The Family Defined

The cartoon in the New Yorker magazine—Bulletin! Bulletin! I interrupt this column to remind you of a very important fact: The family is not God. The family can become an idol. We are to focus (sorry, Dr. Dobson; Jim, I love you, brother) on the Godhead and on God's Word, not on the family. Thank you. I now return you to my regularly scheduled column:

The cartoon in the New Yorker magazine in early 1993 is most relevant to this issue of our Report, but the humor is dark indeed. It shows an aquarium full of fish. One is saying to another: “I guess we'd be considered a family. We're living together, we love each other, and we haven't eaten the children yet.”

Well, why not? I mean, if God's Word is not true, and if a family is not defined, immutably, by God, as one man, one woman, and their children, living together, and, by extension, other blood-related persons, then why can't a bunch of fish who don't eat their offspring be a “family”?

No God, no rules, right? Right.

And make no mistake about it, friends: No institution is under more vicious attack today than the God-ordained, Biblically-defined family. And the way this attack usually occurs is by arguing that there really is no such thing as “the family.” God says there is. But, as usual, the voice of the serpent asks, implicitly: “Yea, hath God said”? (Gen. 3:1). Examples:

—Late last year, the United Nations held a New World Order, U.S. taxpayer-supported conference on women, in Communist China. The Director of the American delegation to this meeting was former U.S. Representative Marjorie Mezvinsky. In an interview on Pat Robertson's “700 Club” (8/ 3/96), when asked why the draft document governing this conference left out the words “wife, husband, father,” Mezvinsky said: “I don't know If it's fair to say there is a traditional family. What is a traditional family?” When, thank God, she was pressed by the reporter to define the U.S. position on parental rights, Mezvinsky snapped, angrily, hugging her eyes: “I 'm not going to give it to you. It's just total, abject nonsense. It's, it's, it's, it's nonsense.”

In this same report, from this meeting in Beijing, we see the burned-out, ultra-Leftist, extreme feminist “leader,” former Congress-thing Bella Abzug, trashing fathers everywhere, yelling to one assembled mob: “We will not allow the continued domination of a male power structure which deprives people of their livelihood, their hopes and their dreams!” But, how stupid can you get? Without fathers, Christian fathers, heading their families, a family is in real trouble.

So, what is this all about? Well, Abzug, explicitly, lets the cat out of the bag. In another clip, we see her, again screaming, to another group of applauding fellow-radicals: “It's hard to overturn every part of history. It's not that easy.”

Indeed. On this score, unwittingly to be sure, Bellowing Bella is right. She rings the hell and gets the cigar—which I 'm sure she'd look right at home smoking.

Paraphrasing Psalm One, “B. B.” is correct. It is hard, as she and her ilk are, to be raging heathens imagining such vain things as their being able to overturn the God-created order of things. It is hard to take counsel against the Lord, and His anointed, saying, in effect, forget God!, we're going to do things our way!

Yes, the God-hating way is hard. In fact, it is impossible—though amusing to God. Indeed, we are told that God sits in the heavens and laughs at such nonsense. But, He is not merely amused. God also holds such idiots in “derision,” which means He mocks and ridicules them. “And He shall speak to them in His wrath, and vex them in His sore displeasure.” He speaks of His Son breaking these God-haters with a rod of iron, dashing them in pieces like a potter's vessel—giving new meaning to the words “cracked pots,” which is what all such God-haters are. “Serve the Lord with fear,” God says, “and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son.” Why? Because if this is not done, He will “be angry,” and you will “perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.”

—In June of last year, U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich addressed the National Baptist Convention on “Family Values.” But, in his six-page, single-spaced talk, Reich says everything about families except what, exactly, is a family?! He ridicules the notion that there is such a thing as a “saintly” or “sinful” family. He says almost all “families” work. He says these “unspoken heroes of American life” don't want their kids to get sick. He says they go to church to seek “higher meaning” than they find on the job. He trashes the “sirens of cynicism” and “the prophets of blame” and “simplistic solutions.” He quotes the anti-family, whoremongering, wife-woman abusing Dr. Martin Luther King on, of all things, the need to “repent” for the actions of “bad people”!! He calls for a “great debate” on “family values.” He denounces “bullies” and “mean-spirited sentiments.” He asks: “Who is the family”? And he answers (a drum roll and cymbal clash, please): “We are all family. We all have value.”

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Great stuff, no?

—Feminist, researcher-pornographer Shere Hite who, thank God, has renounced her U.S. citizenship and moved to England, says, in her 1994 “Report On The Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy,” that the “holy family” model of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is “an essentially repressive one, teaching authoritarian psychological patterns and a belief in the unchanging rightness of male power.” Yikes! Jesus was abused as a child?!! And she adds: “How can there be a successful democracy in public life if there is an authoritarian model in private life”? Huh? The only way there can be a “successful” public life is if there is, first, some kind of self-governing, private “authority.” Truly this woman is a moron.

