Clough Divine institutions Lesson 9
Divine Institution #3, Family – Genesis 1:26-31
Tonight we start the third of the four divine institutions. We have so far covered volition, the first divine institution; we have dealt with marriage, the second divine institution. And we come now to family, the third divine institution. I think it would be well to recall the general definition of the divine institution, that it does not pertain to just Christians; these institutions are designed creations, are designed features in creation that are unique to man and have essential spiritual function. In other words, they’re really there as part of the structure of the universe; man just doesn’t observe the structure of family or marriage simply because it’s convenient socially. Man observes these things, whether he knows it or not consciously, because God has designed it. It comes from God and not from some sociological process.
We come now to the family which is the third divine institution, and we would define the family as we have defined the other divine institutions, in a way which at first doesn’t seem to make too much sense, but in the end you’ll see why it’s necessary to say it this way. The structure of the family, we’d say, is that there is a character relationship between the parents and children which typifies the saving relationship between God the Father and “the Christ.” Again, the character relationship between the parents and children which typifies the saving relationship between God the Father and “the Christ.” Now I say “the Christ” because “the Christ” in Scripture is the technical expression which equals Jesus Christ plus all church believers, all born again believers. So it’s a technical New Testament expression for [can’t understand word] these two. And since the relationship that exists between God the Father and “the Christ,” or Jesus Christ and the Church.
And you want to make sure that you see the higher structures that are involved. With marriage, you remember, marriage is not a sociological institution, it is a design feature and man, in his very nature, that mirrors the relationship that one day in history would come about on the day of Pentecost as Jesus Christ set up His Church in history. And so here we have much the same thing, where the family is not just the incidental; the family is not an incidental structure, it’s a very important structure, and it’s been put into existence to mirror a greater spiritual truth.
Let’s work through this definition, as we did with marriage, and look at some of the pieces. First, you remember we said with marriage it was a personal relationship between a male and a female. Well here we have the character relationship. Why do we make this difference? Because here the central focus is on the common characteristics that’s transmitted; the children are in the likeness of the parents and the family as an institution has to do with this transferring of likeness from father to son, from father to son, father to son, father to son, on down. So that this is dealing with this common characteristic that is passed from parent to child; and this common characteristic in the Godhead you find God the Father, remember God is one in essence, three in personality, you have God the Father manifesting His nature through God the Son, who then manifests His nature in His children. Now this doesn’t make us gods; please remember there’s a boundary between the creature and the Creator here. We’re not intending to blur that boundary. But there is a characteristic, a set of characteristics summarized by the Greek word agape, or love, that is transmitted from the father to the son, and to the children. And the son actually is the greater child of God the Father and believers in Christ the lesser children.
The second thing we find in the definition,
besides it being a character relationship between parents and children, we
find, of course, that it involves as in the divine institution of marriage,
members of the human race, i.e. physical parents and physical children. In other words, angels are excluded, Matthew
So we want to immediately jump into how this typifies or how this is typified in the family, this relationship between the Father and the Christ. Turn to John 1; we first want to examine how the concept of family appears in Scripture. You have to learn to think this way if you want to think Biblically. To many Christians have what I feel are severe cases of compartmentalization. I have often used this diagram and I’ll use it a couple thousand times more to show the divine viewpoint framework that a mature believer should strive to have created in the mentality of his soul. At the center of his life, or his integration point, the center of his existence is God; around this we have Bible doctrine or the glory of God, God revealing Himself outward from Himself. And we know God through doctrine, we don’t know God through experience, through feelings, through anything else, we know God because of His verbal revelation. And then around this we, as members of the human race, have all sorts of activities; we have philosophy, science, art, music, literature and so on. We have our social relationships with other believers, loved ones, friends and society. We have jobs, possessions, sex and health. These are many of the details of life, but all of those details of life form one integrated pattern.
And this is what you ought to see if you’re a Christian because this is one of the proofs that Christianity is true and everything else is false, because no other position on earth has a total solution to every one of these areas. Christianity does. No other system does. So Christianity therefore shows its truthfulness by how it handles these various problems and if you’re not interested in personally making Bible doctrine flow out into these various areas then you’re going to be in trouble as far as Christian growth is concerned. What we have done in many Christian circles is we have built a concrete wall around certain areas.
For example, in the area of philosophy, science and art, and this concrete wall is 3 or 4 feet thick and about 10 feet high and we keep our Bible doctrine safely on the other side. And so we have Christians taking philosophy courses, we have Christians taking science courses, we have Christian artists at work and you’d never know it from their paintings, from their writings, from their papers or from their research. Never! And they would even some say that it shouldn’t make any difference whether one is a Christian or not. Now this is utter blasphemy; it should make a difference in no matter what activity of your life it’s talking about.
We have other believers who would say well, these things are just in the culture, we forget those, the Bible has nothing to say there. The Bible has plenty to say there. Or we have some people say well, the Bible doesn’t really have anything to say about my job, how I get it, how I act on the job, how I act with fellow employees and employee-employer relationship. Actually it does. Some people would say the Bible has nothing to do in practice with how I use my possessions. Of course it does; it has lots to say on how you use your possessions. Some say about sex, how I live my sex life and so on, it has nothing to do with the Bible. The Bible has lots to say there contrary to what a lot of prudes say the Bible has a lot to say in this area. And then we have health and we have all of these other spheres of life.
