Clough Divine institutions Lesson 10

Divine Institution #3, The Father and the Family – Deuteronomy 22

Turn to Deuteronomy 22. We are covering the divine institutions; there are four divine institutions in the universe, all pertaining to the human race. The first one is volition, or human responsibility; the second one is marriage; the third one is family and the fourth one is national government. All of these are features that God has designed in creation, or you might say in human society, in order that the human race might be perpetuated and might be actually not only perpetuated but might survive; might continue in its maturity and it might survive in order that it might be evangelized generation after generation. So we defined a divine institution specifically as a designed feature in creation that is unique to man and has essential spiritual function.

The first divine institution we have already covered is that of human responsibility or volition. We defined this first divine institution as the responsibility man has before God to choose different ends and means in life. So therefore man is not a machine, as the determinists would say, as the evolutionist would say, he is not chemically determined; he has freedom to choose before God. And there lies the heart of the conflict, incidentally, between historic Christianity and the evolutionary dogma of our time. Is man free? Evolution cannot say he is and historic Christianity insists that he must be, else we do not have a man who’s truly responsible.

The second divine institution is the institution of marriage, which we defined and we dealt with in detail, as the personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race typifying the saving relationship between Christ and believers. With this we introduced the concept of a type and we showed that these institutions are grounded actually in a typology that cannot be broken. And this is why these institutions exist; it’s not simply a development of society. It’s not simply something that man has evolved to satisfy his own needs; rather these institutions are there because they are reflections that God has deliberately set into creation to bear testimony to some future thing that He would show. For centuries and centuries before the Church began on the day of Pentecost people were obviously given in marriage, and marriage was existing for many, many centuries in human history as a silent testimony to that which should come. And not until the New Testament does marriage actually receive its full meaning, that is, it points to the relationship between Jesus Christ and the believer.

We outlined various phases of the second divine institution which we will review now because they pertain directly to the third divine institution of family. Remember we said the ways in which the marriage ceremony and the marriage relationship typifies the relationship of “the Christ” and the believer; we said in several ways, three broad areas. One was the sense in simple mechanics in which we showed that the male and the female in the Bible are given certain distinct functions. The man is seen as the initiator; he is the one who initiates love and the female is seen as the responder. This applies all the way up from the physical all the way on up through into the psychological and spiritual, and it’s there for a reason. It bears testimony to that event when Christ loved the Church, and He loved the Church before the Church could personally respond to Him. The Church did not love Jesus and then Jesus turned around and love the Church; it’s precisely the opposite way around; Christ first loved us, then we loved Him. And so this is preserved when the apostles draw this as the type of marriage in such passages as Ephesians 5 and so on. So we found that this is an important feature.

We found other ways in which the man must exercise his positive volition toward the woman but the woman’s positive volition must be developed in response to the man. We found that the man basically acts in the same role Jesus Christ does as a revealer of character, whereas the woman acts as a truster in that revealed character. Now these are not watertight compartments in the sense that obviously there’s an interplay back and forth there within the marriage relationship; these typify, however, the major trends and tendencies. So we find the male as the revealer; he is the one who must reveal his character to the woman who loves him, and this woman basically when she turns in response to him in love she is putting her trust in him as a person and as an individual.

We found also that the male, as with Christ, he must have endurance and patience because it takes the woman growth to respond. So these are some of the Biblical characteristics the Bible attaches to this relationship and the apostles pick up these things. These are not just hung in thin air, the apostles pick these things up in such passages as 1 Corinthians 11, Ephesians 5 and so on. And they are there for a specific reason.

Then we found the second great area of marriage in which it typifies the saving relationship between Christ and the believer, you’ll recall that it was in the sense of a purposed design. In other words, marriage is to accomplish something in history, and this parallels the concept of the Bible because we have this feature about Adam. We have Adam given first, the man, for Adam in the Hebrew means man, then you have him given a plan by God, then you have the woman who is called a help fitted, not a helpmeet, that’s not one word, it’s a help fitted for him, but not just for any man, for the man and the plan that God has given to that man. So you have in the Bible developed, at least implicitly in the Old Testament and definitely in the New Testament, the idea that there is a right man and a right woman and this follows out the typology that Jesus Christ is the right Lord for the believers who submit to Him, those who are predestinated according to Ephesians 1. So we have then the purposed design.

Then the third way in which marriage typifies this saving relationship is in the union; the marriage union itself is something that is greater than the sum of the parts. There’s something created at the point of marriage greater than just two individual people living together. And this union the Bible declares to be one flesh; we do not understand all of the physiological and so on, the details of this, this has yet to be researched. But we do understand enough to say that this is one of the great arguments historic Christianity has against promiscuity because promiscuity is always tending to destroy the people so that when they enter this union they have less than they would have had they not engaged in promiscuity. So we then have some rather strong indicators given in Scripture with regard to this relationship.

Now as we did with marriage we’re going to do with family and therefore I want to review again the human viewpoint attack against marriage. We have today in our culture, because its satanically oriented, a series of attacks being made to undermine the second divine institution. Please do not get me wrong; there are no human beings behind this attack; this is not a product of the communist party, though probably at various places the communist part exploits it. But this is not the product of communists in dark rooms; it is a product of a satanic invasion of the culture. And so we find certain characteristics that are allied in our day against this divine institution of marriage. We found several of these; I mentioned only three when we went through.

One was attacks on clothing styles and I showed from Deuteronomy 22:5 that back in the Old Testament there was an ordinance that seemed at first glance to be irrelevant to the 20^th century until you begin to probe not only the force of this original text but you begin to probe what has been found and what is going on in our own day. In Deuteronomy 22:5 we read, “The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.” And everywhere in the Old Testament you have this word “abomination” it seems to carry the same connotation, that is, that those people who are engaged in abominable work are inevitably engaged in breaking down divine categories. As God has put certain categories in society, He’s put certain categories in various areas of religious activities, and where you have people crossing these boundaries you have them declared to be committing an abomination before the Lord. Again, we don’t know all the details of this; you can study this for yourself, all you have to do is have a concordance and look up the word “abomination” and watch every time it occurs. It always involves a violation of godly designed categories.

