Christian Family

By David Seccombe

What is marriage? What has gone wrong? What is the purpose of the human race? Who owns the children? How should they be raised? Do children need salvation? What happens to a child who dies young? Should young children be baptized? Does God relate to families or individuals? Does the family have a leader? Does the church have a part to play?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whitefield Publications
• Release date: Sep 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780639811222

Book preview

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Christian Marriage

There can hardly be a more important question for the future of human beings and their societies than the true meaning of marriage and family. Are they from God? Or have they evolved by accident? If they are the second, they are ours to do with as we please, and are open to any amount of experimentation and tinkering; the strongest lobby group will decide the future. If they are part of God’s creation-design, then we need to tread carefully.

God has given us every reason to know he is real. He has made himself known, along with his plans for the future, and his will for people living in his world. He has done this through prophets, through working close up with a particular nation, through becoming a man, and through apostles and more prophets, who represented Jesus and explained him. All of this is found in the sixty-six books of the Bible. Christians believe that giving us these books was part of God’s strategy to reveal himself. The Bible is his message. This means that what the Bible says, God says.

It is not as simple, however, as opening to the table of contents and finding the chapter on marriage. Nor will an index help us much. The Bible is the story of God’s action in history from the creation of Adam and Eve to the establishment of his Church, and, in its promises for the future it reaches forward to the coming again of the king of the future world. It was recorded over a period of at least two thousand years, and relates to the life of God’s people in very distinct periods. Most important, the Bible itself tells us that the way of life in the period of Israel’s commonwealth was intended to be different to that under the new covenant that Jesus would inaugurate by his death. Nevertheless, God’s character does not change, and the moral law revealed in the Old Testament remains an essential guide for Christians, even though it needs to be read along with the New Testament.

It is to the Bible, then, that we will go, asking if it provides an answer to the question of marriage. The first thing we discover is that our question is dealt with and answered in Genesis 1-2, the first section of the very first book,. It is clearly a matter of importance.

In a booklet of this length it is not possible to look at everything the Bible has to say about marriage and family. I will choose a few key texts from the Old and New Testaments and try to explain their meaning and relevance. In this chapter we will look at Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5, considering them in their immediate context, but also within the whole matrix of Scripture.

Then the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So, the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2.18-25)

Read Genesis 1 and learn where everything came from! It is a big picture of the origin of the physical universe, including energy, matter, time, the world, plants, animals, and finally, humanity. We also learn that humans were created to be somehow like God, and to rule the world for him; we also exist in two forms, male and female, both carrying God’s image and sharing his commission. We should keep this in mind as background to our passage.

The surprise that meets us in chapter 2 is that man (Adam) comes first, when we know from chapter 1 that he was the last item in God’s creation. Chapter 2 is obviously showing us things from a different angle; humans come first because they are the reason for it all, and the story focuses on one of them in one corner of the world. The climax of chapter 1 is humanity: male and female. It answers the question, Where do I belong in the cosmos? The climax of chapter 2 is woman (Eve), marriage and family. It answers questions about the relationship of man and woman. Its position emphasizes its importance; it is found at the beginning of an eleven-chapter staging of the story of God’s dealing with the human race.

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Confronting loneliness

The problem of loneliness is what meets us first in the words above. God decides that aloneness is not good for the man he has made. We hardly need convincing about this. There are times when we long for solitude, but that is a reaction to overexposure, and is usually temporary. I once conducted a memorial service for a man whose loneliness was so terrible that he hanged himself. As people experiment with short-term relationships, and more and more face old age alone, we can expect that some will find the loneliness too much to bear. God’s first provision for the solitary man was the animals. As Adam considers each species and gives it a name, he establishes a relationship with it. Species differs from species, and the kind of friendship I can have with different animals differs. My relationship with a lizard is different to what I can enjoy with a dog or a pet monkey, but even these are not enough to solve the problem.

Superficially it may seem as though God has botched the human design, and then failed to create an animal to rectify his mistake. Could he not have made the man self-sufficient? Could he not have made an animal that could talk and be a friend? But of course, this is just a way of revealing to us the truth about ourselves: we were designed to be lonely, designed not to be self-sufficient, and the animals were intended not to measure up, because God had something else in mind. God intended that we should not be fulfilled with anything that is not human – and then he makes a helper who corresponds to the man. Some exaggerated forms of Christian spirituality have taught that a relationship with God is all that is needed for complete fulfilment, but this is not the teaching of the Bible, as we see here. We need him, but we also need a human partner.

There is more, of course, to God’s provision of