Lecture 1.docx

If you have your Bibles and your notebooks in front of you, you want to take them and turn them over to the information here that deals with the outline here for the Marriage and Family Counseling Course. The first thing we need to do is we have to define what is the family. Now normally, I can r...

If you have your Bibles and your notebooks in front of you, you want to take them and turn them over to the information here that deals with the outline here for the Marriage and Family Counseling Course. The first thing we need to do is we have to define what is the family. Now normally, I can remember teaching this almost 30 years ago, or teaching about marriage and the family 30 years ago. We didn\'t have to define this because everybody understood it. Everybody understood when I referred to the family, everybody understood what we were talking about, a father and a mother with children and sometimes with children, the traditional nuclear family. But now, a day\'s things have been so vastly redefined that we have to answer the question, what is the family? There was an interesting article that appeared a few years ago in a national and international religion report. It is interesting that, and actually this is a quote from pollster George Gallup, and he makes a statement, if a disease were to afflict the majority of the populace spreading pain and dysfunction throughout all age groups, we would be frantically searching for reasons and solutions. Yet, he said, one particular scourge has become so endemic that it is virtually ignored. The scourge, he says, is divorce, an oddly neglected topic. He goes on and says divorce is a root problem and is the cause of any number of other ills. In fact, he says for many, marriage today is a losing gamble. Six out of ten new marriages fail, victims of divorce or separation. Reports on the National Survey of Families and Households at the University of Wisconsin yield those kinds of statistics. The cold statistics also have a human heart to them. Divorce is like suffering death without a funeral, said one woman still grieving over her marriage that had broke apart after eight years. The pain never ends. It is a living death. Even though most divorce people eventually remarry, about 60% of second marriages fail. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the University of Minnesota\'s Dr. David Olson reports that 65% of marriages that manage to remain intact still are profoundly unhappy. 40% are devitalized, filled with dissatisfaction in every dimension of the relationship. Another 25% of marriages are almost as discontent and weak, but the problem is broader than divorce. It is not just divorce that is happening in marriages, but it is people living in very unhappy marriages. The question is, why is this going on? Why is this happening? We believe that the scriptures have the answer to this. You don\'t have to look very far. Many of you know, even in your own families and extended families, some of the grief and heartache that divorce has experienced. Even as a child growing up, your parents\' marriage didn\'t survive. You know of an aunt or uncle or somebody that is close to you whose marriage didn\'t survive. Or maybe you know in tragic situations of friends, leadership in your church, maybe even your own pastor whose marriage didn\'t survive. How many times have I counseled pastoral couples who have been in the ministry for several years and they are having serious marital conflict and problems? The answer to this question, what is the family, is important because many today are minimizing the importance of the family or they have erroneous ideas about what the family is and the role that it should play in our society in general or in the lives of people in particular. In fact, the biblical concept of the family has been strenuously opposed by many people around the world. I want to give you a few instances of that if I can. For example, Karl Marx, remember he was the infamous author of the Communist Manifesto. In 1848 when he wrote the Communist Manifesto he makes this statement, he says, on what foundation is the present family? The Bourgeois family based on capital and private gain is his answer. It is completely developed form. This family exists only among the Bourgeois but this state of things finds its complement in the enforced absence of the family among the politicians, which is the lower class, and in public prostitution. The Bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. The Bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed relationship of parent and child becomes all the more disgusting the more by the action of modern industry. All family ties among the politicians are torn asunder and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. So he sees the family as primarily a product of an industrial society that is driven by the desire to make more and more capital. It is the use of the poetarians or the lower class of people by the middle class, the Bourgeois, that keeps people in this enslaved state. That is Karl Marx\'s view on the family, which is radically opposed to what the scripture would say about this. There was another book entitled People Making by American therapist by the name of Virginia Satter. In her last chapter on the family of the future she sketches the basic Christian and traditional ethic of the family and then asks the question, why should we accept this as the only possible way? She lays out what the Christian\'s view of the family is and the traditional view of the family and she says why should we accept this as the only way? In fact