What then, is the meaning behind Deuteronomy 22:5? We exegeted that historically; remembering that the Word of God must be interpreted in the day in which it was written. But when that was written the issue there was that the people were engaged in a form of pagan worship called Baalism. They worshipped Baal, one in particular, Ba’al or Baal, and this Baal worship had various activities associated with it; they had sex orgies and they had drug activity, sorcery, spiritism, and so on, and part of this was this mixing of the sexes found in verse 5, where the people would impersonate in various obscene ways the other sex. And you would have this as part of the ordained system of worship, a pattern design violation of these categories that God had built into the human race. And so this little phrase in 22:5 was not just intended to be some little thing that was insignificant; there’s a tremendous meaning behind this. And when we look in our own day, I recently ran across materials that substantiate what I said back then, and so we’ll review some of those things as we come on into the family relationship.

We said, Deuteronomy 22:5 does give us a principle; now this is not against women wearing slacks so ladies, relax. What it’s talking about is a deliberate impersonation of the male, and visa versa of the man deliberately impersonating the female. There is something very abhorrent and abnormal in this which belies a serious spiritual problem. And we find, for example, this corroborated in modern literature. We have one of the great fashion designers of history in our own day, James Leviere [sp?] who works for the London Museum. This man is so skilled in interpreting fashions and clothing styles that when they have paintings come into the London Museum he will date those paintings simply by the clothing worn in the picture. He is a man who is an expert in this field and he will date by the change in style. And he says this, which shows you once again this is not just a trite little verse out of Deuteronomy. He says: “any good clothing designer knows that he is trying to express the collective psyche of the society in which he lives; he is deliberately,” the clothing designer is “deliberately trying to express something.” These are not random designs, you say the kooky designers; oh no, they may be kooky to you but these designers are trying to express something like a piece of art for their society. And he says: “when we judge modern fashions today we can say this: that the women are trying to express their inner attitudes towards their own femininity by the way they are dressing.” And you could say likewise to the men, but he was pointing in there this relationship. Now we need not go into details, all I’m trying to point out here is that modern authorities on the subject recognize there is a connection. This is not some little trite thing trotted out from the Mosaic Law. Moses was onto something here; God had truly revealed to Moses that this does mean something and has important implications. One of the authorities wrote this, and this was an article in Harper’s Magazine, in which they said this: “There is something chic about women wearing men’s clothing.” He said, “What we are trying to do,” this man who was writing, “is that we want to stress a lean, tough, masculine look by causing the women’s clothes to be made of metallic fabric and shiny plastics.”

And again there’s a concerted design; you have to see this, there is a concerted reasoning behind this, and this is why the Christian, as we’ve argued again and again and will continue to argue in the Sunday school classes, even though many people will misinterpret it, you must understand the world in which you live, or you don’t even see the enemy when he comes at you.

Now again we’re not saying be picayune and so on, throw out all your clothes and dump your wardrobe. What we’re saying, however, is be alert, these men know what they’re doing and they’re not doing it just to make money; they’re doing it to express concepts and ideas and the funny part about it is you’ll naïve Christians go out and buy clothes and never think, what is the designed trying to say in this piece of clothing. You never stop and think of that but they do, and that’s what they’re busy thinking about it and you can see it. For example, another authority, a third authority that I’ve discovered that goes along with this was an anthropologies and he says isn’t it interesting that in the last part of the 20^th century; as we move into the 70s, is that even you can watch the shoes and he says the men are tending to go for feminine type shoes, the pointed type, the women are going toward a masculine type of shoe. Again these men may be mistaken in their analysis but I want to point out something, there is a reason behind it. These things do not just happen, and if you think according to the divine viewpoint, which we’ve stressed here, is that you must have God at the center with Bible doctrine. God is known through Bible doctrine, not through emotions or any other system and you must have a grasp of history, science, philosophy, art, music and so on, not all these, you’re not experts in these but you should at least have the desire to let the Bible doctrine flow out into all these areas.

Christians are too compartmental minded; they wall in the Word of God and have it over here in one compartment and then all their life is over here in another and there’s never a connection between the two. But if you will grasp onto this, there’s no part of your 24 hour day in which you are not engaged in some activity that has some bearing on some portion of the Word of God. You simply can’t be separated from it. And if you grasp this it does something for your faith because it’s useful, constantly useful 24 hours a day. And the more Bible doctrine you know the more the connection closes in so you begin to see it in many, many more areas than you see it when you first start out. So this is just one of those things that I pointed out and again it’s corroborated by contemporary authorities.

The other attacks, we dealt with the problem of hair style and we dealt with the problem of lifestyle, but the long and the short of it was this, that there is an inherent maleness and femaleness about the souls of the male and female human being and these can never be erased, no matter how hard you try. We find this confirmed in modern studies in this area. We find, for example, men now coming, after having first come to the conclusion, well, a lot of what we say is the way a woman behaves is that’s the way she was always raised as a girl in the home, she was always taught that that is what a girl does and so she was brought up thinking well, that’s how a girl acts. And similarly with the fellows, they were raised as young men in the home and they were instructed that this is the way young men act and so they acted that way, and to a certain degree obviously that’s true. But these people at first went too far and they said all of it is totally due to the home environment; it’s totally due to the way they’ve been brought up to act. And yet we find now these following texts that show this is not the case, but rather that the male and the female even at an early age behave entirely differently, just as the Bible says.

For example, in one test they took toys, two and three year old kids, and they took all the little girls in one room and all the little boys in another room; they gave them the identical set of blocks and they said go ahead, build what you want to. And then after watching this go on and on they began to discover something. All the girls would tend to build themes involving protection. They would, for example, they’d have their people but there’d always be a fence around the people. They would always build the animals and everything enclosed, and you would always have these girls tending toward themes that would depict protection and inner scenes of inward buildings and so on whereas the boys tended to build outward things; things involving accidents, hazards and so on. And there would be this definite pattern develop, and this was two and three year olds, before they had learned a lot of these things about that’s how a boy and that’s how a girl behave. So they said this must be inherent after all.

