The Family is Responsible for The Nuture and Instruction of Children
As God's Kingdom, the City of Jerusalem, comes upon earth, the core institutions of the Kingdom (the Family, the Church, and the State) will function increasingly as they should. They respectively will perform more faithfully the roles and responsibilities given to them by the Lord. The outcome will be growth in righteousness and peace: social harmony and prosperity will be magnified.
Our concern, here, is to trace out the roles and responsibilities given by God to the Family. This institution has come under sustained attack over the past forty years. Athens has sought overtly and deliberately to undermine the roles and duties of the Family. As it has done so, and to the degree it has been successful, Athens has experienced social dislocation and disintegration. Society will not be “healed” until the Christian Family once again becomes the norm.
The central responsibilities of the Family can be summarised thus:
1.It is the key institution to bear, instruct, train, and mould children into the Christian faith.
2.It is the institution which is primarily responsible for the education of children.
3.It is the central and primary institution for welfare and charity in society.
4.It is the core institution for the accumulation and transmission of capital (wealth)
A glance at these four key responsibilities confirms just how weakened and emasculated the Family has become in modern Athens. That city has rebelled against the biblical order, and has insisted upon the omni-competent State taking over education and welfare. It has strenuously worked against the role and responsibilities of the Family in these areas. The power of the State has also been used to restrict a family's ability to accumulate and transmit capital through its progressive taxation laws, and the forced re-distribution of wealth. Finally, the State in Athens has also increasingly called into question the ability and responsibility of the Family as the bearer and nurturer of children. The modern pagan state speaks increasingly of children belonging to society, to the government. It uses language like “our children”; it sets up public ministries to oversee the raising of children. Consequently, within the mind and religion of Athens, the Family has become withered at best, broken and dismembered at worst.
But the Church is not without fault either. Firstly, the Church has failed to teach a consistent biblical position with respect to the Family. It has supplanted the Family with itself in that it has oftentimes viewed itself as the primary institution to instruct, train, and mould children in the faith. It has not taught adequately and sufficiently clearly the duties of families to take responsibility for the education of their children; nor has it insisted upon the Family being the primary institution responsible for welfare and charity. Moreover, through a fuzzy and unbiblical platonism, the Church has also failed to teach the duty of the Family to accumulate and pass on capital.
We will look at these four key duties of the Family in greater detail and depth. Most important is the first duty: that of bearing, nurturing, and training children in the Christian faith. The fundamental biblical foundation of this duty lies in the Covenant of Grace. God's mercy and salvation works across, in, and through family lines. God has decreed and ordained that it would be so. But this is not just a blood relationship: it turns out that God deals with households, which may be broader and more extensive than blood ties. Nor is it something which is isolated or restricted to Jewish religion. This way of divine redemption is clearly carried on over into the New Covenant.
We see this in Acts 10:2, where the Scripture says of Cornelius, the centurion, that he was a devout man, and one who feared God with all his household. Cornelius would have had slaves and servants in his household. He may or may not have had children. But in his household, his fear of God had been extended to all those who lived under his roof.
But more than that, the Bible records that when Peter was coming to visit him to proclaim the Gospel to him, and open up the grace of God to the Gentiles, Cornelius had called together his relatives, and his close friends. (Acts 10: 24) They all believed as one, when the Holy Spirit fell upon them. (Acts 10:44). God's grace works in families and households. The same pattern is repeated in the case of Lydia (Acts 16: 15) and the Philippian jailor (Acts 16: 31—34). Lydia had no husband and probably no children, but she was a wealthy merchant and had servants and employees attached to her household. God's grace came to them all. The jailor probably had a wife and children, but would certainly have had slaves. Once again, God's grace came to his entire household.
These things reach right back in time to when the Lord first made His covenant with Abraham. The Lord explicitly said that His covenant was not going to be just with Abraham, but also with all the descendants of Abraham that would come forth from him. (Genesis 17: 1—14) Then later, the Lord specified further what this would mean: He said (of Abraham), “for I have chosen him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” (Genesis 18: 19). The covenant gave a critical role and responsibility to Abraham—to command his household and his children so that they would all keep the way of the Lord.
To the believing Family, then, was given the duty to bear and train children—and the entire household—in the ways of the Lord. It is significant that these duties extend over at least two generations. So, parents have responsibilities not only to their own children, but also to their grandchildren. This is clearly spelled out in Deuteronomy: “only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart, all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.” (Deuteronomy 4: 9). Similarly, in the sixth chapter: “Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgements which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, . . . so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God, to keep His statutes and His commandments . . .” (Deuteronomy 6: 1—2)
In Jerusalem, what is to be taught to children, and who is to teach it are equally important. The duty to see that children are properly instructed falls upon the Family in general and fathers in particular: “For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, that He commanded our fathers, that they should teach them to their children; that the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children . . .” (Psalm 78: 5—6)
Upon the Family, then, falls this great duty to raise up children to adult Christian maturity, so that the forthcoming generation might arise to serve God faithfully in its generation. While the Family may receive help and assistance from others in this task, the “buck” stops with parents. It cannot be handed over to the Church or the State.
It is at this point that we are confronted with one of the great dividing lines between Jerusalem and Athens. If the question is asked, to whom belongs the children, Athens insists that they belong to society at large in the first place. And within society at large, the State is the primary power. Therefore, Athens has come to believe that the children belong to the people, to the community, and finally, therefore, to the State, as the overlord. The authority and competence of parents must always give way and stand aside to the higher and prior claims of the community. The community, through the organs of the State, will tell parents how they are to raise their children, how they are to be cared for, how and when they are to be educated, and in what they are to be educated.
But the Lord of heaven and earth says that the children belong to Him. He has ordained that the parents of children will be held accountable to Him for the birth, nurture, and education of the children. In asserting a false prior claim, the community and the State are rebelling against the Lord Himself. The consequences of such arrogance will be terrible.
As the Kingdom comes, as the Holy Spirit draws near, more and more Christian families will come to take up their biblical duties and responsibilities to educate and train their children. More families will see households as a whole as the key recipient of grace, and will therefore rule and train their children to believe and obey the Lord. They will understand that this is how God has determined that it is to be, and so they will arise, obey and act—even as their father, Abraham did before them. They will deny and resist the ungodly assertions of the community and the State over their own children. They will insist on raising God's children, God's way.
This righteous insistence by parents within Jerusalem provokes a fierce and hateful reaction on the part of many of the powerful within Athens. They sneer one moment, then fulminate the next. They know that he who has control over the children has control over the future. Therefore they are going to do all within their power to wrest children away from their parents as soon as possible, to commence a programme of humanist indoctrination.
So central is this reality to the wellbeing of Jerusalem, it comes as no surprise that the enemies of the Belief would conspire mightily against such things. But they will not prevail. They cannot, for the Lord Himself will stretch forth His hand to ensure that they fail.
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