Before God created the church or government, He created the family. The family is designed by Him to be the basic building block of human society. To understand the mission and purpose of the family we must go to the beginning and consider our Lord’s original design.
Well, my assignment tonight is to consider with you the first family, that is the family that God created in the Garden of Eden, the family that began with Adam and Eve. This is the place where God began to unfold his everlasting purpose for the world. In the first two chapters of Genesis, we have the record of the origin of the family. We learn from that place what marriage is. We learn what God's design for marriage is.
We learn that marriage and family are part of God's creation. He created the family in order to fulfill his ultimate purpose for his world. So with that, let me invite you to open your Bibles to Genesis chapters 1 and 2. 1 and 2. We'll not read all of these chapters but I want to read selections from both of them to get the framework in front of us tonight for thinking about God's creation of the family.
In Genesis chapter 1, the book of the Bible begins with these words. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And then let your eyes drop down to verse 26 then God said Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image.
In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them. And God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And having created man and woman as the capstone of all creation, on the sixth day we then have beginning in chapter 2, a retelling of his establishment of his good purposes in creating man and woman. Let's look at verse 15, start there in chapter 2.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. And the Lord God said, it's not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.
And whatever the man called every living creature that was his name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh, and the rib that the Lord had taken from the man he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man.
And the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." God created the family for his own glory. That's the point that I want to set before us tonight from these two chapters. The family is God's creation.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Over the last four or five years, I've been calling Genesis 1-1 the most important verse in the Bible. It is the verse that frames all of reality for us. If you don't start with Genesis 1-1 and you don't have an intentional awareness in your thinking about the truth of Genesis 1-1, it doesn't matter what you might study in the world, you're not going to ever get it completely right. Genesis 1, 1 is the announcement of all that we know that is real.
There are three parts to reality that we can see in this verse. First, there is a God, the true God, the God who is before creation. He is the subject of this sentence. And He is the dominant actor throughout the whole creation story. God, the word God appears 32 times in this first chapter alone.
He is before creation, we read, in the beginning, God. There was nothing before God because God created the beginning and everything that came from it. 1 Timothy 1 17 the Apostle Paul expresses it by calling him the King eternal and the psalmist repeatedly tried to express the eternality of God like in Psalm 90 verse 2 where we read, he is from everlasting to everlasting. So one part of reality, the world that is, is God. He is before everything.
The second part of reality is that there is everything else that is not God. And here in verse 1 it says the heavens and the earth. It's all-encompassing of everything outside of God. The third part of reality is that everything that is not God is created by God. So Genesis 1, 1 is the foundation of all our understanding about anything that there is to understand.
Hebrews 11 verse 3 acknowledges this as the writer says, by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made of things that are visible. We take Genesis 1, 1 as the starting part, point for all of our understanding. The truth that God created everything that exists that is outside of God underscores, undergirds all true knowledge. This truth is the starting point about any right understanding of anything in reality. Everything we know, we know in the world that God created.
And though we may know many things apart from a conscious awareness of the God who's created everything, we can't know anything as it ought to be known rightly apart from knowing it in relationship to God. So an artist can look at a sunset and be amazed by a sunset and can convey to us many true things about the sunset because of her understanding of colors and hues and light and shadows and can teach us things about that sunset. But she does not know that sunset properly unless and until she is led to worship the creative God who brought the sunset into existence. A scientist might be able to describe in detail the meteorological distinctives of sunsets and how the wavelengths of various colors interact with the scattered molecules of air when the Sun is high in the sky compared to when the Sun is low on the horizon But that scientist does not know sunsets properly until he recognizes them as the products of the one true creative God. Now I am fully convinced it is impossible to overemphasize this point in our modern context.
This is God's world. Everything in the world comes from God, belongs to God. He made it. He owns it. He is the author.
He is the possessor. All creation is his handiwork, which means that everything that exists outside of God exists because of God. And that includes people and that includes families. Therefore the very first two questions of the children's catechism that we teach our children and our grandchildren is of great importance. Who made you?