—On the Cable News Network program “Crossfire” in December of 1992, Debra Haffner, of the Sex Information And Education Council, is bristling with misinformation and has, obviously, been miseducated. She says: “When we affirm people, all families, you know, I think that is encouraging tolerance, which I think all of us would agree is an American family value.” Another raging heathen.

—In the September 2, 1995, Washington Times newspaper, David Kahn, president of the American Jewish Committee, attacks the Christian Coalition, noting, approvingly: “There is no one 'American family' and to claim [there is] is absurd.”

—The October 1995 American Spectator magazine quotes the Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison as “proposing an abandonment of societal restraints and a return to the elemental urges of nature.” She says: “The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. Why we are hanging on to it, I don't know.”

—Homosexuals, through our heathen courts, are also working hard to destroy the Christian family. The examples are, literally, too numerous to mention. In November of last year, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand, without comment, a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that allowed a lesbian mother's live-in fornicator, whom her 6-year-old son considers a parent, to prove that she (?) is entitled to visitation rights. In this same month, the New York Supreme Court—noting “fundamental changes” in the American family—ruled (4-3) that neither heterosexual nor homosexual couples have to be “married” to adopt a child together. And in July of last year, the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that homosexual unmarried couples in “committed relationships” are permitted to adopt children under District law.

—And, of course, the folks in our national media are also doing their part to demolish the Christian family. In January of this year, the USA Today newspaper reported that the NBC program “Friends” featured a lesbian “wedding” with virtually no reaction. The “minister” who “married” the two women, a character played by the lesbian sister of Rep. Newt Gingrich, says, in the program: “Nothing makes God happier than when two people—any two people—come together in love.”

In December of last year, on NBC's “Today” program, Walter Cronkite, discussing his upcoming special on the cable TV “Discovery” channel, ridiculed the supposedly mythical, traditional “Ozzie and Harriet” family. Said Cronkite, with a sneer in his voice: “We're not going to achieve traditional family values which actually are not historic anyway” because they were “a figment of peoples' imaginations.” And on ABC's “This Week With David Brinkley” program in February of this year, Cokie (Kooky?) Roberts couldn't believe that there are still people who believe in the Christian family. Commenting on a rally in an Iowa church against homosexual marriage, at which several Republican presidential candidates appeared, she said: “[I] can't believe this is something most Americans are worried about.” Lord, please, help her unbelief! (Mk. 9:24).

There are those who, sort of, vaguely, are, in a way, trying, kinda, to stand against this attack on the Christian family. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who says he's a Baptist, has said (in December of 1994) that: “We want to have an explicit bias in favor of heterosexual marriage.” But this doesn't go nearly far enough. God says the family must, to be sure, be “heterosexual.” Yes. But, this “heterosexual” family must also be Godly, Christian, in a Biblical way.

And what a blessing it is to be a truly Christian family and to see the godly fruit this brings! In her book Marriage To A Difficult Man (Westminster Press, 1971), about the marriage of Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah, Elisabeth D. Dodds notes how in 1900 one A. E. Winship tracked down 1,400 descendants of Jonathan and Sarah. This one Edwards marriage produced 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 100 lawyers and a dean of an outstanding law school, 30 judges, 66 physicians and a dean of a medical school, three U.S. Senators, three mayors of large cities, three state governors, a Vice President of the United States, and a controller of the U.S. Treasury. Members of this family wrote 135 books, edited 18 journals and periodicals. They entered the ministry “in platoons” and sent 100 missionaries overseas, as well as stocking many mission hoards with lay trustees. When one “maverick” married the daughter of a South Sea Island chieftain, even that branch reverted to type—the son became a clergyman.

In addition, re: Edwards' offspring, Winship says: “Many large hanks, banking houses and insurance companies have been directed by them. They have been owners or superintendents of large coal mines.... of large iron plants or vast oil interests... and silver mines... There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters.... The family has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service; on the contrary, it represents the highest usefulness.” And all of this from an original family which had no large inherited fortune.

In his study, Winship contrasted the Edwards' descendants with the anti-Christian “Jukes” family, a notorious clan of “social floaters, with no home or nest,” or settled in upper New York State in 1720 and produced a tribe of “idleness, ignorance and vulgarity.” This mob cost New York State a total of $1,250,000 in welfare and custodial charges. Only 20 of the 1,200 “Jukes” ever held gainful employment. The rest were either criminals or lived on state aid.

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow! His Way is, indeed, the right way. The family will be either Christian or it will be no family. Thus saith the Lord.