she suggests a variety of things that might happen in the future. She says, What if all the practices now going on, which we have labeled as morally bad, were instead really evidence of great variations in human beings? In the case of many times married person perhaps there are some people whose level of interest is short and so they choose one mate after another. Instead of considering this a shortcoming what would happen if we treated this as a simple variation? Such people could enter a limited marital contract, save from one to five years. If the contract were not renewed at the end then the dissolution of the marriage could take place. Perhaps the married people who have heterosexual relationships outside of marriage are not simply adulterers but are people with a human need. After all plandery which is a woman with many husbands and polygamy which is a man with many wives were once respected forms of marriage. Why not have a group of communal marriage? When you think about it marriage merely legalizes a relationship between a male and a female adult that entitles them to certain property and a certain guarantee against exploitation. She says, Why does it have to be limited to just one man and one woman? If we fully trusted one another and were truly responsible we would not be exploitive and we would share fairly. You see what she is saying. If a person has gone in and out of marriage several times then maybe it is really not a shortcoming on that person\'s part that is just one variation of a different type of person and why don\'t we view it as a variation? We will create a special type of marriage category for this person. This is the type of person who will have a marriage for maybe two or three years or maybe five years and then at the end of that particular contract it can be renewed and if it is not renewable then they can move into another relationship. Why do we have a problem accepting a woman that has several husbands or a plandery or polygamy? Why do we have a problem with a man who has several wives? Why do we have a problem with that? She defines marriage as merely legalizing a relationship between a male and female adult that entitles them to certain property and a certain guarantee against exploitation. That is her definition of marriage. We are going to take exception to that but that is the way that she would view it. Virginia Satir in a book entitled People Making. She is an American therapist. Some of you remember Alvin Toffler. Many of you in our class are not old enough to remember clear back to the 1970s. Unfortunately I do. A very famous book came out then called Future Shock. In that book Toffler actually has a chapter in that book entitled The Frustrated Family where he depicts motherhood and he says, Motherhood is killed in the future by birth technology and parenthood as a convenient legal and financial arrangement is soon to be dispatched. He envisions professional parents who bring up children from many biological sources and communes of three to six parents where biological origins will be happily confused. There will be geriatric group families, homosexual family units and so on and so on. The odds are very heavily against the monogamous pattern as a provider of fulfillment and satisfaction. That is what Toffler was writing back in 1970, almost 40 years ago. Toffler sees tailor-made divorce with serial marriage as the new pattern starting quite naturally with trial marriage before anyone understands the first proper one. He admits that the stability and the sense of continuity afforded by the traditional family pattern of birth, growth, parenthood and fidelity is undermined by this future prediction but he does not believe that the traditional family can survive. So he is saying that back in the 1970s. That is when I was in college. They are predicting the demise of the family. When you take a look at what the United Nations says about the family, I don\'t know whether you\'ve read very much about that, but that is certainly eye opening. To the United Nations, family is whatever anyone wants it to be and everyone\'s invited, but back in 1994, 1994 was referred to as the International Year of the Family by the United Nations. The United Nations General Secretary at that time, Butros Gali, calls the International Year of the Family a celebration of the family in all of its many cultural and societal forms, adding that the diversity of society is fully reflected in the diversity of our families. There is no single definition of the family, there is no one model. In fact, the UN\'s International Year of the Family Handbook says that the family is the basic unit of society and is described as a vital means of preserving and transmitting cultural values. Well, wow, we could say that as Christians, we could reproduce that word for word. The family is a basic unit of society and described as a vital means of preserving and transmitting cultural values. Nothing wrong with that, but what he means by the family is totally different than what we mean by the family. A few sentences later, he makes a statement made in that pamphlet that says, many societies change the nature of what is considered a family. Exposure to ideas and behavioral norms beyond traditional spheres and to the different lifestyles is praised as a positive development since it permits additional opportunities for more diversified lives. This is the culture that you\'re going out to minister in. It\'s everywhere, it\'s all over the world. Now, what does the UN mean, the United Nations mean about diversified lives? Well, they mean plenty. In an international