And what you have to work on if you have grown up in a Christian environment, the chances are you have unconscioiusly built concrete walls at certain points and you have to work to systematically tear these walls down and destroy them. You must let the Word of God come into your brain and must let it flow out and destroy and tear down these walls brick by brick, piece by piece until you begin to get an integrated unity over your whole life with God as the center. And then Christianity will never be boring any more to you, you’ll never have this malady, Christians say oh, this Christian life is boring and this thing doesn’t turn me on any more and all the rest of it. These are the excuses. Now every time someone makes an excuse like that it’s proof, it’s living proof that they are building concrete walls here. They’re not letting the Word of God overflow into these various areas of life, they’re not building a unity in their life, it’s just a lot of pieces and actually in many respects differs very little from a common ordinary unbeliever.
So we’re concerned as Christians to begin to think through in all areas of life and when we come to this institution of family it’s no accident that this institution of family has been designed by God for a purpose. Now let me give you a kind of reasoning that’s tricky but false. You’ll hear it often said that the concept, father and mother and so on, they’re common things that we know in our life, everyone has a father and mother, supposedly, and we know these things. So therefore what men have said is aha, then God is a mere projection of the father image; I have a father image from my human father and what I do because I want a divine Father I project this image out. Now this is exactly 180 degrees wrong because the Bible says it’s precisely the other way; the shoe fits precisely on the other foot. If you think that way you’re moving in exactly the wrong direction. The Bible says as a matter of fact the structure of the family with the father and the mother and the children, those designed roles are there because of the prior relationship that exists within the Godhead and the plan of salvation and so on. So as a matter of fact the shoe is exactly on the other foot. This is far from being a projection of the father image; the family and what you experience in your physical life as your human physical father, that is a projection from God. So the projection is going exactly the other way around.
Here in John 1:12 you’ll notice who is the head of the family. “But as many as received Him, to them gave He the authority to becomes the sons of” whom? “…the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.” So we have God the Father then as the father of the family. Turn to Galatians 3:26, you’ll find again we are referred to as the children of God. “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” “Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” Please notice the last phrase because the Bible in a strict sense, and I hope you’ll really appreciate this when we’re through tonight, the Bible in a very real sense denies the brotherhood of man. There is no brotherhood of man; that was broken at the moment the fall occurred. There was a brotherhood of man before the fall but not after. There’s no such thing as the brotherhood of man; there’s no such thing as the Fatherhood of God. These are concepts turned out by modern liberal theology to try to make people feel good and to go along with their universalism. But these are just concepts that sound sweet and they’re used as good excuses for various programs. But as a matter of fact in God’s Word you don’t find the concept; you find this concept, you’re all children of God by faith in Christ Jesus, that’s where the Fatherhood is. You have to join the family.
Finally Ephesians 3:14-15 where the word “family” is used, the word “family” is actually used. “For this cause,” Paul says, “I bow my knee unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, [15] Of whom,” that’s the Father, “of whom the whole family, in heaven and earth, is named.” Now that family mentioned in verse 15 is the great archetype behind every physical, social unit called family that we have today. You have to fight this constantly in your mind. It is not as you learn it often times in a history or sociology course, that you have first the family institution and then men pattern God’s relationship after that. It’s precisely the wrong way around. The structure of the family relationship is what it is because of this prior family relationship mentioned here in verse 15. In other words, this is the design of God.
Now as with marriage I’d like to point out the rest of the evening the three ways in which family life, normal physical institution of family living actually parallels the relationship that God has with “the Christ.” God, together with Christ plus the Church; by “God” here I use it in the New Testament sense of the word, meaning the Father, Christ as God the Son. So Christ plus the Church; this relationship now, how does a human family parallel this. Why is this important? Because it has a lot to do with how you run the family; that’s why, it’s very important. And basically the attacks against the institution of family today are attacks at one of these three points or a multiple of one of these three points.
Just like with marriage, if you understand that the woman, the female in the Bible is always analogous to the believer and that the woman has been designed with an innate nature that causes her to function in history as the truster, she is caused to function in history as the responder; that is her femaleness, that’s what the Bible says, this is the analogy; the woman has been made as a physical living analogy of what the believer does, whereas the man has been made as a living physical analogy of what Jesus Christ does. He is the initiator; He is the one who must initiate the love. You see in the marriage relationship we have the situation where the man has to initiate the love the woman has to respond to the love. A woman cannot respond to a blank wall and a lot of men have never figured out and why their wives treat them so rough. Well, they’re just treating you just like you treat them and if you want to look at mirror you can look at your wife because how she looks is exactly the way she is responding to you and if you’re a snob and an old grouch and a bear and you come home habitually day after day grrrr through the front door, well, then she responds to you like a grouch. And you say well what’s the matter with my woman and so on. Well, the trouble with your woman is you, she’s responding to you. And she’s built that way and if you understood the Bible you’d understand why she bites and snaps and so on.
