The Ruling Household (An Introduction)

(This is a part of the book I’m working on called The Ruling Household)

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

What a question.

There’s an intuition deep within the heart of Western people that providing the radical freedom necessary to consider a question this open-ended is the great achievement of our age. It’s the one thing we can all agree to celebrate. In America, it’s what brings us together as a people. In fact, in the absence of discovering a higher value, providing and experiencing this freedom becomes the default purpose of life. It’s the end we’re aiming at. It’s what our forefathers died to give us and what their sons died to preserve. It’s the highest good.

You and I are living in a civilization that is nearing the end of this experiment—the experiment that freedom is ultimate and that every systemic problem can be solved by applying more freedom.

More money provides economic freedom.

More equality provides political freedom.

And new technologies promise to provide freedom from everything else.

I’m not here to argue that a certain amount of freedom is helpful. I’m grateful that I live in a free country and I wave my flag on the Fourth of July and say a prayer of gratitude on Memorial Day for the men and women who died for the freedom I enjoy.

But, here’s the thing, freedom is a means and not an end.

Freedom exists to give us the ability to pursue something; it's not something we pursue as an end in itself.

Once you have enough of it you must do something with it.

That’s what this book is about.

And on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day, millions of Americans grill burgers and hot dogs with their family and friends and I’ve often wondered as I put slices of American cheese on my grass-fed beef if what we’re experiencing in this country is worth the sacrifice of so many.

The answer of this book is yes, but almost no one in our country remembers why. 

It’s not the food and it’s not the freedom, it’s the family and the faith these things help you build.

This is the highest thing a government can be expected to do.

It can’t provide salvation from our sins but it can provide enough freedom for us to build families and pursue our faith in peace.

Family and faith are both a means and an end.

Raising a family is the first step on a journey toward something.

Families are vehicles that take us to a place we all want to go.

In a family, we experience the kind of relational connection that gives us a foretaste of our journey’s end.

We build families to build households and households are the basic unit of the government in the Kingdom of God.

The Bible is not confusing on this point.

It’s right there on the very first page.

God creates the first male and female and he does not ask them what they want to be when they grow up.

That’s way too much freedom.

God, like a good father, hands us some basic instructions.

These instructions are a blueprint for constructing the vehicle that takes us on the journey of life, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule…” (Genesis 1:28 NIV).

Equipping you to follow this blueprint of, being fruitful, multiplying, filling, subduing and ruling is the purpose of this book.

It begins with a family but it ends with being a ruling household.

The question is not, “What do you want to be?” but:

• Where are you going?

• Who are your companions

• What will take you there? and

• Why does all this ultimately matter?

Asking what you want to be assumes that the basic unit in society is the individual.

This was best put by tech investor and start-up guru Naval Ravikant when he tweeted,

“The reality is life is a single-player game. You're born alone. You're going to die alone.”

I’ve never read a more perfect articulation of the belief that has steered us so far off course.

Life is not a single-player game.

Life is a family game.

We’re born into a family, we live our life with family and, unless something goes terribly wrong, we’ll die surrounded by our family.

And yes, family is for everyone. It’s for the unmarried as much as for the married once you understand that what we’re talking about is not the modern nuclear family but this ancient thing called a household.

The nuclear family only includes a father, a mother, and their children.

The household includes the nuclear family, parts of the extended family, and, for followers of Jesus, many more.

But because Christians have been just as caught up in what they want to be as everyone else it’s possible many of you reading this have never been exposed to a household let alone a ruling household.

The Genesis 1 blueprint is likely to seem like a relic of ancient history.

That’s why I’m writing this book.

In my first book, Family Revision, I explored the biblical vision for the family and in this book, I’d like to guide you through the biblical vision for the household.

Our journey will begin with Adam and Eve, move through the Patriarchs in Genesis, explore the dynastic families in the Hebrew Scriptures, and understand how the Gospel of the Kingdom described in the New Testament gives an updated mandate to the ruling household.

But first, let’s open our Bibles to page one and examine the household blueprint Genesis 1 provides for the structuring of all human societies.

(Read the next section here)