God made me. What else did God make? God made all things. That is fundamental understanding for being able to live well, to think rightly in the world that we have because it's God's world. John Calvin acknowledges the profundity of knowing God when he begins his magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, with this memorable line, Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, all true and sound wisdom consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.
And we cannot know either God or ourselves rightly without acknowledging as a matter of first importance that the God who is to be known is the Creator of all things. Everything that is not God has been created by God and for God. Well that leads us then to consider the importance of verses 26 through 28 of Genesis 1, because this is the capstone of everything that is not God, that God has created. God said in verse 26, let us make man in our image after our likeness. The most significant part of these three verses is verse 27, so God created man in His own image, in the image of God, He created him male and female, He created them.
Humanity, the human race, is God's idea. Human beings are God's creatures. Three times in verse 27 he says that he created them. Now man shares many commonalities with other creatures. Like other creatures, the man was created on the sixth day and formed out of the dust.
Like other creatures, the man was created with a dependence upon sustenance. He has to eat to stay alive. Like other creatures, man is commissioned to reproduce. When you look at verses 22 and 24 of chapter 1 and compare it to verse 28, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But there are some fundamental distinctions between man and other creatures.
Seven times in Genesis 1 as God creates we read, And God said, He spoke the sun, the moon, the stars, the heavens, the earth into existence. But when it comes to creating man, it's as if God slows down and he takes counsel within himself, as verse 26 says, and God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. God created man in his own image. And whatever else might be included in that designation, it certainly means that people have dignity and worth because of our creaturely relationship to our Creator. We're not like everything else in creation in that we alone have been made His image bearers.
As His image bearers, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to represent Him in His world. More specifically, God commissions His image bearers to exercise dominion over His created world as we read in 28 through 30. The key point is to recognize that God created people to represent Him by bearing His image in His world. And just as God created the heavens and the earth, clouds and oceans, stars and black holes, minnows and sharks, chipmunks and grizzlies, white-tailed deer and armadillos, so also God created people. He created them in his own image, male and female.
He created them. He created the human race to have two and only two sexes. Or I hate to use the word but it's just so common now, genders. Genders, I mean that's a literary word but nevertheless male and female. Commonalities exist between men and women.
They're both made in God's image. They're both responsible to represent Him in His world. We read that about both of them in verse 27. They're both called to be stewards and caretakers of creation. Verse 28 God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, have, subdue it, have dominion.
Both are called to enter into a one flesh relationship in marriage as verse 23 of chapter 2 says. Adam says this is at last bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh and she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And both together, united in marriage, are the fundamental building blocks of the family. But there are also clear distinctions, God-designed distinctions between the male and the female. And these differences are both intentional and notable.
The man was created first, then the woman. This is the point that the Apostle Paul makes much of both in his letter to the Ephesians in sending it to Timothy or in 1 Timothy who was at Ephesus as well as to the church at Corinth. Before God created the woman, he created the man verse 7 chapter 2 says and breathed life into him. Before God created the woman, God put the man Adam in the garden and commissioned him to work and keep it without Eve yet being there in verse 15 of chapter 2. Before Eve was created, God commanded Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Verse 17 of chapter 2. Before Eve was created, Adam was beginning to exercise dominion over the earth by naming the animals in verses 19 and 20 of chapter 2. Adam was given authority in the relationship with the woman. The woman was presented to him by God. He was not presented to the woman.
Chapter 2, verse 22. And then in verse 23 of chapter 2, Adam named the woman after himself. Woman. Because she was taken out of man. Even after the fall in chapter 3 verse 20 you see that He again gives Eve her name.
The woman we read was created to supply Adam's need for companionship. In verse 18 of chapter 2 she's described as a helper fit for him. The same language in verse 20. An assistant that corresponds to him, that compliments him, a helper that is suitable to the man. Now All of this indicates that God designed the man to occupy the place of headship and authority in the marriage relationship.
Something that Paul affirms in Ephesians chapter 5 as well as 1 Corinthians 11 in the New Testament. What God did in creating Adam and Eve provides a template for marriage and family life in God's world. And it's worth noting that it was God himself who said that it wasn't good for Adam to be alone. There's nothing in the text that hints at a sense that Adam had an awareness that it wasn't good for him to be alone. We don't have any sense that he felt like he was lacking anything or that he was discontented.
