The family is the highest expression of God’s image on earth. Like the Holy Trinity, it is a communion of loving persons. The apostle Paul described the marital union as a mysterious picture of the gospel itself. Satan hates anything that pictures his mortal enemy.
If you’ve ever been part of a loving, healthy family, you have smelled the sweet aroma of heaven. If you’ve ever lived in a troubled, broken home, you have breathed the foul stench of hell.
The most effective counterattack against our enemy we can launch is to make our own homes what God intended them to be: a little bit of heaven rather than a foretaste of hell. This is so important for us to preach or teach.
We often relegate talking about marriage and family to those infrequent occasions when we happen to be teaching from one of the well-known passages on marriage or parenting. I’ve even heard some say that the Bible doesn’t say much about family. In reality, the Bible doesn’t say much without family.
From Genesis to Revelation, the dominant images the Scripture uses as touchstones for understanding God’s relationship to humanity are marriage and parenthood. We can’t understand what it means to be human apart from our creation as male and female, two becoming one as a picture of three persons in an eternal communion of love. We don’t really grasp why God loves us so much until we become a parent. I can’t help loving my children. I would die for them. So would He.
Every sermon we preach and lesson we teach from Scripture should reference these realities. Again, a healthy home is the highest expression of God’s image on earth
Read more from the DTS Connect dialogue ‘The Point of Home’: