This post is part of a series entitled “A Comprehensive Church-Based Ministry to Single Moms“.
“Building the Church by Building Strong Families.” That is the MO of almost all churches in America today. But the problem with trying to build the kingdom of God on earth by building spiritually healthy families is that it has been tried before. Many times, in fact. For centuries. And each attempt has failed miserably.
The entire Old Testament was written to illustrate this one fact: the human family does not have the capacity in and of itself to propagate the kingdom of God. Instead, no matter how good and godly the start is, all we get is one messy, chaotic, sin-filled family line after another.
Here are some examples:
When Adam and Eve, the first human parents, gave birth to Cain, Eve said, “With the help of the Lord, I have given birth to a man.” Some commentators think she was referring to the messiah that God alluded to in Genesis 3:15. Isn’t that the attitude we have toward all of our children when they are born? “What a cute little cherub!”
But Eve, and presumably Adam too, were in for a shock: she hadn’t given birth to a cherub, but to a devil. Cain wound up murdering his brother Abel because he was jealous of him. What Eve really should have said at Cain’s birth was, “With the help of Satan, I have given birth to a fratricidal murderer.”
That is a pretty awful thing to say about our newborns, isn’t it, that they are little devils? But it is true. The Bible says we believers were at one time all enemies of God, sold into slavery to sin. “You are of your father the devil,” Jesus said — To God’s chosen people, no less! — “and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” (John 8:44)
The Old Testament proves this awful diagnosis of the human family — that it can only, in its natural state, beget enemies of God — over and over again. Here are some other examples.
In the Abrahamic Covenant, God promises Abraham that he will make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. But just two generations later, we see Abraham’s grandson Esau plotting to kill his brother Jacob because he was jealous of him.
The third generation down from Abraham isn’t any better. In fact it gets worse. Out of jealousy, Joseph’s eleven brothers plot to kill him. But instead they decide to make a little money off of him and sell him into slavery.
Do you see a pattern here?
As the descendants of Abraham multiply, they form families, then clans, then tribes, and finally, with the arrival of Moses and the Exodus, they form the nation of Israel.
Now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and with the entire nation based on families and family hereditary lines, Israel enters the promised land and, during the period of the judges, promptly begins a moral spiral into the gutter. Some texts in the book of Judges are so awful I have never heard them read out loud in a worship service and I hope I never do.
Seeing the moral chaos around them, the nation begs for an hereditary monarchy to restore order. Now we’re really going to see what happens when you try to build the kingdom of God on the foundation of human families.
The first family dynasty, Solomon’s, lasted exactly one generation due to Solomon’s disobedience.
The next family dynasty, begun by David, lasted two generations before the kingdom split in two. By the way, David committed rape and murder during his reign and his son Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines during his. Not an auspicious start for a dynasty.
After the twelve tribes split into the northern ten tribes, called Israel, and the southern two tribes, called Judah, all of the kings of the northern tribes were evil while some of the kings of the southern tribes were evil and some were good. I do not have the space here to describe the vileness of these evil kings and their deleterious impact on both Israel and Judah. But it was massive.
Because of the sins of the family dynasty of Israel, God judged them in 722 BC when Assyria conquered Israel and dispersed them throughout the Near East. In 586 BC, because of the sins of the family dynasty of Judah, God judged them when Babylon conquered Judah and took them into captivity in Babylon.
The message of the Old Testament is this: trying to build the kingdom of God based on human families and their family lines will always end in failure. The reason is because fallen human beings, and the families they form, are far more efficient at passing down their sin to later generations than they are their faith.
This inability of the family to reliably transmit spiritual life down through the generations explains why in several situations God extracted individuals out of the evil immersive influences of their families to mold them for ministry. He did this, for example, with Abram, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and Samuel. It was as if God had to put them in his own witness protection program before he could prepare them for ministry.
In my next post, I will show how this failure of the family to propagate spiritual life explains why Jesus had to be born of a virgin, why Jesus didn’t “focus on the family” himself, and why the church shouldn’t either.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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