Recoverying a Vision of the Home

Introduction

What are homes for?

Why should people have children?

What is the purpose of marriage?

Mostly we answer these questions in terms of emotional benefits but not with deeper eternal realities.

I want to suggest this week that homes are meant for much more than we make of them.

I want to suggest that self help books that teach you how to get along with your wife and how to stay emotionally connected with your kids are barely if even scratching the surface of the thoughts God wants us to think about our homes.

Vocabulary Recovery

We need to understand that when we are reading something from the Bible, that there are often references that can become distorted over time for various reasons that require recovery work.

The word baptism is a classic example.

A couple of years ago we talked about the words grace and faith and the changes in definitions those words have undergone since the 1st century.

There are words about the household that have transformed in meaning until we hardly have the framework for understanding them in natural ways today.

The word firstborn is an excellent example.

The firstborn had privileges and the Bible leans on the right and reality of those privileges to teach us lesson.

This is used most importantly in reference to Christ Jesus (Col. 1:15).

That doesn’t mean He is the first created thing. It means He has the prestige and preeminence of a firstborn child but not the literal characteristic.

In all of this we are going to be looking backwards which is where truth is.

Many of the things we talk about are things people think have been thrown into the “dustbin of history.”

Maybe, we have finally come to a point where we are realizing it’s time to go dumpster diving and fish some of those ideas back out.

We are guilty of “chronological snobbery.”

“Primitive man” is not a man who simply hasn’t developed to our vaunted state of progress, he is a man who has cast off God and now lives in the pagan squalor that results. So you should look at that tribal primitivist not as our history but more likely as our future.

The Scope of the Home

Here we are going to need to slow down and minute and develop this point.

What was wrong with Moses striking the rock (1 Cor. 10:1-4; Num. 20:9).

What effect did Abraham’s relationship with Hagar have on eternal realities (Gal. 4).

Our homes point to eternal truths. Faithfully, or unfaithfully.

You don’t have to understand those eternal realities to be connected to them. But it helps to understand them if we want to reflect them well.

Conclusion

In our best efforts, we are usually not saying enough or thinking deeply enough about the home.

We are treating symptoms of all the departures from God’s fundamental truths about the home without ever diagnosing those departures.

We are giving people to small a vision for what their homes could be as we give them a black and white picture 1950s America as the highest ideal.

When in reality, we need to be lifting their eyes up to the reality that “this world does not end with a bang, nor a whimper, but with wedding bells.”