We found also that in the area of marriage, in these studies, we found one of the characteristics we pointed out in James. If you turn to James there’s an innocent little remark that James makes that relates the fact that this man was sensitive to this difference between the man and the woman and how they act. James 1:23, you remember when we were dealing with this, this modern tendency to erase the difference between the man and the woman, and we went over to James 1:23 and we noted what he said here. Many Christians have read through this many times, but fail to realize that from the original languages that he’s talking about a unique mental characteristic. And James uses one of the weaknesses of the male to illustrate a spiritual principle. And he says in verse 23, “If any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man,” and the word “man” there is a male, it’s aner, it’s not the word anthropos, in the Greek, which means just the man, it could be man or woman, but this is aner, this is a male; “he is like a male beholding his natural face in a glass, for he beholds himself, goes his way, and straightway forgets what manner of male he was.” And James is simply saying that the male is very insensitive in certain areas of his life; he could care less what he looks like sometimes. And James points this out as this is a picture of a careless believer, who goes to the Word of God, sees the truth but could care less, he just rocks on.

We have one modern authority, McClellan, who said: “One should point out that men are not just weak in the interdependence dimension,” which is the same area James it talking about, “they are often deaf, dumb and blind to what is going on around them because they are so busy assertively concentrating on a task.” And again he pointed out the same thing that James had pointed out centuries ago, namely, that the male in certain areas is totally oblivious to certain things.

Now I bring this out again because I do quite a bit of marriage counseling. And if there’s one thing that keeps coming up it’s that the women and the men do not know each other. And one of the things that the women take very personally, and they wouldn’t if they’d understand the Scriptural concept of a man is that they think that because the man is insensitive to them in certain areas that he’s personally insulting them. They may have some area in their marriage and when they see the husband and he just neglects his wife… now we’re not condoning this, we’re saying it’s a matter of growth; obviously a matter of growth, but oftentimes women will be in a situation in a marriage relationship where the man ignores something. He’s like James here, he sees it and walks on and totally forgets it, and so immediately the woman is hurt; immediately she thinks that this man is deliberately ignoring her, when she fails to realize that this is one of the characteristics of the man. And it’s one of his areas of weakness that the Scriptures depict, namely that he will tend to see things that a woman will see but it doesn’t make any difference to him, he’ll just walk right on, move right on. So ladies, take a tip from James, don’t take everything personal; some of it is a matter of growth, and obviously the man who grows becomes more sensitive in these areas, there is a maturity problem, but you need not take everything totally sensitive, in a personal way.

So this is one area in which this comes out; we find another symptom of this. When one man made a study, which was rather humorous, of the ways in which after a man and a wife have a disagreement the man resolves the problem, and they found out statistically the man, more than the women by a statistically significant margin, will walk out of the house, whereas the woman stays in the home; again pointing out the fact that the tendency is for the man to go outward, tending to move and leave the situation of an interpersonal relationship, whereas the woman must satisfy and she must handle that problem.

We found out in natural skills it’s the same kind of thing. On the college entrance examinations two basic skills are measured for everyone going to college today. One is the verbal skills; the other is the mathematically reasoning skills. Two-thirds of the girls always score higher than the boys when it comes to verbal skills. On the other hand, in the mathematical skills two-thirds of the boys, almost exactly identical, scored better than the girls do in this area, clearly showing something. And they are convinced that this is not just due to their upbringing; this is not just due to the fact that boys are taught to be this way and girls are taught to be this way; it’s something inherent in the very character.

So therefore we say that modern findings, where they’ve been serious and statistically controlled, and very carefully, point out what the Bible has said all along, that the maleness and femaleness is not environmental, it’s inherent and it’s there for a reason. You see, the non-Christian has no explanation for it; we do. The explanation goes back to the type; the explanation goes back to this relationship between the male and the female that typifies the relationship of Christ and the believer. We say that inherentness is there for a theological reason, to demonstrate in history and give every person in the human race the opportunity to play out historically these roles, i.e. again, the man is the initiator, the woman is the responder. The man has positive volition to start with toward the woman; the woman must have positive volition in response toward him. The man, on the other hand, must be the revealer; he’s the one that takes the place of Christ in the Christ-believer relationship. Jesus Christ reveals His character and it’s Christ’s character to which we as believers must respond. We have to be given something in order to respond to it. This is what is wrong in so many circles of fundamentalism; there is so much emotion that people respond emotionally but they forget what it is they are responding to. They respond to the music of a sweet hymn or something; they respond to the way the song leader leads the crowd, they respond to the pastor or something but they fail to see the issue that the response must not be to these; your response must be to the character of Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the Word of God, regardless of the people that are involved in your life that communicate this to you. Your response must be directed back toward the character of Jesus Christ.

Now practical thing: how does Jesus Christ communicate His character toward us? Two ways, words and works…words and works. And so this gives a clue for the marriage relationship; when the man is acting as the revealer and the woman is acting as the truster, she has to have something in which to trust. Well, if the man comes home grrrr and picks up the paper grrrr, and says about three words from the time he walks in the door in the evening until the time he goes to bed, what does the woman have to respond to but grurrrh, and so finally she responds to it and she starts going grrrr and then you have a problem with counseling. So this is the key that’s given back here if you look at the spiritual relationship. Christ doesn’t go grrrr to the believers; he has given us the whole New Testament in which He has revealed words about Himself. And in His intercessory work for us, of course, He operates on our behalf in history. So we have various actions and therefore we can trust Him; we trust Him on the basis of His words and His works. So similarly we take the same principle back over in the marriage relationship and the woman trusts in proportion to the revelation she receives from her man.

So we have these parallels, and now I’d like to go to one further item on this problem of marriage. We have…and we discussed this earlier, the problem of divorce and so on, and the problem of laws which tend to deride the permanency of marriage. In other words, the point is made that marriage is a mere passing institution. We have had laws enacted in the United States, but chiefly in other foreign countries where they have tried to destroy the marriage relationship systematically. Let’s review some of these to show once again that the Bible comes out on top, to show once again that when the Bible says this is a permanent relationship that it is a permanent relationship and when men try to violate it they wind up breaking down their own society. Remember the purpose of the divine institution? To preserve human society; break them down and you break down society with it. So therefore we can choose three examples in world history where marriages have tried to be broken down.