So this is the relationship; the man is the initiator and the woman is the responder. Some people never can get this clear, I don’t know why, it’s all through the Bible. But the Bible defines these two roles. Now these roles have come under many attacks. We find it being attacked today. Now one can have various opinions about the women’s liberation front and all the rest of the activities that are going on. Some of what they say is right. For example, if a woman produces X amount of work she has a right to get paid as much as a man that produces X amount of work and a lot of the male employees of various firms have brought a lot of this on themselves by their snobby attitude in hiring women. So in that sense there is much with which a Biblical Christianity could agree. However, the ground motive behind the movement is where we have our snags and here is where we have the hang-up. We feel that the motive that promotes this kind of thinking is basically apostate and anti-Christian. Here’s why.
If you look at the thrust of the whole movement you hear people saying this; we want to be known as people, not as women or men. Now did you ever hear of a people who was not a man or a woman? Do you see the problem? In other words they’re creating an abstract; they’re creating an abstract thing called a person that’s nonexistent, absolutely nonexistent because you can’t find a person who’s not a male or a female. But they’re progressing toward this nonexistent ideal when they fail to realize that God has made people in inherent structure and you can’t erase it. You could pass all the legislation you wanted to, you can’t erase that. You can’t erase it, it’s indelibly imprinted in the very structure of the male and the female. No matter how many laws are passed it will still be there, no way to eradicate it. God has put it there. And this goes along with what I have said again and again when I went through the second divine institution, that we face today as Christians something new that our forefathers spiritually never faced before.
Our forefathers faced the problem of the lusts and so on in the society. We face a concerted attempt on the part of the whole culture around us to crush the very concept of sex itself. Now this may sound very strange but our culture is moving toward an anti-sex position in which the distinctions between male and female are going to be progressively erased. It’s going to be progressively erased through the destruction of the home. It will be progressively erased through the style of clothing and so on. I’m not saying it’s going to happen totally but I’m saying the tendency is there already and you can see it behind every one of these things; there’s a tendency to erase categories. God says this is right and this is wrong so man comes along and says well, let’s mix the black and white and we’ll have some gray. Always apostasy works this way, erasing the divinely ordained category. And so this is the mark of this thing in our day.
But when you come over to family, the third divine institution, just as with marriage, just as if we understand the role s we have in marriage between the man and the woman and we can manipulate and we can utilize the Word of God in these relationships it blesses them and so on and actually matures them and causes them to grow, so when we come into the family it’s the same kind of thing. I suggest there are three ways in which the family unit typifies God’s divine family.
The first way is that it is grounded or descended from one head. Turn to 1 Corinthians 15:45; this will have a very practical result in family life. And incidentally as we go through the third divine institution many of you have asked when I was going through the second divine institution of marriage, what about the Christian and birth control and abortion and so on, everything else, what does the Bible say about it. We will deal with that under the third divine institution; that has to do with three, not two, so that will come up in this later.
Now in 1 Corinthians 15:45 we have a discussion that’s very crucial to understand the concept of the family. You remember Genesis; we started off with a very strange thing. We started off with God making Adam; did He make Adam and Eve together? No. He took Eve from Adam’s side; now that’s not just a nice little sweet story stuck in there to amuse a few Sunday school students. That is in there to teach something that is absolutely crucial. Eve must come from Adam so that Adam can be the one head over the whole family; the family can’t come from a couple. The family of the human race has to come from one head, not a pair, one and only one. So that in this case Eve had the same genes that Adam had; she had the same identical genetic structure of Adam; she was taken from Adam’s side. And that is very, very important because that means that the human race did not start out with a pair; it started out with one person, one head.
The analogy is coming out here in 1 Corinthians 15 so it’s crucial that you understand this. This, to me, is one of the greatest proofs of the inspiration of God’s Word, that when you deal with these fine little details the whole Bible fits together logically, beautifully fits together. Eve, then, came from Adam; Adam did not make a disjointed couple. He made the woman come from him so that he would be head over all; only one head.
Now in 1 Corinthians 15:45 Paul draws the
analogy between the first Adam and the second Adam; the first Adam here and the
whole human race comes out of the first Adam.
The second Adam is Jesus Christ and out of Him will come this new
race. Of course God the Father is the
Father of Christ as well as this family.
“And so it is written, the first man, Adam, was made a living soul; the
last Adam was made a quickening,” or actually “an enlivening spirit. [46] However, that was not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural; an afterward that which is
spiritual. [47]
The first man is of the earth, earthly; the second man is the Lord from
heaven.”
Before we go any further I hope you all noticed something very important about this passage of Scripture, namely Paul took Genesis literally. That’s very important, he took it literally and this is why I have fought Christians hammer, tooth and tong over this little seemingly trite point. If you start allegorizing Genesis you are doing something to God’s Word that [neither] Jesus nor the apostles did. They did not take this allegorically as some mythological story. They took it as straight factual normal straight forward history. And so we must conform to the apostolic interpretation of God’s Word or we stand no longer in submission to the Word, we stand over it and judging it ourselves.