year, the family document entitled the Changing Family Structure, the UN describes various types of family units as comparable and equally acceptable. Polygamous and community families are lumped together on an equal footing with biological and adoptive families. Same gender families are also included in the listing. So you can have anything. You can have polygamy, polyandrophy, homosexual, lesbian relationships, all lumped into this very generalized idea of what the family is. Jane Carney-Schultz is the International Year of the Family\'s North American coordinator. She says, the family is such a subjective thing. Really? The family is a subjective thing. She goes on and says it\'s important to accept that there are a lot of different models, whether it\'s two women or two men raising children. In the International Year of the Family, promotional literature provided by Schulz entitled Gay and Lesbian Community Groups are listed under the heading, Could Child and Family Oriented Contacts. In that same article it says, new forms of family life have developed to meet the challenges of the modern world. The UN\'s International Year of the Family handbook adds that policies affecting the family should seek to avoid promoting implicitly or explicitly a single ideal image of the family. So they\'d hate a class like ours. They wouldn\'t like this at all because we\'re promoting a single ideal image of the family, not because this is Professor John Street\'s interpretation of the family. It\'s what the Word of God says the family is supposed to be. They go on and say, we\'re trying to encourage the stability that families give said UN spokesman William Haas, but we\'re not going to get trapped into any definition of the family. Trapped? It goes on and says it\'s a diversified world and unless we respect that, we cannot achieve any progress. No one has a monopoly on the best form, definition or concept of the family. Schulz says, I think the UN\'s attitude about diversity and accepting all kinds of families without any definition is really excellent. So there we have it. Some of the things that Marx predicted, Sater predicted, Toffler predicted is already reaping huge fruit in international definitions of the family. What is the family? O. R. Johnson in a book entitled Who Needs the Family? How about that? In a book entitled Who Needs the Family, listen to the way he describes the traditional family. He says, In traditional pre-industrial societies, the family was a type of microcosm, undertaking itself most of the tasks which the family group needed to survive. It may be useful to list these functions as anthropologists and sociologists have analyzed them. Firstly, the family regulated sexual expression and satisfaction, thus preventing constant conflict, confusion and competition. Second, the family regulated the production of children, thus ensuring that the community continued. Thirdly, the family socialized the children, transmitting the culture and ensuring that they become mature citizens at some point in the future to enter into productive and continuing life as a society. Fourth, the family protected the children. This protective form was in most cases undertaken not only in relationship to children but also to their grandparents. The active adults in most societies have not only handed duties downward to their children but also upwards to their elderly patients. Fifthly, after protection comes simple economic division of labor. This is seen in the most primitive societies where there are hunting societies or gathering societies. It is the father who hunts or gathers and it is the mother who rears the children. And sixthly, the family provides other resources which we can lump together. Healthcare, recreation, training for work, initiating into religion and myth, lore and literature. All these tasks in early societies and in most primitive societies today were and are undertaken in the family for itself. Admittedly, there was sometimes a certain degree of specialization. In addition, there was the priest for religion and medicine man for the health. But the family was a many faceted operational group rich in a variety of tasks and it could shoulder for itself. A broad generalization is at once obvious. In the transition from primitive to modern western types of society, many of these functions have become institutionalized outside the home so we don\'t need that. So he basically sets up a description of what the family was supposed to do by his definition. Then he begins to set it up in such a way that in our industrialized society today there are other institutions that have taken over for these purposes that the family has provided and therefore the implication is we really don\'t need the traditional family. He says we have witnessed the stripping of the family of many of its former reasons for existence and the handing over of these tasks to other specialized agencies put very crudely in modern societies work itself, that is economically profitable work, employment in order to exist mostly goes on outside the home. Religion is left to the churches or perhaps as a vestigal superstition to the astrology columns of magazines. Work training is provided by an industry or by the state or by a specialized institution. Certainly it now only rarely occurs in the family. So he is beginning to go through and just systematically piece by piece show how the industrialized society has taken over for the family. His ultimate argument is basically who needs the family? Who needs it? You don\'t need it any longer. We have all kinds of organizations and institutions