The first experiment was in Russia; after the communist and Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 turned out the early communists, particularly between the years of 1918 and 1925, enacted laws across Russia that would essentially negate marital vows. And so therefore anybody could go with anybody and that was it. And they had everybody signing up in the free love offices and they choose new partners every month. For a while this went on until finally some of the communists got wise to it and they realized that they were destroying their communist society; even communism cannot stand this type of arrangement. Communism itself winds up in the end confirming what the Bible says, that there are basic building blocks that you cannot tamper with, no matter how hard you try, you wind up destroying that which you’re trying to build. And so we find the Russians in 1926 passing a law that marriages, once again, had to be registered. They hadn’t been registered since the days of the Menshevik government in 1917. But in 1926 they began. In 1936 they passed another law in which they proclaimed, which is an amazing thing for us, they proclaimed the family is the basic unit of society and said that in a communist country we cannot exist if we destroy either the family or the marriage; we must use these. Then in 1939 the Russians made abortion illegal. In 1944 they tightened divorce laws extremely, to the point where now, today, the one Puritan society actually on earth is the Russians.

I mentioned to the Sunday school the one thing that’s destroying Russia faster than anything else is the corruption she’s getting from American; it’s ironic that the one thing that we have used very effectively in the world is the pollution, the pornography, the music and all the rest that are polluting the Russian youth and they are making tremendous and deep inroads in destroying the Russian youth through listening to western music and so on. So what we ought to do as far as forgetting our ICBM’s because Congress will emasculate those pretty soon, we won’t have any, what we should do is just take all our pornography and pack it up and send in crates and drop it off in Russia. But they recognize the problem and they have tried to deal with it. But here’s the lesson to learn from the Russian experiment. Here is a nation, who if there was any nation that tried desperately to destroy this divine institution they wind up today more strongly convinced of its validity than even we do, a nation that has supposedly been operating on a Christian base.

The second experiment that we could look at are the Kibbutzim of Israel; these are communes that the Israelis started in 1948 in which they had a communal type of life. And there they had a very loose type attitude in various areas toward premarital activity and so on, and we’ve had a destruction in part there of the marriage. And yet as the years go by they’ve noticed a strange thing about these Israeli communes; the women and the men have tended to go back to their traditional roles, and they tended to go back, not because the government has forced them but because of something inwardly that cries out from both the man and the woman that there is a certain defined role that cannot be violated, no matter how hard you try to legislate it away it’s still there, you can’t erase it.

And then finally, ironically in our own country we have one experiment, the hippie communes, and even in the hippie communes we find that there is no true identity between the man and the woman in their role; there is maybe equality but equality, please remember in this day of women’s liberation, equality is not identity. Remember that! There is such a thing, there are many things about the women’s liberation that the men have deliberately brought on themselves, such as paying women less for X amount of work than they get and so on. There are many legitimate claims, but remember there’s one fallacy behind the movement, and that is equality is not identity; there are two different types of concepts involved.

So we can look out on the world and say that the facts, the sociological facts tend to support what the Bible said all along, namely that the divine institution of marriage is something that is ineradicable, you cannot destroy it.

Last time we started on the problem of the family. We defined the family as a relationship between the parent and the child. We said this: that this is a character relationship…a character relationship, rather than a personal relationship our emphasis is on type of character, a character relationship between parents and children which typifies the saving relationship between God the Father and “the Christ.” Now watch it, there’s difference; marriage was between Christ and the believer, but the family is between God the Father, God the Son, and those who are born again in the Son, the Church. This together is known in Scripture in the New Testament as ho Christos, or “the Christ.” That’s the technical term to describe “church.” Oftentimes when Paul wants to describe Christ plus all believers he’ll cal it ho Christos, or “the Christ.” So we have now “the Christ,” “the Christ” including the Son plus all believers, and the relationship of that with the Father.

Last time we said that there are several things in which this typology shows up. The first one was there is a descent from one head, a common nature. In other words, there’s something transmitted from the Father to the Son and this is quite crucial in defining the family theologically. It patterns, or is a pattern of the character of Jesus Christ as it’s transmitted to the believers. And so we have the problem of similar natures or the transmission of the parent’s nature into the next generation. The second feature about family we covered was the sense that there is wisdom transferred from the parents to the children. So there are two things transferred, there is a nature, an inherent nature that I receive from my parents. Secondly, the family exists, according to the Bible, with an express purpose of passing on wisdom, which we’ll see in a moment. And the third area, which we did not cover last time and we will cover this evening, is the legal responsibility. In a family situation the head of the family bears responsibility for that family. And this explains the New Testament doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to the human race. Adam is the head of the human race, head of the family; what Adam does the human race does. And this is why we are credited with Adam’s sin in Romans 5.

So we have these three features of family, just like we had those three features of the marriage. We have transmitted character, transmitted wisdom, and transmitted legal responsibility. So we have these three features that we can examine. And when we go again to compare this with the contemporary scene and ask ourselves, what is happening to the American family, we find a significant parallel with these three things, as though the attack is directly made against these three crucial basics in the American family.

Eighteen experts on family life were interviewed recently, and they gave the following eight points as to why the family in America was being weakened, and this was the concerted opinion of these eighteen men who spend their lives studying this relationship. These eight are functions that they said tend to weaken the family relationship. One they said was an obvious one, the rise of extra-marital sex and so on, and therefore the decreased attention on the need within the family.