1 Corinthians 15:48, “As is the earth, such are they that are earthy; as the heavenly, so are they that are heavenly. [49] And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” Now that is the key verse, verse 49. “We bear the image,” here’s the character relationship from father to son, from the head to the rest of the family; the rest of that family by definition shares a common characteristic called “image” here, image of Adam, image of Christ. The family is the means of propagating from one person to the next a certain common characteristic. Biologically we would speak of this as you’re transmitting the genetic code, but we would just simply say it in non-technical terms that the characteristic is transmitted from father to son and so therefore when we start a family from a head, from a central point, we transmit throughout the whole domain of that family a common image or a common characteristic.
Now what are some practical things about this that we can draw? The first thing is found in John 3, in the famous Nicodemus discourse. This is when Nicodemus, a Pharisee, comes to Jesus by night and asks Him about the kingdom. Nicodemus confesses that he has been impressed with the empirical evidence concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Nicodemus didn’t just believe in thin air, he looked, he examined, he had his eyes open and his mind functioning and he said as I examine the empirical evidence of this man, Jesus Christ, something strikes me that this man is more than just a man. And so he came in John 3:3 and Jesus answered him before he even asked the question basically. “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again,” or “born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And in verse 4, “Nicodemus said unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?”
I recently read a commentator who’s added I think a tremendous insight to verse 4. Nicodemus isn’t just making a mistake. So often Christians say that Nicodemus is thinking in physical terms here and he’s just confused Jesus’ terminology. Nicodemus question is a lot more profound than that; he’s not an ignoramus. In verse 4 what Nicodemus is really saying, I have lived on earth from this point when I was on down, say Nicodemus is 55 years old, he says Jesus of Nazareth, I have lived 55 years; 55 years of personal history has already occurred; 55 years of the things I have said and the acts that I have done; how now can my personal history be totally erased and can I start life over again.
That’s the question Nicodemus is asking Jesus, how can I start all over? How is it possible to erase my personal history from the universe and begin, as it were, anew? And Jesus Christ says the answer is being “born of water and of the Spirit,” explained in Ezekiel 36 and so on. So here we have the doctrine of regeneration of the new birth, or the new creation. That’s why in one of Paul’s epistle he says, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation,” again going back to this analogy, we start our life with Adam and bear his image; we have a chance to, as Nicodemus said, start all over again and bear the image of the man whose seed we carry within us, in our own nature. If you want to think of it this way, and I’ve often wondered this, whether the doctrine of regeneration isn’t saying that in some way God even causes physical changes to occur in a person’s body. Now we know that of course we bear the natural body and the resurrection body is actually the ultimate in mortal flesh, but I’ve often wondered if part of the mechanism that God uses to change a person’s character is not truly based on the physical; not truly based on certain physical changes that are miraculously instituted at the point of regeneration. But be that as it may, still we have the image that we inherit from the Father.
This is God the Father, we are now His children. When we say we are His children the Bible means for us to be thinking this way: I am the child of God because I have received from Him my Father’s image, in other words, the new nature. That’s the focus of this family relationship; the nature of God Himself. Now what do we mean by this? We have to be careful here that we don’t go off into pantheism. Here’s God’s character; he is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is love, He is omniscient, He is omnipotent, omnipresent, immutability and eternality. These are the various attributes of God. Now many of these define deity but some of these are personal and I usually draw the line right down the middle here and say that all those attributes on the right side of that line depict infinity; all the attributes on the left depict personality. And so what we have here is the love, the righteousness and the justice, these qualities can be transmitted from an infinite Creator down to a finite creature.
We can partake of the nature of God; originally we were made in His image and we have still in our unregenerate natures part of that image left. But when we are bon again we receive something more; we receive of some of these attributes corresponding things in our own bodies so that we can safely say we are the children of God because we bear our Father’s, our heavenly Father’s image. Don’t think of the heavenly Father as some theological abstraction lifted from nowhere. The heavenly Father concept means that there must be some semblance of character between the Father and His children. That’s the whole point, that’s why God is called our heavenly Father, that’s why Jesus said, “Be ye perfect, even as your heavenly Father in heaven is perfect,” and He wasn’t teaching any pantheism; He was teaching the fact that there is a commonality here, there’s a common characteristic between the Father and His children.
And so this is the image behind this, and
this is absolutely necessary and ties in with the physical family. This is why when Jim Voss went to
So you see, there is a relationship here, and marriage and family are absolute crucial because as the child grows up he is developing; by his behavior pattern he is being programmed to think in terms of certain categories and then when the gospel comes to that child, that child can grasp it, he understands what “father” is; he understands the concept of love because he knows it in his life and therefore it communicates. But if these divine institutions are broken down, if marriage is smashed, if the family is smashed we come down to a very serious problem, can we ever communicate the gospel; in that kind of a society where there’s no merit, where there’s no family is communication of the gospel at all possible and I would suggest it isn’t, that these institutions are absolutely necessary, you might say, to program into the categories in which they later will use to receive and understand the gospel.
So the first thing we can say as how this relationship typifies the heavenly relationship between God the Father and His children is this: that we all descend from one head; in the family I bear the image of my parents; it is nonmeritorious; I didn’t do anything negatively or positively to inherit that image. It was given to me at physical birth. So similarly at spiritual birth, you didn’t do anything to inherit the investment that God has put in your life as a Christian if you are a Christian tonight. If you are a Christian and have received Christ, remember, the image that you bear and the new nature that you have is yours by regeneration and regeneration is a nonmeritorious process, just as procreation within the family is a nonmeritorious process.
