Dennis Tuuri

We were a little late getting here this morning, which gave me an opportunity to see how many other people were late in the lot. You know, Sundays can be a real day of start off with a real bang as you try, particularly the larger family you have, the more of a bang it gets off to a start with, and it can be quite difficult to get everybody rounded up and ready. And if children are small, to get them here on time. And you can get here and then you have to kind of keep track of them while they’re here, of course. And I suppose sometimes one might ask what’s the point, you know? Maybe I should just stay home until these kids get bigger for a few weeks or a few months or a few years. It’s a good question: why do we come to church on Sunday?

Obviously, we’ve talked about the command of our Lord. But I bring up that this morning because I thought about on the way in that sort of illustrates what we’re going to talk about this morning. There’s a tension Sunday morning trying to get your family ready to go to meet with the extended family of the church. And it takes sacrifice on our parts to get here and to get here on time. And that will be kind of an introduction of what we’re going to talk about this morning, which is the tension between the natural family and the church family.

I guess the title I’ve used is “Limitations on the Family, the Church.” This is the last of a series of talks we’ve had now going through the marriage relationship. Several months ago, we talked about child rearing at some length, and I thought it’d be good as we ended up the husband-wife relationship and the talks we’ve given on the family to talk about some of the limitations. And so we’ve done that over the last three or four weeks intermittently interspersed with other messages about other things.

But it’s important that as we consider this morning’s topic, we remember the context of what I’m going to talk about this morning. I think the context of this church is that we’re a group of people that understand the great importance of the natural families that we have. By “natural” I don’t mean non-adoptive. Children in our families are what I’m calling this morning natural. I’ll use the term the Adamic family. I’m trying to differentiate it somehow from the extended household family of the church and the household of God that we’ve been ushered into in terms of the institutional church.

So I use that term natural family, but don’t let that throw you off. It includes adoptive children as well and extended family as well—uncles, aunts, grandparents, et cetera. But as I was saying, this church has stressed the importance of the family structure. We said that the family is the necessary building block of society. Without godly families, you’re not going to have a godly society. We said that the family is the first church the child experiences and the first state the child experiences in the sense of punishments and rewards for bad behavior and good behavior, and the first school, and for many of us the only school that children will really experience much of in their lives for homeschooling. A lot of us. But in any event, even if you don’t homeschool, almost every mother teaches their children with some help from the father hopefully to speak the English language from the earliest days before they ever see a school building in the formal sense of that term.

So the family is very important, and it’s important for reconstruction. There’s no way to reconstruct the society without reconstructing the family. And that’s why we spent so much time talking about children and the marriage relationships, et cetera.

But as I’ve said several times over the last few months, there’s a question of balance in all of this. There’s that old song we like to sing occasionally. It has the line in it, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.” And that’s certainly true. We are. We still have that element in us that wants to pull us away from obedience to God and delve into sin in various ways. If we’ve assumed a godly direction in a particular thing, then a lot of times we’ll veer over to the other side of that issue.

I mentioned before that when Calvin teaches in Deuteronomy about the marriage relationship, he always is kind of going back and forth, back and forth. It’s a good thing to do that with ourselves because we tend to wander. We tend to go off the path one way or the other, and we need corrective action back.

And so we’re going to end up our series of discussions about family relationships with the talk about the limitations of the family relative to the church. I guess the point we’ve been trying to make in these last three or four talks about divorce, remarriage, contraception, child rearing, and no guarantees from God that we’re going to have godly children, although that’s presumptively the case, is that all these things indicate that there are limits to the natural family that we’ve been talking about.

An example was with divorce, and we talked about a couple of weeks ago Deuteronomy 13:7, that says specifically that if a member of your family tries to get you to follow another god, you must move against that member of the family strongly according to God’s word and be the first to take them to court and then also to engage in capital punishment against a rebellious and self-conscious idolater who would want to pull people off into worshiping false gods. That’s definitely a limit on the natural family.

We haven’t talked about this and I’m not going to talk about it at any length this morning, but Ezra in the restoration told the covenant people to put away their foreign wives that they had married. Again, an indication the marriage relationship is not sovereign. It’s not absolute. And I think probably what was going on there in the time of Ezra was that those foreign wives weren’t just foreign wives. They were foreign wives who are trying to proselytize the husbands. And so we’re in the position of the Deuteronomy 13:7 family member who tries to get you to follow another God. And Ezra said, “Divorce that person, cut yourself off of them because they’re covenantally dead to you.”