Providing Adam a wife was God's idea, which means that marriage is God's idea. He thought it. He created it. He designed it to be just the way that we read about in Genesis 1 and 2. Therefore, marriage is not a social construct.
It is not some kind of evolutionary development that occurred in order to continue on the species of man. Furthermore, both Jesus and Paul refer to this account of the original marriage in Genesis chapter 2 when teaching on marriage and husband-wife relationships. And by virtue of that fact that they both refer to this, we are taught that what God designed marriage to be is trans-cultural. It's not a construct of Western civilization. God's design for marriage has always been and always will be one man, one woman in a one flesh, heterosexual, monogamous relationship for all of life.
Out of this relationship under His blessing is to come children who will similarly grow into men and women who will again, under the blessing of God, themselves become husbands and wives in fruitful one-flesh relationships. So brothers and sisters, we must see this and embrace this vision of marriage. Husbands, God created you to be the head of your wife, to lead your family in fulfilling his commission to represent him in the world and to exercise dominion over it. You are to lead out and acting as his steward and wives. God has created you to be the corresponding helper to your husband, working with him to fulfill the Lord's Commission to represent him in his world in being good stewards of it.
So the family is God's idea. He created it. That's my first point. The second grows out of that first point and it answers the question, well, Why did God create Adam and Eve and establish them in marriage, a marriage that would be the foundation of the first family and of all families? But behind that question of why God created Adam and Eve and did it this way is an earlier question.
Really we could say many prior questions. Why did God create it all? Why did God create the heavens and the earth? Why did God create sharks and minnows and grizzlies and armadillos and mountains and valleys? And how do all these things that He created outside of Himself fulfill His purposes?
And what we find throughout the Scripture is that God created all of these things for His own glory. Which means then specifically that God created the family as He did to manifest His glory in His world. All creation exists by God for the glory of God. This is a vitally important truth that we see repeated throughout Old and New Testament. For example, Isaiah chapter 43, God declares through the prophet there in verses 6 and 7, Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my own glory.
Or in Revelation chapter 4, as the 24 elders around the throne cast down their crowns. In verse 11 they are saying, Worthy are you our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and by your will they existed and were created. As Paul wraps up the intense doctrinal section of the letter to the church at Rome in Romans chapter 11 verse 36 he says, for of him and through him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Everything that exists, exists from God, belongs to God, and is for the glory of God.
When Paul begins to build his case about the universality of sin in the letter of Romans in chapter 1 verse 18, he talks about the wrath of God being revealed against all unrighteousness, against those who suppress the truth of God. In verse 19 of that chapter he says, for what can be known about God is plain to them. Why? Because God has shown it to them. And how has God made it plain to them and shown it to them?
He goes on in verse 20 and explains, for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. I mean this is mind boggling. This means everything we see, everything we hear, everything we touch, everything we taste, everything we experience has been designed by God to show us His glory. John Calvin recognized this. It led him to describe creation as the theater of God's glory.
In book one of his Institutes, he describes creation as that glorious theater or the stage on which God displays his glory. He says this, Ever since the creation of the universe, God brought forth those insignia whereby He shows His glory to us whenever and wherever we cast our gaze. Wherever you cast your eyes, there's no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. This is what Jonathan Edwards communicates in his book, The End for Which God Created the World. And after going through argument after argument, He comes to the end of that book and toward the end he writes this, From these things, the various arguments that he has just piled up, it follows that the glory of God is the last end of the creation of the world.
God's glory is the ultimate purpose that everything outside of God exists. Brothers and sisters, we must never forget this. We need to meditate on this more than we do. Soli Deo gloria is far more than a nice little Latin phrase that looks good on a t-shirt. This is a cry from a heart that recognizes that it has been created by the true living God, the Creator.
And that God is worthy of glory, that God is glorious and that God as He reveals Himself to us shows us His glory. We belong to God for God. So we must keep learning this lesson. We must keep relearning it. We must teach it to our children and our children's children.