The second one, however, is more important for us and the rest of them following is that there was a transfer of protection, of the family from the head of the family to outsiders, such as police, health authorities and so on. So that the head of the family isn’t as in the Old Testament, the one who protects the family, the police protect the family. He’s not the one that does all these other things of protection, medical protection and so on, but there’s always special areas in our society that do it. A third function they mentioned was a transfer of education; the parents no longer educate their children, special authorities educate their children, so again we remove another function from the family relationship. The fourth one, the transfer of family recreation, so now we go to be entertained, outside of the family itself. The fifth one was a transfer of the place of production, whereas in the Old Testament and in ancient society the families had their farm, their farmland was right there, it was part of the family property, or if they were in the urban areas the men who worked weaving and so on did it in their home. So now more of this family production is done outside of the visible area where the family lives and so it becomes disconnected.

We have a transfer of religious worship toward the outside, specialized forms, such as in the church area the tendency to rely totally on the Sunday school for the education of the children which is utterly wrong and we’ll get back to that in a moment. Transfer of the family as the insurance for aging parents; we have old folk’s homes and so therefore the older people don’t feel a part of the family as they once did. And finally the eighth one these experts listed was the loss of significance for traditional homemaking skills with store bought products. In other words, the point is that the man can go out and buy the stuff already made; the woman can go out and by the instant so and so and just put water in it and come up with something that tastes halfway decent, and she can do it very quickly. And all of this they feel were things, functions, that debilitate the American home.

However, if we analyze all these eight and go back to those three Biblical principles we come across something very interesting. All eight of these factors that supposedly are destroying the American family would not, and do not have to destroy the American family, even if they continue on. These eight factors can go ahead and continue all they want to, but if the families are grounded on these three Biblical principles it would make no difference. For example, we said there’s one principle that controls family is the similarity of nature principle. At other places at Lubbock Bible Church, on the basic series and so on I’ve covered this; we just briefly review it. Every person has a sin nature; we diagram it like this: every person who is a member of the human race has a sin nature. After I receive Christ as Savior, after I become a Christian I still have a sin nature. I never lose that sin nature until the time I die. And so therefore you must remember every believer has a sin nature. Therefore, it is no excuse to say well I don’t like Christianity because of so and so. Of course, so and so has a sin nature.

Now of course nowhere does the sin nature pop out more and in greater form than in marriage. Is it not interesting that the first place the sin nature is shown in the Bible is in the marriage relationship? Adam and Eve is at the first point where it shows because where you have two people living close together they’re bound to discover, hey, the other person has a sin nature just like I do, how about that. And no matter how romantic and all the rest of it is and they can trip down the aisle and have the rosy glow about marriage and go through all the ceremony and so on, sooner or later even the most naïve couple are going to realize that the other one has a sin nature.

Well, if we analyze the sin nature we find every one of us has an area of weakness and an area of strength. This means that I may have a tendency to sin overtly and outwardly in various areas, whereas you may not. And I used the classic illustration of we could have one person who tends to gossip; we can have another person who tends to steal. We have a person who steals, he’s a kleptomaniac, he walks into Montgomery Ward and walks out with 20% of the merchandise. Now he just can’t leave his hands to himself, he’s always got to steal something, professional lifter. So here he is, his area of weakness is stealing. He just can’t go anywhere without stealing, it’s overt, everybody knows it, it’s so easy for him to get out of fellowship, all he has to see is something, aha… and he’s got it. So it’s an overt thing. So the tendency in many Christian circles is to oh, let’s clobber him, or the more sophisticated way is let’s get on the telephone and pray for so and so, do you know so and so has a problem, why I saw so and so doing such and such the other day and do you know that violates the Word of God, and all the rest of it. And you get this gossip started in the local congregation and pretty soon poor so and so with a weak area, stealing, is crucified by his fellow believers. So we have this problem, he has an area of weakness in the area of stealing.

But he may also have an area of strength that he keeps his mouth shut, and he might see you do something and he’d never tell anybody. Now we have somebody else, we’ll let that be Brother A. Now Brother B comes along and he just can’t keep his mouth shut, everything that goes on in the congregation he’s got to blab it all over the place. This, incidentally, is a person never to have for your friend. You can’t tell them anything, you can’t confide in them, they are untrustworthy and anything you tell them they will broadcast all around. You use these people if you have a PR program and you need publicity but that’s about the only use that they are for. These people have a great area of weakness; they have to gossip, they can’t keep their mouth shut. But on the other hand, this brother may have a situation develop where he would never steal, he could walk through Fort Knox ten years ago when they had gold and never pull out one bullion, never; he has absolutely nothing to worry about as far as stealing. So we have these two brothers and they get together in the local Christian congregation and then they start looking and comparing notes at each other, and they try to maneuver each other into a situation where they get the other one to appear worse than he is. And so we have this person, he starts to gossip because he knows believer A is always stealing; and so he likes to run believer A down, every opportunity he gets, spreading around bad news about Believer A. And then Believer A keeps his mouth shut so he usually comes out on the short end because it’s not his nature to go around blabbing things. And so he just quietly burns. So we have two people out of fellowship, harping at one another, causing all sorts of problems in the local church and it is all because they do not understand that different believers can have different patterns to their sin nature.

You have a pattern to your sin nature; it’s unique, thank God. And somebody else has a pattern to their sin nature, and so you marry and you have children. Now guess whose sin nature they inherit; they inherit yours. So when you look at your kids and you say good night, where’d that blat come from, just remember that he has inherited parts of your sin and if you are clever and perceptive as a parent you will begin to… and here’s one area where you can resist these attacks on the family, for there is one thing that the Christian parent can do that no school teacher can do, no education instructor can do, no authority can do, no sociologist can do for you. You and you alone know your areas of weakness and your areas of strength, and you and you alone know your character. And it should be up to you to read that character in your children, and begin to help them overcome these areas; areas that you’ve struggled with, maybe for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and you in the Christian life have had a persistent problem in certain areas. Be alert to the fact your children may inherit the same problem from you and they’re going to have to go to the same battle. Why let them go through the same battle when the Lord has worked with you for maybe five or ten years with your problem. So you take the benefit of what you have learned and start to discipline and train your kids accordingly. [Tape turns]

…realizing that they will inherit their patterns of weakness and their patterns of strength from you. And so it will also get rid of the problem when so and so comes home, and he’s been bad or something, there’s always a tendency to say, well, your kid did such and such today. You jointly share the blame, he’s got the genes of both of you there and so he’s inherited traits and behavior characteristics from both of you.

