Finding Family Wisdom in Scripture

This is the fifth part of Chapter 2 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here are links to The Intro and the fourth part of Chapter 2.

The Post-Fall Family

Genesis 1 ends with “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” and Genesis 2 ends with “​​the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

But then Genesis 3 happened.

Humanity took a sharp turn from the perfection enjoyed in Genesis 1 and 2. Our job here is to try and understand what the event theologians call “The Fall” did to God's original design for the ruling household.

Does God double down on the household or does the plan for the family fundamentally change?

It’s clear that a massive wave hit the structure of the household in Genesis 3 doing damage that must be absorbed. However, there’s no indication that God replaces the household with a new entity or changes the basic blueprint of the family. What we do get is a description of the damage done.

The Enemy Targets Gender-based Weaknesses

When we read Genesis 3 we see that both Adam and Eve demonstrate a basic weakness exploited by the enemy.

Eve’s weakness was her propensity to be deceived. The serpent set a clever trap, causing Eve to doubt God’s goodness “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened” (Genesis 3:5 ESV) which she believes, and later realized was a deception, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:13 ESV).

On the other hand, there’s no indication that Adam was deceived. What the story does make clear is that Adam was with Eve during this event “She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6 ESV). Adam fails to guard the garden, he fails to make clear God’s original word, and he fails to lead his wife, instead, he chooses to follow his wife doing damage to their family and all their generations.

Future biblical authors look at this event, not as a one-off occurrence about two individuals, but as indicative of flaws embedded in men and women more generally. In his first letter to Timothy Paul refers to the actions of Adam and Eve as the reason for specific instructions he gave to the church pointing out that “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” (1 Timothy 2:13-14 ESV).

Generalizing from a specific event to make application to all men or all women is increasingly problematic to modern Western intuitions. “Why would the struggles of one individual woman, Eve, say anything about any other individual woman?” we wonder.

And so here we must deal with an issue that will determine if my family and yours can find wisdom about how to build a household from Scripture.

We must choose to move in the opposite direction of modern Western culture and, instead of minimizing generalizations, we must embrace this form of wisdom.

Tool: Embrace Patterns of Family Wisdom

We live in an age obsessed with identity.

This obsession compensates for the lack of identity many Western people feel.

We know we need it. We understand that knowing our identity would answer foundational questions like “Who are we?” and “What is the purpose of our lives?”. 

What we don’t know is that we’ve destroyed the tool that allows us to understand identity.

What is that tool? Simply put it’s the sweeping generalization also referred to as an archetype. Many today label identity generalizations as narrow-minded, discriminatory, bigoted, or even a form of hate speech.

Western people want to imagine that identities can be totally different for each person. We like to think of ourselves as a unique snowflake and so any general word or description is bound to do violence to our need for unbounded self-expression.

General identities like man, woman, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, and wife are way too broad to do anything more than create confusion leading to dysphoria. It’s like putting on someone else’s clothes. We want something that fits only our one-of-a-kind style.

But even those preaching the gospel of hyper-individualism see that some generalizations must be created in order to give a sense of belonging and to gain wisdom from others who feel a similar kind of identity. 

So the modern project is to fracture every major identity into an endless series of sub-identities.. Man and woman must be broken down into dozens of invented genders along a spectrum.

Fatherhood and motherhood must be entirely abandoned as problematic social constructs. 

And if you’ve been at all infected by the mind virus that promotes the fracturing of identities, the tool I’m about to describe may feel like a weapon aimed at those who seem vulnerable or historically oppressed.

But that’s only true if you believe these identities are created by society.

What if God created these identities? What if, like a good author of a story, he chose to hand out certain roles, and because he’s the story’s author, he alone has the authority to make these decisions?

If this is the reality God created then it’s not an act of kindness to encourage someone searching for identity to fight reality. 

In the end, reality always wins.

So to accept that these identities exist and to gain access to the wisdom they provide we must accept the following realities by faith:

• God created a list of core identities.

• The Bible alone has the authority to describe what these identities are.

• The Bible does not give us sterile descriptions of each identity but gives us stories filled with symbolic patterns that unveil the nature of each identity.

• We must immerse ourselves in the symbolic world of these stories in order to anchor our understanding of these identities.

• The world will always be at war with some or all of these identities so we must refuse to allow the ever-changing winds of culture to move us from our moorings in the Scriptures.

Keep in mind that generalizations exist to give us wisdom. For example, every wisdom statement in the book of Proverbs has exceptions AND every statement in the book of Proverbs is generally true. If you use the existence of exceptions to destroy statements of general wisdom you’ll set yourself adrift without any ability to tether your life to what is wise.

The way the Hebrew Scriptures deal with exceptions to these generalizations is not to remove the book of Proverbs from Scripture but to place the book of Job directly after the book of Proverbs. Job is the great exception to everything written in the book of Proverbs. He embodied the wisdom of Proverbs and experienced terrible tragedy anyway. This doesn’t nullify Proverbs, it adds helpful context. Everything in Proverbs is still wise and generally true.

By the way, in most modern translations the book of Job was moved from just after Proverbs to just before Psalms but this was a colossal mistake. Well-meaning theologians cared more about the Western category of chronology than the Hebrew approach to ordering books by intertwining themes.

The point is we need generalizations to understand how God designed gender and family roles. 

Every symbolic description of man and woman, father and mother in Scripture is also generally true. For all those who love wisdom, we will continually mine these patterns and seek to shape our lives.

Throughout the rest of this book, we’re going to be using the tool to discover what we’ve lost in the decision to abandon general wisdom.

We accept as an act of faith the wisdom held within these stories and choose to apply their lessons to our lives by faith.

(Click here for the next section in the book.)