So we all descend from one head; this means we receive their image. Now we might make one quick application here as to attitude for parents. When you stop and think of this, think of going back into the Garden; think if you could take a time machine and you could go all the way back through history, all the way back to the Garden and you could have a conference with Adam, you know what has happened, you know the horrible consequences of the fall that have flowed out from history, form that one historic act. Adam hasn’t yet made it; suppose now you go to Adam and you say to Adam, Adam, you’d better not fall because (if it were hypothetically possible) Adam you’d better not fall because there’s something horrible going to happen, something horrible and you’re not going to even see it in your generation. Your children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children, they will experience the suffering and the heartache because of your action.
And we find here, then, one of the great things is that we as parents bring something new into history and starting from our families, through our children, we begin in a small way what Adam began in a large total way; we begin to set forth a stream into history; we bring something new into history through our children, and then through their children and on the way down; we have created and added something to history. That’s tremendous and significant. Children are important because they are your transmission into history of yourself and you are transmitting through your children yourself all the way down generation after generation. And so just as Adam has transmitted himself, you might say, down through all of history as the human race, so you are going to transmit yourself ages after you’re dead in the genes that you’ve set forth through your children and through their children and through their children and through their children’s children.
So the first analogy then is this propagating in history from one head. That’s just one analogy that we have between God’s children and our children. But there’s a second one and to this we’ll turn to Hebrews 12, a second parallel between God’s family and our family. The first parallel was that in both cases a common characteristic transmitted down through history from one head. A second analogy is that the children of the family must return to their parents for wisdom on how to live; just as God’s children must go back to the God, the God who made them, I have to go back to my heavenly Father and ask Him, God you gave me this nature, how am I to use it in history, how do I use it. So I have to go back to the Word of God, I have to go back to the teachings of my heavenly Father to understand how to use the equipment, and so the children must go back to their parents, not to any parent, to their parent; don’t you see, you if you are a parent bear a special, special relationship to your children. Your children have your nature and therefore all the idiosyncrasies and all the weaknesses of your character are going to be there in your child and you’ve had to fight with these things for 30 or 40 years and you should pass on to your children knowledge of how you have dealt with the weaknesses in your life so that your children won’t have to. You know they’re going to inherit them; you ought to prepare them and realize that because our characters are marred by the fall, we are transmitting from one generation to the next weaknesses in our sin nature, and you must…nobody but you can do this, because nobody but you has propagated these children into existence. And you have propagated these children into existence with your marks, the marks of the fall that are on you are on your children and you, therefore, ought to teach them and train them how to deal with the marks of the fall in their life because they have your areas of weakness.
And so they heavenly Father does to us, but not in the sense of the fall, here we have discipline in its purity in Hebrews 12; the concept is just learning. Discipline isn’t always bad. The word “discipline” means training in Scripture, and it can mean positive or negative. In this passage it means positive but I know immediately when you think of discipline you think of the paddle or something and you think of the bad kind, someone fouls up or something and does something wrong you have to discipline. Well, here we have the good kind, here it’s just tough training.
And we use this analogy in Hebrews 12:5, whoever wrote the epistle to the Hebrews, probably Apollos, but whoever it was, brilliant man as he was, he drew this analogy out of the Old Testament. He says, “And ye have forgotten the exhortation that speaks unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of Him.” And his point here is that it’s a normal process of a family relationship to have the parents to have to have tough moments with their children, and there’s nothing embarrassing about having tough moment with your child. This is, as I will shortly show you, the father, God the Father had to have tough moments with even Jesus Christ. And so we have here in Hebrews 12:6, “For whom the Lord loves He chastens, and He whips,” the word scourge here means whip, “He whips every son whom He receives.” A tremendous concept of the Christian life, God doesn’t let people just float through Christianity and if you think you’re floating through Christianity just remember something; if you’re truly born again you’re in the family of God and God has a big whip. And it doesn’t mean He goes around hitting people but it does mean that He insists there be order and discipline in His family.
Now you may have seen a lot of families that are run very sloppily; you may have seen families where the children run the house; you may have seen families where the children dictate to the parents that I am going to have the car and I am going to go out and so on. You may have seen this kind of thing but I’ll tell you something, God doesn’t operate His family that way; children don’t tell God what to do, God tells them what to do. And so we have here God telling them what to do, but notice the verb to love. Now this is not just hitting out of anger, this is a training program, that’s the only analogy I can think of that would communicate the impact of the text; just conceive of a training program.
Those of you who have been in the army, you know basic training, boot camp, a training program, and you know how some of these GIs would come up to you and they’d brace you. I can remember when I was in the cadets for the Air Force, some of these guys, afterwards, after the training was all over they were our friends but they never let us know it during training and they couldn’t. Why? Because the would have broken down the whole training structure and they’d get us up at 4:00 or 5:00 o’clock in the morning and they’d literally start chewing, from one shoe all the way on up over your crew cut down to your scalp and all the other way back down to the other shoe; about two inches away from your face, screaming at you. Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir, and that’s the way you were. Now they weren’t doing that just to be mean, they were doing that to produce a calculated effect, and for a lot of them it comes hard. I later talked with some of those guys and it doesn’t come natural because that’s not naturally the way they are, but they are in a training program where they must do this in order to produce discipline. And they must do it if they really love.