Who made you? God made me. What else did God make? God made all things. Why did God make you in all things?
For His own glory. Every song of a bird, every web of a spider, every bite of ice cream, every drink of water exists to show us God's glory. That includes marriage. It includes the family. You cannot rightly think about the family.
You cannot rightly enter into or live in marriage. You cannot rightly appreciate any of the instructions that God gives to you about family life without understanding this fundamental truth. Because family is a creation of God that's designed to manifest his glory. Now this means that though the family is obviously important, it's not ultimate. God's glory is ultimate.
Family exists for God. And God created the family to be part of the theater on which He displays His glory in the world. Well then how does this work? How does the family as created and designed by God manifest His glory? Well, there are a number of ways that should at least be acknowledged that when families live in accordance with God's revealed will, when they function the way that God instructs them to function in His Word.
They show His glory. And we can unpack that in any number of texts throughout both Old and New Testament. But I want to set before us tonight three specific practical ways that God has ordained for the family to function in platforming His glory throughout history. The first is the family is the fundamental institution for human society in God's world. God has created three primary institutions in which he has vested his authority in his world for the purpose of carrying out his agenda on earth.
The family, the church, and the state. And he created the family before he created the other two. God designed the family so that image bearers might learn to represent God in his world in families before they do so in any other spheres. Every child, every spouse, every parent, every sibling is obligated to live before God in obedience by virtue of the fact that they are creatures made in His image. Because God designed us to come into the world in families we are forced to face up to those obligations and because of sin to our great failures in meeting those obligations with the people that he chose for us to live with.
G.K. Chesterton makes this point when he says, we make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor. He goes on to say, the supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out at us like brigands from a bush.
When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. Brothers and sisters, God put you in the very family that He ordained for you. Many of us came up in what today would be called dysfunctional families. But God who created us, who owns us, ordained that it should be so for His glory. As we get our minds around this, then we don't cover up or whitewash the...
The wickedness or the sin that does exist in families. But we don't have to let that define us. And we don't have to let that hold us back or keep us from pursuing the glory of God who created us. Well the family was created to be the fundamental institution in God's world. Secondly the family was created to be a discipling institution.
Children come into the world completely dependent upon their parents. Parents have been designed by God to teach children what it means to be a creature made in His image, living in His world. Parents are designed by God to teach children to obey God's commandments and to believe God's Gospel. We just heard from Deuteronomy and reference to Deuteronomy 6 and there will be references to Ephesians chapter 6 verse 4 later where we have very encapsulated instructions about that for parents. Marriage was created to put the Gospel on display as Paul makes very clear in Ephesians chapter 5 verses 22 through 33.
Husbands in this relationship of marriage that God thought up, that God created are to represent Christ and how they love their wives. Wives are to represent the church of Jesus Christ and how they submit to and respect their husbands. So that in marriage God has ordained that we might give to the watching world a living parable of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's why God created marriage, Paul says in Ephesians 5. Thirdly, The family was created to be the primary vehicle for God's redemptive work in His world.
When God sent His only begotten Son into the world to redeem the world, He placed Him in the world as a helpless baby in a family. God in flesh grew up in a home, in a family with earthly parents, with earthly siblings. As a child Jesus learned his first lessons about God and God's world from Mary and Joseph. It was from a family that the Savior of the world emerged to accomplish salvation by His righteous life and His sacrificial death on the cross. So the institution of the family is vitally important.
It is not preeminent because God alone is preeminent, but it does have a place in God's creation of instrumental importance, importance for bringing Him glory in the world. This is why we should fight so strongly against the attacks that are being waged against the family in our day. It is why Christian parents must be hyper vigilant to recognize our enemies attack and their tactics to destroy the family. Tactics that are both subtle like making too little or too much of families, and then tactics that are overt, like legalized abortion or bogus, reality-denying, blasphemous decisions by the United States Supreme Court. And in that I'm primarily thinking about the 2015 Supreme Court's redefinition of legal marriage in the Obergefell versus Hodges case, in which they rule that marriage is not limited to the design of the God who created marriage.