out there that have basically supplanted the family\'s role. So why should there be any kind of problem with redefining the family? You get the idea. Here as we have on the screen there are many people today minimizing the importance of the family or they have erroneous ideas about what the family is and the role it should play in society in general or in the lives of people in particular. Now, in asking the question what is the family, the second thing we want to make an observation here is that the answer to this question is important because it has consequences. It has consequences. If your conclusion about whatever the family is, if that\'s wrong, it will affect you and it will affect the way that you minister in horrible ways. If, for example, you don\'t understand what a church or a school is, then you don\'t know what to do with it. You have to understand what something is if you are going to use it correctly. You have to understand what something is if you are going to use it correctly. You can hardly be expected to be able to benefit from something like a church or a school if you don\'t know what it is and you are confused about what it is. Some of you have probably seen the old movie The Gods Must Be Crazy where an African bushman finds a Coke bottle and he doesn\'t know what it is. So he tries to use it as a hammer and it doesn\'t work. He tries to use it as hanging on his body somehow and it\'s too awkward to hang it on his body. He doesn\'t know what the function of this particular item is because he has never seen a Coke bottle before. Back ten years ago when we moved out to California, we were like that. I was put in charge by my wife of cleaning out our garage. We had lived in one location for many, many years. You can really collect a lot of stuff when you live in one location for many, many years. I found stuff in that garage I hadn\'t seen for years and I couldn\'t remember what it was. If I didn\'t know what it was, then I didn\'t know it looked important though. I didn\'t know whether I should throw it away or keep it. If I kept it, I didn\'t know what I would use it for. But I was scared to throw it away. Should I throw that thing away? I don\'t know. What is that thing? It looks really familiar to me. That\'s the way it is. If you don\'t know what the family is, then you\'re not going to really know how to use it. If you don\'t know how to use it, then that\'s going to have huge consequences in your ministry. This is what happens when people don\'t clearly understand the answer to the question, what is the family? Because ideas have consequences. The way you think about and conceive of marriage, family, the role of the husband, the role of the wife, the role of the parent, the function of children in the family, how the children are supposed to respond to the parents, how the parents are supposed to respond to the children, the way that you conceive of these things drastically affects not only that family but all of society and even your church, if you don\'t understand it correctly. The answer to this question is important because destroying the biblical family is one of Satan\'s primary objectives. That\'s certainly true. Scripture tells us in many places that we who are believers are really involved in a war. We\'re involved in a war. It\'s not a war that you can see. You don\'t see the fighting going on literally. But it is nonetheless a war with lots of casualties. Grab your Bible for a moment and let\'s go over to 2 Corinthians 10. Let\'s take a look at verses 3-5. 2 Corinthians 10 verses 3-5. Paul says here, For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but are divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. There\'s part of that warfare. This is not a medieval mystical type of warfare with gargoyles and demons hiding under every rock. That\'s not the idea of this warfare. Within the context of this, Paul is talking about an ideological warfare that is very demonic and very powerful. It\'s not demonic in a medieval sense, but demonic in just as a devastating sense because it is destroying the way that people think about life and reality. Paul says he goes to battle not against flesh and blood, but against these wrong ideas about life. That\'s his ministry. These ideologies, these speculations, these lofty things that are raised up against the knowledge of God. Paul is trying to promote and uplift the knowledge of God, not human knowledge. So the scripture is very clear that there is a war that\'s going on there. Let\'s go over to 2 Timothy 2, verses 3 and 4. Here he says, 2 Timothy 2, verses 3 and 4. Here he says, In this warfare we are called to be soldiers in this kind of ministry. We have to see ourselves as soldiers, but we are ideological warriors. The word of God is our primary tool. This is what we minister. Not only that, but other scriptures make it clear that our real enemy in this war is Satan and demonic forces. Our real enemy in this war is Satan and demonic forces. We go over to Ephesians, chapter 6, verses 11 and 12. Here Paul says, Put on the full armor of God, so that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. You see the little phrase, of God. Take a look at that in the Greek, not just a genitive of source, but God who is the one who supplies. He is the source of the armor. He is the source of the armor. So that you may be able to stand firm, that is, hold your ground against the devil. The word for devil is diabolos, which is the word for slanderer. It is probably descriptive of Satan\'s main tool, and that is to slander the truth. He slandered you as a messenger of the