Suppose you were a drill sergeant and suppose you had a group of young kids out of high school, seniors out of high school, just graduated and you’ve got this platoon and you’re in charge and you have to drill them. Now it would be easy to become sentimental; your son, your own son might be their age and you might say well, I’m not going to be too hard on these kids and so on, I want to be their friend, and so they drift on through your basic training and they go through and they graduate and then about four or five weeks later they’re out on the battlefield and they get shot and they’re dying. Why? Because you considered your own sentimentality greater than their personal safety and I would raise the question then, did you really love them…did you really love them because if you had then why didn’t you chew them out when they needed it. And this is what it’s talking about here in verse 6, that’s the love that God has; He chews and He whips and He beats but He doesn’t do it because He hates the child; He does it because He loves the child and He knows when that child grows he needs this training and that’s the only way he can be trained.
And so in Hebrews 12:8 it even goes so far as to say that if we’re Christians and if we find we are getting away with everything, sin after sin after sin after sin in the life and we never get disciplined it would be time to examine whether you be in the faith because “if you are without chastisement then you’re a bastard, and not sons,” you’re not sons, you’re not members of the family, you’re just professing. And so when he asks in verse 10, the Father is making the analogy between the human family and God’s family, “For they,” those human fathers, “verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure,” and he’s not knocking them, he’s just saying according to their own viewpoint, as best as they knew, they trained their children, “but God does it for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness.” [Tape turns]
…showing you, incidentally, unless you be misled by a lot of this pseudo spirituality that’s floating around in Christian circles, you don’t get holy overnight; maturity takes time and it’s hard; that’s what he says in verse 11, “Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous,” when you’re being disciplined, when the drill sergeant is chewing you out, when you’re being slapped around, when the whip is being applied to you, it isn’t very joyous. But, afterwards, verse 11, “afterward it yields” the desired effect, afterwards! And so therefore he says in verses 12-13 to believers who in this particular time in history were being disciplined as children in God’s family, “Wherefore,” he says, don’t worry about it, “lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees.” You can just see someone bending over for the paddle and he says don’t worry about it, just move on and Hebrews 12:15, “Look diligently, lest any man fail of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you,” and this is always the danger in any program of discipline, that the discipline gets too tough and you get one of these little weaklings and they start belly-aching and crying, and they write their Congressman and they write somebody else that this drill sergeant looked cross-eyed at me and so on, he hurt my big toe last night getting into the bunk and all the rest of it, and they start developing an attitude of bitterness. And finally they’re against the army and they’re against the military and they’re going to have peace symbols all over their tanks if they have to show them and so on. This is the spirit of bitterness. And we have to watch that, lest when God disciplines us in our life this spirit of bitterness doesn’t come in.
So I would suggest this is the second great
parallel between God’s family and your family; namely that both structures are
built on the same principle that the children must derive their wisdom from the
discipline of the parents. The children
must derive their wisdom from the discipline of the parents! I’d like to go to three references in the Old
Testament to summarize this second analogy.
First turn to Exodus 12; I want to show you the concern the Old
Testament had for their children. People
in the Old Testament had a fantastic concern for children. In Exodus
Well, here’s one of these things that he
was reading, Exodus 12:24, after going through this whole ceremony Moses says,
“Ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons forever.
[25] And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the LORD will
give you, according to that as he has promised, that ye shall keep this
service. [26] And it shall come to pass,
when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service?” [27] That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice
of the LORD’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of
We find this again in Deuteronomy 6; here’s
the classic central reference in the Old Testament as to how parents trained
their children. This gives us not only
the fact they did train them, in Deuteronomy 6 it tells you how the people in
the Old Testament trained their children.
At verse 4 you have the Shema,
or the famous slogan of
Deuteronomy 6:7, “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children,” and the Hebrew verb to teach is the Hebrew verb that was used to sharpen sticks, or to sharpen an axe, to make these things sharp. In other words, make it so it penetrates, that’s the idiom. You’re going to teach these to your children and they’re going to penetrate, and it says this is how: “You will teach them diligently unto thy children, and you will talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.”