One man, one woman in a covenant relationship, one flesh, heterosexual, monogamous for all of life. But those robed authorities, defying the God who put them on the court, said, marriage can also be between two homosexual men or two homosexual women. One of the most recent and violent attacks on the family as God created and designed it has come from the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. Though they took down this statement I'm about to read to you from their website once it began to get attention and they began to lose money and support. You can still find it as you go through the wayback machine on the internet.
This is what they said, this is our purpose. We disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement of supporting each other as extended families and villages that collectively care for one another, especially our children to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comforted. What they target as socially constructed Western nuclear family is nothing less than, other than the family as God designed it and created it to be in Genesis 1 and 2. I wish that the most malicious attacks on the family were all coming from outside the church. But that's not true.
Even those who call themselves Christian have oftentimes jumped onto the bandwagon of efforts in our culture to undermine the family. And I'm not just talking about the liberal, Bible-denying type of Christianity. We've witnessed over the last 10 years even conservative evangelical and yes, even reformed sectors of evangelicalism leveling attacks on the family as God created it. I'm only going to mention one of them but we could spend time talking about others. This is perhaps the most egregious of them because it seems to be the most effective at swaying God's people to loosen our commitment on God's design for the family.
I'm talking about the gay Christianity movement. And specifically the movement as it has been promoted by organizations like Living Out and Revoice. Revoice was a conference that was launched in 2018 led by its founder, Nate Collins, a former teacher at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It has been endorsed by Karen Swallow Prior, who is a current professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The conference's stated purpose in its own words is this, supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, and same-sex attracted and other gender and sexual minority Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.
In his talk in 2018, Nate Collins called the work of Revoice and the promotion of gay Christianity prophetic. Listen to his words. Not just the false teaching of the progressive sexual ethic, but other more subtle forms of false teaching. Is it possible that gender and sexual minorities who have lived lives of costly obedience are themselves a prophetic call to the Church to abandon idolatrous attitudes toward the nuclear family, toward sexual pleasure? If so, then we are prophets.
Now our hearts ought to break for those who suffer gender dysphoria, those who experience genuine sexual confusion, and those who are overtaken by sexual sin. But we do them no favors by trying to convince them that they can be faithful Christians while denying the very God who created them and designed them to be male and female. While Calvin has rightly noted that the human heart is a perpetual idol factory and we're very creative at turning anything, good things even into idols. To suggest that the church today has a problem of idolizing the nuclear family demonstrates just how far Nate Collins' thinking is from Genesis 1 and 2. Brothers and sisters, we must own up to a sad fact.
That the world has done a far better job discipling many of the people within our churches than we have. And we must get clear on what the Bible teaches about the family. And we must hold to that without flinching according to the pattern that God has described doing so by His grace, knowing that this is not only right, this is good. This is good for people to understand how God has created them to live in his world. Let's not be embarrassed by God's design for the family.
Rather, let's celebrate it. Let's pray for grace to make our homes beacons of light and pointing to the Savior and to live with full confidence in the one who has created us to be part of a family. And though families are always comprised of sinners, and many families experience radical, radical failures and brokenness, We can, by the grace of Jesus Christ, live in our families in genuine repentance and faith and therefore in joy. And we can declare that the family is God's idea. He created it.
And while families are not ultimate, they are important. He created families to manifest his glory in his world. So let's embrace our calling and seek by his grace and strength to fulfill our responsibility to see the families in which God in His sovereignty has placed us today to pursue our calling and fulfill the manifestation of His glory on earth. Let's pray together. Our Father, we acknowledge that we are dependent upon you for grace and we look at what you have done in creating families and we see what our own families are like and even in our best efforts, in our best days, we fall so far short and we need your grace and I pray that you would give us a renewed vision of our role in families, in your creation and that we would acknowledge that we exist for you.
And that you have good purposes for us as we turn from sin and look to your provision of salvation in Jesus Christ. So please bless and seal to our hearts this truth from Genesis 1 and 2 that we might recognize that we in all things, including our families, exist for the manifestation of your glory. For Christ's sake, amen.