But anyway, the family has limitations on it. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about this morning.

Now, the other context of what I’m going to say this morning is that there are some tangential groups to reconstruction. And by this I don’t mean any of the main proponents of Christian reconstruction, but people that have kind of moved around the edges of it somewhat that I think have become overbalanced in this area and become familistic and have relied totally upon the family. I know of some so-called reconstructionists who believe that the family is the only institution that God still has ordained under the new covenant, that the state and church are not valid institutions, and therefore we have no allegiance to them.

Obviously, no Orthodox reconstructionist would assert that, but there are elements in it that we have to be careful not to get overbalanced. One of the reconstructionists wrote in a recent newsletter some pretty good remarks about the limitations of the family in terms of defending the faith against onslaught of the state. They said this: “Some have relied upon a weak reading of the family as if it were God’s primary representative government. They expect the family to defend civilization against statism. This is nonsense biblically. The family, while sovereign, is always subordinate to the jurisdiction of both church and state. For the family is required by God to pay tithes and taxes. The family therefore cannot be the primary agency to defend our freedoms against state encroachment. The church is that institution. Christ did not say I shall build my family. He did not say that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the family. He built the institution of the church to aid in that assistance in combating ungodly statism.”

Now, one might quickly want to add on to a quote like that: Well, we said before that the family is a necessary building block for a godly society. And if you have churches that are fulfilling the function that God has called them to do, one of the things they’re specifically called to do is to strengthen families and their knowledge of the word of God and application of it to life. But without the institutional church instructing people out of the word of God and encouraging people in that task, the task becomes far more difficult.

And so, I think we need to have a balance. And this will become clearer as we go through the outline this morning.

The text before us that we just read, Matthew 12:46–50, has implied in it some things that are quite important for us. The first point we want to talk about then is Jesus’s implicit support for the natural Adamic family in this text.

A little background for the remarks that we read from Matthew 12: the family coming to Jesus and wanting to talk to him. There is indication from the larger context of what we read that there was some concern on their part for him being out of control perhaps in his teaching. And so there is that implication to it. In Matthew 13:57, shortly following the text that we read this morning, Jesus says that a prophet is without honor in his hometown, and he said—we often forget this—in his own household.

Mark’s account of the passage that we just read, the parallel account of this in the book of Mark, the parallel passage of this account links his family’s reactions to his preaching with those of his friends earlier in the passage who thought him beside himself or out of control. And so in the parallel passage in Mark, we see that there are indeed indications that the natural family of Jesus here had some concerns for his ministry.

It’d be easy to read into this action then and for Jesus saying that these are my brothers and my sisters and my mother to read it as an absolute rejection of the natural family by our Lord. But this is a very narrow understanding of what he said and certainly cannot hold up in light of other scriptures. In reality, our Lord in this specific text by referring to the disciples that he spent his time with and cared for and was now ministering to, he referred to them by using family terms and by using those family terms in a positive sense, he implicitly affirmed the relationships within the natural family.

Do you see what I’m saying? If he wanted to denigrate the natural family, he wouldn’t have used those terms when he talked about the extended family in a favorable sense. And so, there’s an implicit action here on the part of Jesus to actually support the relationships within the extended family.

Now, this fits in well with the other things that he did explicitly. In Mark 10:19, he reminded the people that he was preaching to of the necessity of obeying the commandments. And he quoted specifically the fifth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” And so in your outlines, we also note under this point that Jesus affirms the natural family. He uses family terms in a positive sense. And he also restates the validity of the fifth commandment in Mark 10:19 and Luke 18:20. He restates the validity of the fifth commandment.

And that fifth commandment, as I’ve said in the outline here, has relevance to superiors and inferiors in general. In other words, what I’m saying when he restates the fifth commandment here in those two passages that we’ve referenced, the fifth commandment has far greater application than just one’s mother and father.

I wanted to kind of work this in somewhere in this talk on the family that the Westminster Confession of Faith in its exposition of the requirements of the fifth commandment in questions 123 through 133 talks about the fifth commandment in relationship to the duties of inferiors to superiors and superiors to inferiors. That’s what’s being talked about here. Functionally, we’re talking about now. And I would highly recommend to every family in the church to read those questions 123 through 133 in the Westminster Larger Catechism as a guide for you as you fulfill your responsibilities to either your wife or your husband and to your children. It’s a tremendous exposition of those scripturally verified, of course.