Now there’s a crucial shift in the translation of verse 7 and I think unless you see this you lose the impact of it. If you read this in the King James, in verse 7, it sounds like all the parents are doing is giving Bible stories from dawn to dusk. It says talk about them, so you talk about Joshua and you talk about this and you talk about all that. No, that’s not what it’s saying; in the Hebrew it looks this way: “you will talk in them,” that’s the preposition, “in.” And we know what this means because this is the same structure grammatically that is used later on when it says take not the Lord’s name in vain, swear not in His name. Now what does that mean? It means in the legal system you weren’t to swear in God’s name within the concepts and so on that have to do with that name. And so here what it’s saying is talk in terms of the Word of God. That doesn’t mean you have to teach Bible stories from dawn to dusk. It means that in your family you have a divine viewpoint framework; it goes back to that diagram I showed you at the beginning, God at the center, Bible doctrine all around flowing out into the areas. So regardless of whether you’re talking about the baseball team, you’re talking about something else, you can talk about any topic in light, but if you have a divine viewpoint framework you’ll always have the orientation you need. That’s why it’s so crucial, particularly for parents, to build up your divine viewpoint framework, so that you will be able to discuss any possible activity that comes up and have a Biblical view of it. Now that’s how the parents educated their children; they’d talk always in terms of these commandments. It didn’t mean that they had them memorize the thing from dawn to dusk; it meant simply that the conversation in that family was oriented according to the viewpoint of God’s Word. And verses 8-9, these are various other modes that they used for Scripture memory and so on.
One more reference I’d like to show you is
in Joshua 4:5-8. They are crossing
Joshua 4:5, “And Joshua said unto them, Pass over before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of Jordan, and take you up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel; [6] That this may be a sign among you,” and now watch what’s coming up, “That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? [7] Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD,” you see how every time, you see this again and again in the Old Testament, every time there was a miracle there was a monument set up to deliberately trigger questions in the youth. So the youth would come up and they’d say what about this, and the parents would have to be filled in on Bible doctrine and know their history so they could say, well son, it was this way…boom, boom, boom, and they could explain it. There was a tremendous emphasis here, tremendous emphasis on father to son.
Now what can we derive from these two analogies. We haven’t got time to go into the third analogy tonight; we have only time to develop these two. The two analogies are, between God’s family and the human family, that they both have a common characteristic that flows from the head. The second one is that the children must come to the father, must come to the parent for wisdom. I would say and suggest that there are two basic thrusts of practical application for us today.
First, to the parents; over in the New Testament there’s a verse that says “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be always ready to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in you.” This goes particularly for parents. It means that you are to “sanctify the Lord God in your heart” so that you will be ready to give an answer when your children come to you with questions, and if you don’t know the answers that you will have the honesty to say I don’t know, but I know where we can find it out. I know this is crucial; you’d be surprised what some children come to me… I had a child come to me, not a child, I had a teenage student come to me and this child came to me and said I don’t know why I believe, which is a perfectly legitimate question. Now in this particular case I feared maybe the parents panicked a little bit, oh my son’s going apostate or something. But there’s no need to do that; if it’s an honest question, an honest answer. And the child said I don’t know why I believe? And the only answer that child got from his parents, and this is why we’re having a Sunday school class for parents, the best answer that those parents could give the kid was “just believe it.” It’s tragic! What do you mean, “just believe it?” Why should I “just believe it?” And it would be right for the child to rebel at that point, what do you mean “just believe it,” I’ not going to just believe it, I have to have reasons for believing it.
Now I’m not talking about answering snobby
questions, I’m talking about answering honest intellectual questions. And honest intellectual questions demand
honest intellectual answers. Don’t
expect the unbeliever to listen to you, or children, unless you have answers to
give them. There are answers; you never have to be afraid of answers…never have
to be afraid of answers. But honest
questions demand honest answers. So I
would say that’s one thrust for the parent, is that you must build I our mind,
as Christian parents, a divine viewpoint framework that not only understands
the Bible but understands the issues out there. Remember in the analogy I used
of the army; that drill sergeant was training the soldiers for a future
battlefield. You parents are training
your children to live in their generation; not yours, their generation! And their generation is going to face
different issues than your generation but you ought to keep abreast of the
trends so that you know and can anticipate what those issues are. It’s not that hard; we’ve passed through some
very critical times in the 20th century in
I’d like to conclude with the application
to the children. Turn to Luke 2;
naturally children don’t like discipline; naturally children tend to rebel
against authority. It’s part of the sin
nature, and naturally it’s difficult to go through any training program, even
if you didn’t have a sin nature. So I’m
asking you to turn to Luke 2 to see an incident that happened in the life of
Jesus Christ with His mother and His father.
And I want you to see this particularly, and you children that are in
families you should look at this. Here’s
your model. In Luke 2:42 we have Jesus
going to the temple; “And when he was twelve years old,” Jesus has become a
teenager, you say oh here we go, and in Luke 42 he hit the teenage, he hit it
right here; “when he was twelve eyras old they went up to Jerusalem after the
custom of the feast. [43] And when they
had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child, Jesus, tarried behind in
Now we haven’t got all the details; Luke
evidently consulted Mary to get this, but we have this at least. Bethlehem is north of Jerusalem; evidently
it’s one day’s travel out, they get one day out, it’s a long caravan, they had
gone to Jerusalem, a large family, all the aunts and the uncles and the
grandparents and the grandfathers went in one big caravan and so the whole,
Joseph and Mary and all of their families were together and there were lots of
kids running around and so on, they didn’t notice that Jesus wasn’t in the
caravan. And you can imagine the natural
inclination, put yourself in the position, here you are a whole day’s journey
out and all of a sudden, hey, seen Jesus around somewhere? Nope, haven’t seen him here; so you look all
around, and they’re looking for Jesus, oh, good night, what happened to the
kid, he’s gone, no Jesus. So here you are a day, so they spend a day all the
way back and the next verse tells us they spent a day looking around because in
verse 46, “And it came to pass that, after three days, they found him in the
temple.” So it was one day out, one day
back, and one day looking all up and down the streets of
In Luke 2:46, “And it came to pass that, after three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,” these are the PhD’s of their time, “both hearing them, and asking them questions. [47] And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. [48] And when they saw him, they were amazed; and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Now first let’s deal with the first part of verse 48, the word for “amazed” here is she’s just flabbergasted. Why is she flabbergasted? Mary and Joseph came from a rural area, probably they never even carried on a five minute conversation with a PhD of the time, and they walk into the temple and what’s Jesus doing? He’s not only answering questions, he’s asking them questions they can’t answer. That’s their son, he’s in there, and all of a sudden they say good night, what’s going on. They walk in here and here’s Jesus having a big long dialogue with the PhD’s of his time. And so they’re amazed, utterly amazed that this is their kid. Now this is a tip off, you’ve got to catch this or you’re going to misunderstand a remark later on in the text.
