of dominion, has rightly been understood as the “cultural mandate.” Adam was to build a culture. Now, in its infancy, culture is pretty limited to tilling the soil, to planting trees, to guarding and tending the garden (2:15). But culture building over centuries, over millennia, looks like Bach’s concertos, cathedrals, cities, nations, wine, nuclear power plants, iPhones, Christian schools, sports, sourdough bread, and on and on we could go. Could Adam have done that all on his own? Of course not. Not only did he need a co-laborer to help him in his current task of guarding and tending the garden, but all those other things that come out of culture take a lot of time and a lot of people. There’s no way this culture could develop over time without the ability to multiply people. Adam needed Eve’s help in the work of dominion because without her, he remains one man. He cannot take dominion over the whole earth without offspring spreading both geographically across the earth and temporally into the future. Which brings us to the next purpose of marriage, of the family.

2. For the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with an holy seed (MAL 2:15). 

But did He not make them one,
Having a remnant of the Spirit?
And why one?
He seeks godly offspring.
Therefore take heed to your spirit,
And let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.

The second purpose is that the human race would grow, that husband and wife would be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But notice the purpose is not merely that it would grow. In other words, growth itself is not virtuous, growth itself is not the goal. Growth alone is not enough. As Malachi says, God desires a godly offspring, a holy seed. Its not enough that you have a bunch of kids made in the image of God, you need to bear offspring that image God rightly. God doesn’t want a subdued earth full of pagans. That’s not what he’s after. The prophets regularly repeat this theme, that one day, the knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. How covered are the seas with water? How wet is the ocean? That is how thoroughly God intends to expand the knowledge of his glory across the earth. 

And the knowledge piece is important here. God’s glory will be known by creatures. Its not enough for his glory to exist, but that his glory would be set forth and beheld by his creatures. That they would see him and glorify him and delight themselves in him and the work he’s called them to. God seeks godly offspring. He intends to fill the earth with his image-bearers—men and women who rightly and properly reflect his image, his glory, to the ends of the earth. 

Now we might ask the question. But what about sin? Didn’t sin mess all that up. When Adam fell the image of God in mankind shattered. Though still present, it was marred and tainted by sin. Because of sin mankind cannot rightly and properly reflect God’s image no matter how much he multiplies. Which is why Jesus came not only to restore individuals. Jesus came to restore families. You see, the family is at the very heart of God’s purposes in the world. He intends families to be both the driving engine and the building block of his new creation. Apart from families, there is no godly offspring, there is no holy seed. Apart from families, there is no knowledge of God’s of glory spread to the ends of the earth—there are no image-bearers rightly reflecting his glory. 

And so Christ came to restore the family. And now every marriage of redeemed sinners is a walking picture of the glory and delight and joy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the bride for whom he died. Every redeemed Father can look on his wife and children and display rightly, accurately to them the smile of God the Father. Every redeemed wife can look on her husband and her children and display the beauty and majesty of God’s redeemed people who are washed clean by the blood of Christ. Every child of the covenant can teach us through simple faith to draw near to Jesus that we might know him and cherish him more and more.

Are you living that way? Are you fulfilling your duties with joy, that you might reflect the smile of God to your spouse and to your children? Are you caring for the needs of your family without whining and complaining? Are you leaning on Christ to give you strength that you might endure with joy, the many trials that fallen and sinful families go through? 

The magnitude of these acts of simple faith for your family cannot be measured. You have no idea how great of an impact these things will have on the hundreds and thousands of people that come from your marriage over hundreds of years into future. You cannot quantify what it means on future nations when you choose to reflect the smile and joy and glory of God to your family.

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