So the fifth commandment has a lot of implications in it.

But in any event, Jesus restates the fifth commandment in that sense, but he also restates the fifth commandment in Matthew 15:3 and 4 with specific reference to actual parents. Okay. In Matthew 15:3 and 4, he says, “He answered and said unto them, ‘Why do you also transgress the commandments of God by your traditions? For God commanded, saying, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and “He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.”‘”

In a specific context here, Jesus is talking about people dishonoring their actual parents. So he restates the fifth commandment, which has general application to superior-inferior relationships in the two passages, but in this passage, he specifically restates the fifth commandment in relationship to the duties to one’s natural parents in the natural Adamic family. And that’s very important to realize in this section.

Additionally, the actions of our Lord to make provision for his mother then widowed at the foot of the cross and while he was on the cross dying as documented in Holy Writ is a model picture of the elder son’s responsibility to his now—in Jesus’s case—to his widowed mother. And so he had respect for those relationships and acted in obedience to God’s word and in respecting the natural family as well. And he certainly supports that.

So the passage before us must not be seen as a total rejection of one’s natural family or of that concept.

Now there is continuity with the Old Testament as I pointed out, and Jesus quotes the fifth commandment. And this continuity with the Old Testament responsibilities one has toward one’s natural family is also reasserted in the epistles of the New Testament where the fifth commandment is again referenced, for instance in the book of Ephesians.

Now having said that, some commentators go the other way and say that actually the only thing that Jesus is pointing out in this text before us is that his relationship to his natural family is of a different nature than our own to our extended natural families. In other words, Jesus, you know, his relationship to natural family is different because he’s the Son of God. And certainly there that has to be entered into the discussion here. But to say that’s all that Jesus is trying to assert—his own unique distance from his natural family having no implication for us—is I think to destroy the meaning of the text from the other side. Either side does away with the natural tension that’s in this text.

The second point of the outline affirms this and we’ll go through several scriptures now to point out that Jesus makes explicit support for his extended faith family. Now as opposed to the Adamic family. That’s the second point of our outline.

I was going to mention, by the way, that when it’s really difficult to get here Sunday morning and you brought the kids and everything, and like last week, for instance, if some of you might have had a hard time getting your family here, then you come here and I get up and give you a sermon that’s an hour and 15 or an hour and 20 minutes long with—you know, I think I finally counted the points in last week’s sermon. I think I actually had 30 points to that sermon, and the 30th point had six sub-points to it. And I wanted to kind of apologize for that. It was a very difficult time compacting that information down.

Hopefully, we won’t get into that kind of length this morning. I’m sure we won’t. The outline flows right along. But again, this is all important as the context of why do we come here?

And that’s what we’ll be getting at as we go through these texts. It’s important to see in the passage we read from the book of Matthew, Jesus has explicit support for an extended faith family. He takes his hand—when he’s told that his mother and his brothers are outside looking for him, he sweeps the disciples who are there listening to him teach—and he says, “These are my mother. These are my brothers. This is my family.” He’s saying, “Who is my family? Those who obey.”

And so Jesus explicitly states your support for an extended faith family in contradistinction to the Adamic family.

Now in Luke 8, in the parallel account to this, the conditions for participation in that new family are spelled out in a little clearer sense than in the Matthew we just read. Verse 21 of Luke 8 says, “And he answered and said unto them, ‘My mother and my brethren are those which hear the word of God and do it.’” The Matthew 12 passage says, “Those who obey the word of God are my mother and my and my brother.” And Luke 8:21 says, “Those that hear the word of God and do it.”

So those are the requirements for entrance into the extended faith family of Jesus Christ. You see, it’s not enough just to hear the word. It’s not enough just to come here or to read your Bible, see what the word of God says and walk away in disobedience to it. The overall thrust of what we’ll be saying this morning is that Christ makes lordship claims upon us in relationship to all kinds of things in relationship to the family. And if we don’t obey it, then we’re not part of the extended family.

You’ve got to be part of the extended family to live eternally with Jesus. And so the conditions are not just hearing the word. Remember the wise man and the foolish man. The foolish man hears the word but he doesn’t do it. The wise man hears the word and obeys it. Orthodoxy—you have to believe the right things. You have to hear the word of God and believe it. Orthopraxy—we have to practice the right things. We’ve got to do the right things to be part of his extended household.