You’ve got to see the picture; the parents are utterly amazed, this is our kid? Doing that? Unbelievable! So in Luke 2:48 Mary starts in, it’s always the mother that starts, “Son, why have you thus dealt with us?” You can tell she’s antagonistic and so on, “Behold, thy father and I have sought thee, sorrowing.” Can’t you just see that, don’t you know that me and your father, we went all the way out a day and we came back a day and we’ve been running around this city today, and she probably had a few other words to say in here too; Luke just gives us the convenient summary. And so she really lets into Him, and this is a real parent chewing her son out. And then in verse 49 there’s a remark that if you don’t understand it, you’ll think that Jesus was insulting His parents. And I want to correct that. “How is it that you were seeking me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business? [50] And they understood not the saying which he spoke unto them.”
Now let me develop this a minute. When he said “Don’t you know Me,” he was
referring back to that initial amazement that crossed his parents face when
they walked in and they saw him and they said this is our kid? And this hurt Jesus very deeply because he
was saying to them, Mother, don’t you remember my birth, don’t you remember the
wise men, don’t you remember who I am? And
what he is saying to her, and he’s not being snotty at all, that’s a
misunderstanding that you get from the English; he is broken at this point, and
he says you don’t know who your own son is… you don’t know your own son. And when he says, “don’t you know that I must
be about my Father’s business,” what he’s saying there is that mother, and we
are to deduce from this, evidently it was an accident that initially got him
separated from the situation, and so he’s saying, don’t you know enough that if
I were lost in Jerusalem where I’d naturally go? Where would I naturally go? I’d go to the temple; why did you spend all
your time walking up and down the streets; you knew I wouldn’t be out there,
where would I normally gravitate to? I’d
gravitate to the temple. You know if you
lost a kid in
Luke 2:51-52 is the conclusion to the story
and the conclusion to our application.
Here’s a teenager who was the most important teenager on earth; no
teenager ever since or before ever had the mission that Jesus Christ had to
perform. Here’s a teenager that was able
at the age of twelve years to carry on a
conversation with the elite of his time, and he could have very easily have
said, and it must have been a fantastic temptation in His humanity to say why,
I’ve got it made, I don’t have to have my parents around, the dopes, after all,
nobody is more stupid than my parents, and here I can handle myself with all
these PhD’s, I don’t need school, I don’t need anything. And intellectually apparently at this point
He was prepared. But watch, verse 51,
“And he went down with them, and came to
Verse 52 is the result of verse 51; even Jesus without an sin nature and as orthodox Christians we are held to the Scriptures that Jesus did not have a sin nature, Jesus did not commit sin, and yet even with this Jesus respects the institution of the family and submission, even in this case, when his parents were wrong. In this case both Mary and Joseph flubbed it, badly; they flubbed it badly because they failed in an elementary thing; they failed to know their own child; they failed to know this child was God’s child, that God had invested in their life. Mary and Joseph didn’t have that child except by a miracle of God and God, as it were, had picked out Mary and Joseph special to be the parents of His Son. And they goofed it because when the kid got to be a teenager, at this point, they didn’t understand him; they didn’t understand him! So parents don’t feel bad if you don’t understand. Here you have the ideal pair picked out by God, they didn’t understand either. But they had a problem; they didn’t understand and Jesus was right on his side of the argument, but notice, because He respected the divine institution of family He was subject to it. Why subject to it? A lot of teenagers, if I know them correctly are saying to themselves now, but why, why is this so? For the simple fact that as a man sows, that shall he also reap.
You know the story of the prodigal son; you
know what happened to that son; it was a son that violated the third divine
institution, and the prodigal son wound up in a pig pen. Why did he wind up in
a pig pen? Because he wasn’t ready to go
out, and he wasn’t ready to go out on his own because he hadn’t submitted to
his parents and he hadn’t been prepared by parental training to go on his own;
he was a little crybaby and a little brat.
And when he went out he wound up in a pig pen and he came back and I guarantee
you from the story that he was no longer a little brat; he was a person who
understood that his parents made mistakes; he was a person who understood that
his parents were not infallible, that they did make mistakes but nevertheless,
he respected the institution of family.