truth. Then in verse 12, he says, For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness, and heavenly places. Then verse 13 says, Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. Then verse 13 says, Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist. That is our Greek word, anthistami, resist. This is an Aorist act of infinitive, antistami, stand against, challenge, oppose in the evil day, and having done everything to stand firm by putting on Christ. God tells us that our enemy is a real enemy. Even though we cannot see this enemy, taste this enemy, feel this enemy, this enemy is very, very real. We have to stand firm against this enemy. Our war is against Satan and that of demonic forces. Take your Bible again and let\'s go over to 1 Peter 5 and verse 8. Here is our adversary, a sober spirit, he says, Be on alert, your adversary the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So we have an adversary that is looking out to devour us. So we are in a war. This is an ideological war. Our main enemy is Satan who is a slanderer. He slanders the truth, he slanders agents of the truth. And we are called upon to be good soldiers and to take our stand, to stand against. There\'s where our word antistami, stand firm, stand against, against him. Thirdly, Satan and his demonic forces are opposed to God and all that God stands for, all that God wants. Satan and his demonic forces are in veritable adversaries or enemies of God. Now, nowhere is this particular battle more intense, I believe, than in the area of marriage and the family. And we can see it throughout modern society today or we could even say postmodern society today, even though there are a lot of philosophers who believe that we\'ve even moved beyond postmodernity. But we can see that and how it\'s affecting the family. And we would say this, that anyone who is in touch with what is happening in the area of marriage and family life knows that the changes that have taken place ideologically and structurally in the last 50 years have been nothing short of catastrophic. More changes have taken place in the last 50 years than have taken place in the thousands of years previously. That\'s devastating to think about. There have been radical, radical changes that have occurred in the last 50 years. Changes that have been so dramatic and so sweeping that our great-great-great-great grandparents would be shocked by what has occurred. So things are changing very, very rapidly. Fourth, Satan has declared war on the family and now is focusing much of his attention on the family because he knows how important the family is. What is it that Satan knows? You understand that Satan is far more intelligent than we will ever be. He\'s existed long before we existed. He saw and was very much a part of the fall of man. He\'s seen all of humanity from the beginning right up until this very moment. He studied human behavior. He studied the way in which human beings have interacted with life and circumstances and stress and difficulty and hardship. He\'s seen all of this and he knows. He predicts. He\'s not omniscient like God, but he certainly predicts and is a good predictor of how we\'re going to respond to certain things and what we think about things. We can\'t outthink him. What is it that he knows? He knows that the family is the basic building block of every other social unit or institution. He knows that. How is it that God started the world? He started the world not with the church, not with some kind of government, but he started the world with a family. That\'s the way God started the world. It was Adam and Eve. It was not good that man be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. That\'s the way everything got started. Satan understands that. It is the basic building block. There is theological priority given to the family in Genesis 1 2 and 3. And it was through the family relationship that now sin comes into the world. What else does Satan know? Satan knows that the command to multiply and replenish and fill and subdue the earth was given to a family unit. Satan knows that as well. It was given to a family unit. Grab your Bible for a moment and let\'s go back to Genesis 1 and verse 28. Some theologians call this the cultural mandate. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth. So we can see that part of the blessing that God gives the husband and wife relationship is that of children. Right from the very beginning. That\'s part of the blessing upon that relationship. Is children. And Satan understands that. And that was something that was given to a family unit. So anything that he could do to interrupt that or stop that. Because when families thrive than the image of God thrives. We can see this. What else does Satan know? Well Satan knows that the family is unique and irreplaceable in God\'s program. The family is very unique and irreplaceable in God\'s program. The family is not one of several different types of optional ways that people should live. It was God\'s only declared way for people to live. God didn\'t create a philanthropy. He didn\'t create polygamy. He didn\'t create. You\'ve heard the old story. God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. Alright. He didn\'t do that. God didn\'t create a lesbian relationship from the beginning. He created a husband and wife relationship so that the two sexes, the male and the female can complement one another in their gender distinctiveness. That is lost in every other definition of the family. And Satan knows that. Satan knows that. And if Satan can destroy that concept, he can destroy the family.