Now, there’s a larger context, I think, for this two-family structure we have in Matthew 12. The larger construct, the larger context for that truth is that there are two basic groups now in society. Luke 14 is a picture of this. If you’ll turn in your Bibles to Luke 14, let’s see. Let’s start at verse 16. Jesus says, “A certain man made a great supper and bade many and sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, ‘Come, for all things are now ready.’ And they all with one consent began to make excuse.”

“The first said unto him, ‘I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it. I pray thee, have me excused.’” Another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them. I pray thee have me excused.” Another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” So that servant came and showed his lord these things, that the master of his house, being angry, said to his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind.”

Then the servant said, “Lord, it is done as thou has commanded, and yet there is room.” And the Lord said unto the servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in that my house may be filled. For I say unto you that none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper.”

You see, that’s the larger context. Jesus came and preached lots of these sorts of parables to say that one thing he was obviously saying was that Israel, the Jews that he came to talk to and preach to—if they rejected him, he would call in the Gentiles. And that’s of course what happened. And he pictures that in this parable. But what he’s saying is that anybody who believes they have natural privileges as a result of their relationship to the master, being good friends, members of his extended house, whatever it is, does and think then that they cannot obey the master and still have grace with him and come back to a supper at some other time. Those people are cut off by the master.

You see the greater context for the shift from natural family to the renewed faith family is this idea that there are people that assert natural privilege and are cut off by Jesus as a result of it. And the Jewish nation was part of those people that thought they had natural privilege by virtue of their relationship to God through special relationship. The way that the original ones who were bidden did not come to the feast and he says, “I tell you those will not taste of the supper”—and of course the obvious context of this as well is the supper that we’ll celebrate downstairs, that’s the meal of meals that we have.

So the old natural privilege group lost out at the master’s feast and they’re replaced by a new group, a new household as it were for the master, a new family one could say. And so Israel—God’s old house in which he dwelt and the people that inhabited his house—is cut off as the gospel proceeds and the new house of Gentiles is brought in and developed.

Now this contrast between two groups—the natural and the ones who were called—and the rejection of the natural is pointed out in Deuteronomy 33:8 and 9. We look for Old Testament confirmation of this. We find it in Deuteronomy 33:8 and 9. Deuteronomy 33 records the blessings upon various tribes from Moses. And in verses 8 and 9 he’s talking about Levi.

We’ve looked at these passages before, but let’s look at them again. “And of Levi, he said, ‘Let thy Thummim and thy Urim be with thy holy one, whom thou did prove at Massah, and with whom thou did strive at the waters of Meribah, who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him.’ Neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children, for they have observed thy word and kept thy testament.”

And so in Deuteronomy 33, Levi is commended because he keeps God’s word and testament even to the point of not acknowledging his own children, his own father and his own mother. So Levi acknowledges—in the blessings given to Levi—acknowledges this transition from natural privilege to serving God and cutting off those who would claim natural privilege and not be also servants of God. And so we have Old Testament confirmation of this two-group idea that I think is the larger context to understand the idea of two families.

This also of course is reasserted in the epistles later in the New Testament. There are many references in the epistles to the household of faith, a term used in reference to families. For instance, Ephesians 2:19 says, “We’re no longer strangers, but fellow citizens of the saints and of God’s household”—God’s family. Hebrews 3:6 says that we are Christ’s house. We are Christ’s family if we hold fast the same condition, holding fast, being obedient to Christ laid down for his extended family rather in the portion from Matthew 12 we read originally.

1 Peter 2:5 says, “We are builded up into a spiritual house.” And the word there is household. Again, it’s the base word, the root word for the term family. 1 Peter 4:17, “Judgment begins with the household of God.” We quote that a lot, but we sometimes don’t think about the fact that Jesus is identifying the institutional church, the invisible church that is, which is institutionalized in various local settings, as households, as families, extended families.

And so, we have a covenant community, a Reformation Covenant Church, a covenant family. And so, this idea of the two groups and the tension between them is reiterated in the Old covenant and also in the epistles.

If the natural family, if the group that asserts natural privilege refuses to become part of the invited elect family, if the natural family refuses to become part of the faith family, then they’re left out in the cold. And that’s what Jesus was saying in Matthew 12. “My brothers and my sisters are those that hear the commandment, hear what I have to say and obey them. And if Mary won’t do that, then she’s no longer a member of that extended faith family.”

Now, she did and so she was. But the point is that’s the tension between them.