So this is one area where Christians operating perceptively on the basis of the Word of God can spot the areas of weakness in their children, study them, know them. If you would like some help on this I would suggest Dr. Joe Temple’s series of tapes called Know Your Child. It’s an excellent series of tapes and he has a printed manual where he’s gone through the Biblical principles of disciplining children, of spotting these areas in your child and so on, a very excellent series, and Dr. Temple speaks from experience, I think he has about 7 kids and all of them have been raised up this way and they are wonderful kids if you know them.

Then we come to that second principle in the family. Not only do we share a common nature that can’t really be known outside of the family, and that is the transfer of wisdom. Now it’s true that the school does a lot of the educating for you; it’s true that the Sunday school does a lot of it for you. Use it your advantage; don’t sweat about it, we have problems in that area, but my point is that you can’t worry about spilled milk, it’s over. The state has intruded to move the child out of the family this much; turn it around and say well, if the state didn’t do it I would have to do it so now I don’t have to do that, now let me concentrate on the area that’s really important, and that’s the area of developing spiritual wisdom and the area of leading your child to faith in Jesus Christ. It’s amazing how many parents don’t know how to do this; amazing how many parents don’t even know how to explain the gospel to their child. They come to the pastor, could you explain my gospel to my child? What have been doing out there in the pew? What do you do when you read the Bible and so on? So this is an area where a person can… you emphasize then, whereas the school has taken the skills, it has taken the occupational techniques out of the home. All right, that leaves you and you just have one thing to worry about, transmitting Bible doctrine to your children.

Turn back to Deuteronomy 6, that key passage in the Old Testament. We dealt with this last time but I want to come back to it. The argument is made today that the family has become obsolete because the father can’t pass on the skills that he learned to his son, because the world is changing so fast technologically that by the time he learns the skills and passes them to his son they are obsolete. So the father can’t pass things to his son like that, but there is one thing he can and that’s Bible doctrine because Bible doctrine is never obsolete. No matter how advanced technologically the culture, it will never make obsolete Bible doctrine.

So in Deuteronomy 6:7 we go back to the same principle again and again. “You will teach them diligently unto your children, and you will talk” not about them, for that’s not what the Hebrew says; there’s a preposition, Bet or “in,” “thou shalt talk in them,” that means in terms of them, “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up. [8] And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand,” this is not literal, this is a symbolic expression here in verse 8, “and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. [9] You shall write them on the posts of thy house,” there would you provide Scripture passages for your children and provide them with access to the Word of God.

But notice in verse 7 how those ancient families of Israel passed the faith from father to son, from father to son. They did it, not by constantly preaching at them, that wasn’t the technique they used. What they used was that they were able to develop the divine viewpoint framework to such a degree, God at the center, Bible doctrine around, and then all these areas, science, history, art philosophy, music, literature, fellowship with believers, loved ones, friends, society, possessions, sex, health, job and so on, all these details of life, and they were able to see every one of those details in the light of the Word of God. So for example, take a situation at the supper table, take a situation where you have a discussion going, take a situation after supper, say the kid’s involved with some subject at school or something, or is involved in some relationship with his friend. What these people are commanded to do in verse 7 is to analyze it in the light of the Scripture. In this way you do two things; you deal with the problem and you deal and present Bible doctrine with it, because the first verb in verse 7, “thou shalt teach,” is a strange verb in the Hebrew language to teach; it was the verb that they used to sharpen arrows with, and what it means is to take the content that you’re teaching and work it around so that it penetrates. When a man would do this to his arrows, what was he doing it for? He was preparing his arrows to penetrate. And so what he’s saying, to make doctrine penetrate into the child you do it by constantly phrasing everything in the home within that divine viewpoint framework.

Now this is the point of griping about certain school texts. It’s not that we’re trying to be nitpickers about something and fuss about this and that and the other thing and Christians too often have done this. Too often Christians fuss because there’s an off-color picture or joke on some page. That’s not really the point; the point is the framework in which the facts are presented to the young people. They go to school, what do they get? We’ve discovered in the history books, the first thing they learn is they have the whole set of historical facts constantly taught to them in an evolutionary framework. Now evolution itself is never discussed, never debated pros or cons, evidences for or against, never debated in a history class; it is taken simply for granted and is allowed to become the overall framework into which every historic fact is crammed, rammed and jammed.

Now what’s going to happen; they say well, we don’t teach evolution here; not directly you don’t, but what’s going to happen with a kid if ever historical fact he’s ever learned has been framed within the evolutionary framework. Are you trying to tell me he’s not going to learn evolution? Bologna, I don’t believe you. You have subtlety brainwashed him to think this way. You’ve gotten him used to thinking in these terms because you’ve presented everything he’s ever had inside an evolutionary framework. Open up your child’s history text when you get home and look at the section on the history and watch how it’s phrased. If it’s like most of the texts you’ll see how it says and Israel was once a polytheistic nation and she developed her concept of monotheism over many, many centuries; Abraham and the early forefathers were just simply legends, simply something off in the past, and these tribes gathered together, some worshiping a god here and some a god over there, and some a god over there and they finally got together about the seventh century BC and developed a concept of monotheism and so on and so and so on.

And this goes on, and of course it’s made a major point in the classroom but it doesn’t have to be made a major point in the classroom to have its effect. So what happens? Then the kid goes back to the Bible and what’s his attitude? He’s learned all this history inside an evolutionary framework, dogmatically never being allowed to be exposed to something else; never being exposed to anything else. And then if you point this out to people, some of us here at Lubbock Bible Church have been involved in this and here’s the answer we get. We asked one writer of a history book that’s going to be proposed to the Texas school system, and we got a reply back. Here’s a man who said… this went on and so on and he went on to say why he wasn’t going to change his history text, and he said, after all, I asked my ten year old daughter whether I should or not and she said I shouldn’t. So that’s the authority, evidently, a ten year old daughter decides whether we’re going to change the text or not. Well, these are the replies we get back, seemingly totally oblivious to the whole issue. The issue is that you’re constantly teaching people by the way you teach them. And if you’re teaching them facts always within this evolutionary framework they’re going to learn evolution. You may want to say well don’t they have the right to learn it. Yes they do, but I demand the right also that they be exposed to the creationist position also; that’s equal time.

