When we lived in California my family and I would spend many summer afternoons at the oceanside. Often I would scoop up a handful of sand and let it slowly dribble through my fingers. I often thought of that promise God made to Abraham, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the . . . sand on the seashore” (Gen. 22:17, NIV). I was glad that God’s use of “sand” referred only to the vast number of Abraham’s future seed. It did not refer to the design of Abraham’s future seed because as I examined those grains of sand, I noticed that each grain was an individual, a complete entity, totally unrelated to the grain on top of, underneath or next to it. That is not true of God’s spiritual “sand.” Every child born into this world is born into a pre-established relationship, automatically inheriting a mother, a father, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. Unlike sand, this child grows, matures, and he himself establishes new relationships. To one he becomes a husband, to another a father, to another an uncle, to a whole new group of people, an “in–law.” That child is not an isolated grain.
How thankful I am that God does not structure human life according to the pattern of sand. He chooses rather to create human “sand” along “family lines”— father, mother and children—so that each child born into this world has a God-given right to claim the love and faithfulness of two parents. What a blight on our society when parents separate from each other, robbing children of their birthright and destroying God’s divinely planned ecological balance in family living.
Why did God choose the “family plan” to advance human civilization?
The first reason is simply biological: the human race had to be propagated.
But second, it is within the family that the child is protected, nurtured and trained. The second table of God’s law dealing with love to our neighbor, begins with the fifth commandment which deals with the home. The placement in that order is no accident. “Love to neighbor” must begin at home. No world problems, moral, social, economic or any other, will be solved nationally or internationally if they are not solved first in the home. Creation began with the home of Adam and Eve as the base, and obedience was the condition for true happiness, a condition Adam failed to fulfill because of his sin. Redemption began with the home of Joseph and Mary as the base and obedience the condition. Jesus met the condition and through His perfect obedience we may have victory over sin in the home and subsequently in the nation and in the world.
Third, it is within the family that the principle of love begins. In God’s plan, it is love in which each child is conceived; it is love with which each child is reared; it is love which each person, having received in childhood, must seek to implement in all the relationships of his life: marriage, parenthood, business and social life. It is love which transforms a “house” into a “home.”
If that love, developed and practiced at home, radiated out to all areas of human endeavor, what a changed world this would be! Police officers could retire, courts could recess permanently, and prisons could close.
The family is in real trouble today precisely because too many people either do not understand or do not accept God’s prescription for true happiness. While some people decry ecological ruin in nature, they play fast and loose with the ecologically balance environment designed by God for the growth of human beings. They allow and promote a “pollution” in the press, in films and in day–by-day living which destroys the foundation and fabric of the society which inhabits the environment they are trying to rescue from ecological disaster. It makes no sense at all.
Join us next month in watching God’s remedy become a reality, God’s plan become a product in the Christian home.
NOTE: The address of Mrs. Vanden Heuvel, editor of this department, is now 415 Arizona, S. W., Orange City, Iowa 51041.