And so the third point we’re talking about then is not just the existence of Jesus’s explicit support of the extended faith family, but the third thing is that there is a tension between those two families—between the first Adamic family, the natural family, and the second extended faith family. And that is implied in the text before us.

You’ve got these people coming wanting Jesus’s attention, the natural Adamic family. You’ve got this faith family now and there’s a tension between them. They want the natural family wants Jesus to put off his teaching and go and talk to them. For whatever reason, we don’t know exactly. There’s some indication it was not a proper reason. And Jesus says instead, “No, I’m going to minister to these people. Either join this people or you’re not going to talk to me at this point in time.”

There’s a natural implied tension in the text before us.

This implied tension of the text before us in movement from the old Adamic family to identification with the new faith family by Jesus is brought made explicit in other gospel passages. We’ll now look at in Matthew 10:33–38 and in parallel passages as well. We see division in the old Adamic family as a direct result of Jesus’s ministry.

Matthew 10:33–38. Verse 33 asserts the priority of God over man. When it says, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my father which is in heaven.” Our obligations to our father supersede our obligations to men. And that’s rather obvious, isn’t it?

Goes on to read, however, that there is a larger extent to this prioritization of God over man than sometimes we think about. Verse 34, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Okay, so the priorities of God over man extends to conflicts that are then described by Jesus in terms of warfare.

Verse 35, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” Some very strong terminology here. And it’s even stronger when you realize that the term there for daughter-in-law is the term that’s often used for bride. And so it means a new bride, a new daughter-in-law. And right away there’s tension between her and her mother-in-law. Jesus said the division is very pronounced here.

And so the priority of God over man extends to the closest men that we have relationships with, which is our family, our natural Adamic family. Verse 36, “A man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” Okay? And then the statement is reiterated in stronger form when he sums up in verse 37, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Okay, that’s a summation and a strengthened form and points out what Jesus is talking about in this family—that there is division within the Adamic household based upon allegiance to Jesus and disobedience to Jesus.

The results of this teaching are found in verse 38 as the passage continues, and said, “And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.” And so the result of understanding this correctly and obeying it, which is necessary to be part of the faith family of Jesus Christ, implies tension within the natural Adamic family.

Tension that brings us into conflict described by Jesus as war sometimes with the natural family. And the result of all that is that this is a cross we must bear. If we’re going to follow Jesus, there is sacrifice involved—is what he’s saying here. Sacrifice.

And I think that as we’ve been trying to in this church, individually, and in families, and corporately, move into a fuller obedience of God in relationship to all things in the world that we put our hand to do, seeing them guided by Jesus’s word, many of us have seen this sort of tension. And so, we understand a little bit better why this happens. It’s good. It’s part of God’s plan. It’s part of what God has intended for us to test our commitment to him as we work through these tensions and the sacrifice that’s required in terms of putting God and his priorities over man.

He actually speaks about war against the Adamic family in Luke 14 starting at verse 25. Now Luke 14, these verses and we’re going to be looking at now for a couple of minutes follow that other thing we talked about in terms of the two groups where the master goes out and says that the invited, the natural people, natural friends won’t come, then let’s bring in all the people that I don’t know—that the idea of tension between two groups. Jesus then goes right into talking about Luke 14:25 where he says, “There went a great multitude with him and he turned and said unto them, ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, his own life also he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’”

“‘For which of you intending to build a tower siteth not down first and counteth the cost whether he hath sufficient to finish it?’”

Now I think that there’s two things going on here. One is that great multitudes are following him and he’s letting them know about the commitment that’s required in following him. He’s given them the cost of what’s going to happen here. And the cost cuts right down to the very heart of our other obligations and affections and obedience—which is the natural family.

And Jesus says in relationship to them, “You’ve got to love me. And if they would try to pull you away from me, you’ve got to hate them.” That’s the extent of the cost of following Jesus Christ. And if a man gets that down, there’s very little in life that’ll pull him away from obedience to Jesus Christ, apart, of course, from individual temptations that come along.

But this is a large temptation to man to not follow God and his teaching—the natural fallen family. There’s allegiances there that are deep and they’re going to put us into conflict with those if we follow Jesus. And Jesus is warning his disciples about that.

But the second part of this, though, is, as I said before, it’s a reiteration in terms of the natural family. Now, the point he was making about two groups, old and new.