So here in Deuteronomy 6:7 we have this same principle, they used this technique in ancient Israel of constantly phrasing every problem in terms of creation, in terms of the Word of God, and so it had the opposite effect that we’re finding these school texts have. So this is the way the family worked.

Turn to Proverbs 1, you’ll see the same thing developed there, where the father is not passing on technical skills to his son; he may not know how to educate his son in the sciences and in the mathematics, and he may not know how to educate his son, but he does know, if he’s a Christian, Biblical principles and he can pass these on and these will never be obsolete. And if his son grows to live for a hundred years he can look back and say the principles my father taught me are the truth because they are rooted in the immutable Word of God. You see, that’s what the father, the parents should be doing, transferring the Bible doctrine over into the younger generation.

So in Proverbs 1:1, why were the Proverbs written? “The Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, [2] To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.” Verse 4, “To give subtlety to the simple,” and that “simple” doesn’t mean simple-minded, it means to the one who just are young, it’s an idiom for a young person, “to the young man knowledge and discretion.” Notice down in verse 8, this was not left just to the father, I want to correct an impression I left last time because some people turned in some feedback cards and I do appreciate you who do that, if you have questions to write it out and drop it in and I’ll work it in when we come back. Some of you dropped in the question, well is this implied from what you said that just the father was doing this in the ancient world. Your answer here is in verse 8, no, the father, true, was given the ultimate responsibility, but the mother did her share. “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother.” You see it’s in parallelism, so there wasn’t any hierarchy where the man did all the teaching; both the man and the woman taught.

The only distinction that we find in the New Testament observed is that of the woman teacher. In the New Testament Paul says in 1 Timothy 2 and in 1 Corinthians that the woman is to keep silent in the church. Now some people have taken that to the extreme and say women can’t teach; that’s not what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about is that he does not allow women to be in a position of authority over men; that’s his position, within the spiritual realm of the church. Now what secular society wants to do that’s outside of the church. But as far as inside the church the apostles did not allow this, and for a definite reason, given in 1 Timothy 2:11 to which we will turn. “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.” Now that is a key word and it’s misinterpreted, so let me straighten that up before we have people running off and making all sorts of bad applications. Be careful, that’s not saying what you think it’s saying. A lot of people interpret that and say the woman should never open her mouth, and she constantly walks around and evidently gains her knowledge by osmosis from some place. That’s not the way Paul meant; what Paul is talking in the subjection is that she’s to go home and ask her husband in this situation. And it implies something; her husband has to know the answer to the question. It’s very simple, and if the husband doesn’t know, obviously it’s not God’s will that the woman remain stupid, it is God’s will that she understand and so she has the right to ask if her husband can’t explain it to her.

“Let the woman learn in silence with subjection,” the subjection here is don’t get out of line as far as the marriage relationship. “But I do not allow,” Paul says in verse 12, “a woman or to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Again, this is in the context of the local church; he’s saying nothing at all about the women teaching other women, for example. For example in Timothy we find that the women are commanded to teach the younger women, commanded to; so obviously Paul doesn’t mean the women are not to teach. He’s simply saying that he does not want them to be an authority and you say why is all this here, did he hate women?

No! 1 Timothy 3:13-14, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. [14] And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” Now without going into a detailed exegesis of that we simply say this: that there was a deep theological reason for this. Paul felt on the basis of the problem of Adam and Eve, that in that situation, even though it was equal, Adam when he sinned, sinned in total and complete and full knowledge. He sinned as the authoritative head; he sinned having known the truth and turned away from it. And incidentally ladies, just remember, the man got in trouble because he loved his woman, because at one time after the woman fell Adam could have chosen for Christ, and he chose the woman over the Lord. So that is one very interesting thing that comes out of the fall. But the woman here was deceived, and evidently he’s suggesting that the woman today can be deceived if she is placed into a position of authority. Thus he argues that he will not permit this woman to teach or to usurp authority over the man but watch that; it does not mean women can’t teach. We use women teachers all around here, just that women are not to be in a position of authority over men; that’s the point.

In 1 Timothy 3:15 he ends by showing that the woman has an irreducible part in the plan of salvation. The childbearing here is “the childbearing,” and it refers back again to the fact of Eve and he’s saying this woman, Eve, was said to be the mother of all living, wasn’t she, and so God had worked it out so that the woman would be the access and the channel through which Messiah would come. Messiah did not need a man to come into the world; you think that over for a moment. No man was involved in bringing Messiah into the world; it was the son of a virgin born; He was virgin born and so therefore man was not needed in any way, shape or form to bring Messiah into the world; it was solely the woman’s prerogative. And Paul balances this out, he says don’t you interpret my remarks to say that God is putting the woman on a lower pedestal, just because she can’t exercise this particular function does not mean she’s not equal in God’s sight, for he says, he reminds us in verse 15, just remember it was the woman and the woman alone who was chosen by God to bring Messiah into the world, man had nothing to do with it.

So we come to the second of the family relationships, the first one was the common nature and we said how as Christian parents we can use this; we can use this to strengthen our family by dealing with the areas of weakness and strength in our children. We find the transfer of wisdom problem; it doesn’t have to be transfer of technical knowledge, transfer of Bible doctrine, from both parents, mother and father, to the children.

Finally the third principle of family life that we discovered last time was the legal responsibility ...the legal responsibility, what do we mean by this. We mean that what the father does…what the father does the children are responsible for. Deuteronomy 5:9, back to the Ten Commandments. In Deuteronomy 5:9 one of the Ten Commandments or the ten statements that has given a lot of people problems is this strange statement that’s tacked in here, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me. [10] And showing mercy unto thousands of them who love Me and keep My commandments.”