Now, these statements about Jesus saying that a man must hate his father and his mother are like the divorce statements we read a couple of weeks ago without the exception clause—if you remember those, that anybody who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. You have to take it in the context of all of Jesus’s teaching. And Jesus, as we’ve said at the very first point we made, was that he is not getting rid of the natural family altogether. He’s showing a contrast here. If the natural family wants you to would have you disobey a command of Christ, you must not obey them. And he says if you do obey them, and if your life is characterized by obedience to your natural father as opposed to your new heavenly father and to your natural brother as opposed to your new brother who we’re now called brethren with Jesus Christ, then you’re no disciple of Jesus Christ.

These words have implications for us. They call us to a further degree of obedience and they warn us that obedience is going to cost us dearly at times in terms of relationship—severed relationships with our natural family. In conflicting loyalties, one must treat his parents as though enemies if they become enemies to God and trying to pull us off to follow him, or not follow him rather.

And I think that if you see this context what he’s talking about here is idolatry. To put anything above our relationship to God and above our obedience and reverence that we owe God is to create another God. It’s idolatry. To put natural family allegiances above our allegiance to God and his kingdom is idolatry. And idolatry is a serious sin in God’s sight and is the root of all other sins. And that’s I think why he uses this strong term referring to hate.

Now it’s interesting that he says both parents and he also talks about children. Okay, he has to hate his father and his mother, his wife and children. Now our relationship to our father and mother is characterized by at least a couple of things I can think of. One is obedience to them. The scriptures tell us to obey them. And secondly, we’re to reverence our parents.

And I think what Jesus is saying is that if our obedience to God is greater than and stronger than our obedience to our parents, we’ve moved into idolatry. If our reverence for God the Father isn’t greater and stronger than our reverence and honor that we give to our parents, we’ve moved into idolatry. The parental relationship is to mirror that to us and image it to us, but it must be subordinated to God.

Now, our relationship to our children isn’t one of obedience and reverence. Our relationship to our children is one of self-sacrifice and one of compassionate love for them—emotional attachment as well. Of course, the wife as well are mentioned as well. And I think what Jesus is saying is that if we sacrifice more for our children than we do for the sake of him and his specific commands that he gives us, we’ve moved into idolatry. If we have more emotional attachment and more compassion and more concern for our children than we do for the things of Christ and his kingdom, we’ve moved into idolatry.

Christ and his kingdom come first. We’re reconciled to God the Father that he might reconcile those relationships—but not isolate them under our reconciled relationship to God the Father. There’s no reconciliation of those relationships apart from our reconciliation to God the Father through Jesus Christ.

Now again, there’s Old Testament continuity. What we’re saying here—the idea that there’s not just two families, but now there’s tension and warfare between the two families—when remember that the context is for Deuteronomy 33:8–9, we said that Levi was commended because he regarded not his natural family when it came to obedience to God. And if you’ll turn to Exodus 32, we’ll find out the specific occurrence in which that was proved.

Exodus 32:25–29. Now, it’s probably a good thing to keep in mind here. We’ve talked about before that Levi was one of two tribes that was originally cursed by God because Levi led an attack against Shechem and his father and the men of the city when Shechem wanted to marry Dinah and had raped her. Levi with another tribe enticed the men to circumcise themselves falsely telling them they could join the tribe of Israel or the nation of Israel and then they killed all those guys. And we’ve read before about how God then looked very unfavorably at that and cursed them. And if you look at the genealogies for instance of Levi as they come out of Egypt, they’re a reduced tribe in terms of numbers.

And I think that’s part of the curse of God upon this terrible hotheaded action in using deceit to slay these men when these men thought they were being ushered into the household of faith. But Levi now becomes resurrected. He turns that old sinful tendency and he uses it for God.

Now in Exodus 32:25–29, and here’s what we read. Moses now comes down from the mountain from meeting with God and Aaron and the men have created a golden calf and are now moved back into idolatry while Moses’ absence.

Verse 25. “When Moses saw that the people were naked, for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, ‘Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come to me.’ Where can front of the earth.”

This is a situation where people are engaged in gross sin. All of them. And Moses said, “Who’s on the Lord’s side? Come here.” And who responds? All the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. They’re going to redeem themselves here. They’re going to show their repentance from their old evil actions and using their talents and gifts now for God. And Moses said unto them, “Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout this camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion and every man his neighbor”—or another word for that is kinfolk—”there and the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses and there fell of the people that day about 3,000 men. For Moses had said, ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the Lord, even every man upon his son and upon his brother that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day.’”

This is the specific reason that we’re told in Deuteronomy 33 that Levi is exalted by God. And this is very clear to me. This is the reason why Levi was chosen as the tribe to specially represent God to the people because they distanced themselves from the rest of the idolatrous tribes here and move forward into obedience to God, to the very point of shedding the blood of their own families who are trying to pull them off into idolatry in obedience to those commands from Deuteronomy we read before.

You see, so we have Old Testament verification. And this is what Jesus is talking about when he says he came to bring not peace but a sword. When the fallen Adamic family seeks to pull us off in a radical, self-conscious effort away from God, we must separate ourselves from those actions of our family. We must not obey the family to the point of disobeying God. There’s tension. There’s warfare. The Old Testament tells us that and Jesus reiterates it as well.

Now, in the context of all of that, there’s blessing from God as well. The fallen family losses that we incur mean new family gains. From Mark 10:28–31. And Jesus tells them in response to Peter who said, “We’ve given up lands, households, families for you.” Jesus said, “Nobody’s given up any of these things.”

Verse 30, “But he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time—now in this time.” And that doesn’t just mean in this age, in this age before the consummation of all things. The term there “in this time” is a very specific, immediate term. Jesus is saying right now, Peter, you’re going to get—for whatever you’ve given up for me—you’re going to receive a hundredfold recompense in terms of new brothers, sisters, mothers, children, lands, with persecutions.

Now, I just want to point out there when he says “with persecutions,” Peter had said we’ve gone through all these persecutions of giving up family and households and things for you. And Jesus says with those persecutions, you’re going to get a hundredfold recompense from your heavenly father. Okay? So, there’s blessing in this time immediately.

We have New Testament confirmation of this blessing in Romans 16:13. Paul says—talks about Rufus, he talks about Rufus’s mother and his mother. Paul identifies Rufus’s mother as his own mother. You see, and so Paul, who had undoubtedly given up natural family relationships by breaking with fallen Israel, now has been given a new mother in Rufus’s mother. And I’m sure that was multiplied probably easily a hundredfold for Paul in the journeys he went on. He had those sorts of strong extended faith family ties now through the church.

Now we do have a marked emphasis in the New Testament text in referring to members of the household of faith as brothers and in referring to the institutional church as the house of God and as the household of God. In the New covenant we have elders now, which is a familial term but used no longer in relationship to family members. 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 talks about the qualifications for eldership, but they’re now institutional offices of the church. Family terms now applied to the institutional church.

There is progression here. And I think that if we start to put all this together, here’s what it comes out to. The scriptures tell us in 2 Corinthians 5:1 that we move from glory to glory. History is not static. History is a continual movement of God’s providence from glory to glory.

Now, one way we can think about that is if we think about God’s special dwelling place among the people. Remember, God comes down on the mountain when they’re pulled out of Egypt and the nation is constituted and he tells Moses how to build a tabernacle. He then creates a tabernacle. Moses builds this tabernacle for God and God tabernacles amongst his people in the wilderness. But when they get into the promised land, the kingdom becomes more established. Now, a temple is constructed. And the temple is double the dimensions of the tabernacle. It’s bigger. It is more glorious. Things that were silver and brass in the tabernacle now become gold in the temple and there’s a movement from glory of the tabernacle and God’s special presence and dwelling with the people to now the temple as being his dwelling place and it’s a more glorious thing.

Now in the time of Solomon we see this temple constituted and then we see a destruction of the temple with the falling away, a partial restoration pointing forward—the book of Daniel tells us—to the restoration to come when the seed of David will sit on the throne and that’s Jesus Christ. When we read in the scriptures that we’re now the temple of God, we should think of that in reference to this progression from glory to glory—mountaintop to tabernacle to temple to now the church, the new temple, the more glorious temple, the temple that has dimensions that couldn’t even be built according to the book of Ezekiel. It’s too big. You couldn’t have built a temple like that. You see what I’m saying? There’s a progression of glory to glory.

And the church now has constituted the new temple.

How does that relate to what we’re saying in terms of the family? It relates because the fallen Adamic family was related originally to Adam, the original household, and Jesus comes to constitute a new household. And so there’s a progression from glory to glory of the family. The fallen Adamic family is being replaced and will finally in the consummation be totally done away with. Jesus tells us clearly that in marriage there is neither marriage—in heaven rather—there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. In heaven there are no families in that sense. What we have in heaven is the holy congregation which is now typified in the church on earth.