Incidentally, those of you who pick up children’s history books, there’s something else I’ve noticed. They tend to depict the God of Israel as the God of wrath and the God of the New Testament as the God of love. Now for your information that went out 150 years ago out of scholarly circles. I don’t know who it is that’s writing these things but they haven’t even got liberal theology correct because they don’t even believe that any more; it’s just 150 years old, modern textbook.

So in Deuteronomy 5:9 what he is talking about is the justice of God…the justice of God, but please notice, the love of God is in verse 10. Everywhere you have justice of God in the Old Testament you always, always, always have the love of God expressed. “But,” he says, I “show mercy unto thousands of them,” He says I curse to the third and fourth generation, but I bless to the thousands of generations and there you get…which is weighted more, justice of love here? Justice goes to third and fourth; love goes to the thousands, now you tell me whether God is a God of love or a God of wrath in the Old Testament. God is a God of love in the Old Testament just as He is in the New Testament, no difference whatever, none whatever.

So now we deal with this third and fourth generation; what does that mean? It simply means that when the father engages in a certain type of sin that’s obnoxious to God, if the son, and this is the big “IF,” if the son, down to the first, the second and the third generation engages in the same sin, then he will receive the discipline of his father plus further discipline. To see how this works turn to Jeremiah 16:11, and here we see how this historically worked out. “Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken Me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshiped them, and have forsaken Me, and have not kept My law, [12] And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, you walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto Me. [13] Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers;” and they shall serve other gods and so on.

The point is this, that the children engage in the same sin of the father, they receive compounded discipline. We see this; recently we’ve come across research done in Europe that in a very strange way corroborates this claim of the Bible, and this is the work of Dr. Kurt Koch who was a German theologian for the past 20 to 30 years, has worked in the Black Crescent of Europe. The Black Crescent of Europe is an area of Northern Europe, including Northern Germany, it includes part of northeastern France, it includes Denmark and so on, that for apparently four to five hundred years has been heavily influenced by spiritism, by the demonic and by the occult. For example, if you studied music you know Wagner’s operas and so on, this pagan theme, it’s been in this area. And Christians after World War II became very much the victims of this spiritism; they became victims of it in new ways; they had become victims after World War I, after the ravishes of Europe, after the war, many Christian women would go to these séances to find out what happened, am I still a wife or am I a widow; is my husband alive in a concentration camp somewhere or is he coming home to see me, or is he dead; where is he? And these women, tortured day and night by this agony of not knowing, am I a wife or am I a widow, would go in their desperation, instead of trusting the Lord they would go in their desperation to consult one of these mediums. And Koch found over the years that they’d become afflicted with various psychic phenomena as a result of attending these séances.

And he found further that when the father and the grandfather of these particular women had engaged in the same thing, for it was very prevalent in that part of the world, when they had engaged in the same thing, this was rapidly and increasingly intensified down to the third and fourth generation. And in all the studies of Koch’s book, and you can get the book, it’s called Christian Counseling in Occultism, in all the cases that he presents in a typically German scholarly way, four or five hundred footnotes in the thing, he presents case after case after case and he shows you that down to the third and fourth generation the following thing happened. The grandfather will be experimenting in say, dealing with black and white types of magic and he will have these various things and it seems you go back to Lamarkianism, inheritance of acquired characteristics, all of a sudden his son pops up with the same…the ability for example to mind read, the ability to have extrasensory perception, from birth, after his father participated in this. And then if he goes out and doesn’t become a Christian, he doesn’t submit to Jesus Christ, he rebels against the gospel and goes back into this spiritism, he can do it better than his father could. And it’s likewise down till finally it gets so intense in the third and fourth generation that the family itself is usually destroyed; either by lack of procreation or by the person commits suicide or something before marrying. So it’s a very strange correlation. Now Koch doesn’t bring this out, I’ve made the connection, but he does bring out the statistics to show you that this operates in a very weird way down exactly as the Bible says, to the third and fourth generation.

So the fathers, then, and the parents are held responsible for setting the tone and the destiny of their children; not only is it a simple matter of passing on your nature to them, not only is it a simple matter of passing wisdom to them but it seems that you can pass the very discipline of God to your children. And contrary, you can also pass the blessing on to your children. How many of the great families in the Christian church have been father/son teams down through history. There have been Puritan families, for example, that had preachers in the family for four, five, even six generations. Why? Is it just because the parents said well now, you’ve got to be a preacher. Oh no, it was that God honored and blessed them and this blessing was transmitted through the family.

So remember that you as parents bear a responsibility; you can be the transmitters of God’s wrath or you can be the transmitters of God’s blessing. It doesn’t mean your children are going to suffer unjustly, but it does mean that if they get out of line and you’re transmitting the wrath of God to them they’re really going to get it. And that’s the teachings that we find from this particular commandment, that develop many portions.

We have one Biblical example of this, you all know it; it’s Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Remember what Abraham’s problem was? He was a liar, remember what he did with Sarah; he took her down to vacation in Egypt and the first thing you know he’s gotten in trouble with the Egyptian authorities, tried to pass Sarah off as his sister. Sarah was an extremely beautiful woman; any woman at 90 years old that would attract the ardor of Pharaoh was obviously a beautiful woman. And so this woman was passed off as a sister. Pharaoh started showing some interest and he said wait a minute Mr., that’s not your sister, that’s your wife. And Abraham got in trouble. Then what happened to the second generation? You have Isaac come along and he does exactly the same thing with his wife. He takes to Abimelech and so on, and it passes through the same thing. And then finally you come down to Jacob and his very name means liar, it means a chiseler, that’s why he was named it; he was a chiseler from the beginning and his mother named him that. And so Jacob…you see what happened, the character intensified. Then what had to happen? The fourth generation went down into Egypt and stayed there. For how many generations? Four generations, and then they came back out as a nation. It’s not accidental, these aren’t things just put into the Bible, they’re revelations of a strange dynamic that works in people’s lives. And we as Christians do well to understand this.

Next time when we deal with further aspects of the third divine institution we’ll deal with the problem of family planning and the problem of abortion and so on that are troubling a lot of Christians in these days. We’ll go back to various Scriptures in these areas.