So there’s a progression here and the old Adamic family will eventually be totally replaced with the new family, God’s household in the dwelling place that will finally find consummation when Jesus returns the second time. You see, there’s this movement in history.

Now, where we’re at today is we have a foot in both ages, as it were. We have been ushered into now the kingdom, and we have been ushered into the church, which is now the temple. We don’t have Solomon’s temple anymore. We’ve got something even more glorious today in the temple of the church. But that New Testament church is clearly still in the epistles administered according to family groups. You still have commandments relative to the natural family. Households are still baptized. They’re brought in as households. And that’s the normative pattern still.

There’s continuity with the Old Testament administration of families. But there’s discontinuity as well as we move from elders of families to elders of churches. There’s tension. And any attempt to get rid of that tension—and that’s what we’re kind of pointing to this morning—any attempt to get rid of that inbuilt tension, the “yet and not yet” aspect of what we have in terms of this glorifying from glory to glory of the family to the new family of Jesus Christ perverts the gospel.

To say that there is no new family, to say to hold on to the Adamic family as the basic institution that will forever permeate society and will forever, in the consummation of all things, be the way that the world is organized, is wrong. To say that the church now, since it’s the new family, means that we should leave natural families is heresy on the other side of the fence.

And I guess what I’m saying this morning is that we as a church have stressed the natural Adamic family. That is good and proper because the scriptures stress it and they say that it is the building block of society today. But we must not, when we do that, fall into the error of somehow seeing the church as optional.

We come together once a week here in a convocation, Sunday, the Lord’s day, the Sabbath is to be the paradigm for the rest of our lives. Okay? We come for a special meal today that’s different than all other meals throughout the week at communion. Why does God do it that way? He does it that way to remind us of the eternal realities of the church. That when we come together, we have our most special meal of the week. We have it in the context of the new household of Jesus Christ. Not that anything wrong going home and eating your own household. That’s a good thing. There’s this tension involved though. And what I’m saying is that allegiances to the old Adamic family to pull back to that and not to move into a relationship with the local institutional church is wrong.

It’s a denial of this progression that has happened with the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of his plan for man. Now, the fourth point I’ll just make real quickly is that in 1 John 4:20, the fourth major point of our outline is love for Christ means love for his family, the church.

1 John 4:20 asserts that we cannot say we love God if we hate our brother. Okay, we’ve been ushered into the household of God. And 1 John 5:1 says that whoever loves God loves the children born of him. If we see that Jesus Christ demands obedience and that the natural family must be subjugated to his obedience—obedience to him and to the Father. And if we see that Christ equates love for God with love for the children who are born of him in 1 John 5:1, and Jesus said in the Gospels, he says that “if you do it to the least of these,” his extended faith family, “you’ve done it to him,” he identifies himself with that extended faith family.

Then the implications are that we must not pull back from the institutional family that is Christ’s body today. Okay? He equates himself with his new family, the extended faith family of the church. Our loyalties to our family, our natural families then, our Adamic families, must be tempered by our new allegiance to the family of faith.

What does all this mean to us realistically? Well, it shows a little different perspective on things. We’ve talked in this church for four or five years about how there was an article I read several years ago called “The Quiet Passing of Natural Community.” And the idea was that with a movement from an agrarian to an industrial society, there is now the breakdown of natural extended community.

On farms, you’d have your aunt, the uncle right down the road a piece there, and you’re probably living with your grandparents and maybe even the great-grandparents there. You had a natural extended family where you could have big families and it was no problem. Well, “no problem” is probably a little too strong, but the point is you had extended family to help care for them. We don’t have that anymore.

Does that mean that we should tear down the industrialized society and go back to agricultural society? No. That would be moving back toward relying upon the Adamic family for that extended family. What we should do instead is see that God and his progress in history has given us a new extended family to pick up some of that thing that has happened because of the passing of the agricultural community. What I’m saying is that if we have big families today and we have problems administering those big families and if we’re in the context of an institutional church that sees itself as a covenant community, we had better be able to go to that covenant community and look for the support that old extended family of the agricultural society gave to us.

You see, that’s one aspect. That’s just one example of showing you how to apply some of this to a current situation. We should see the industrialization, the progress in terms of society and culture as a good thing. And it is good. And it also teaches us that we have an extended family in the church.