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THE REFORMED WITNESS HOUR "God’s Gift of the Family” Rev. Carl Haak September 21, 2008; No. 3429 (Printed copies in a
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Reformed Witness Hour, |
prca.orgDear Radio Friends,
It is with great joy and thankfulness to God
that I return today to the microphone of the Reformed Witness Hour. We are very
thankful for the stirring and solid messages that were given by Pastor Wilbur Bruinsma for the past fourteen weeks on the Reformed
Witness Hour. We express to our brother our prayers for him in his work as a
missionary and as a church-planter. And we rejoice for the gifts given to him
as he has faithfully brought edifying messages to us in the past weeks.
As I return to my place as the radio-pastor, I
would direct your attention today to a very beautiful promise of God found in
Psalm 68:6.
The title of our meditation will be “God’s Gift of the Family.”
Your family, according to God’s Word, is a gift
of God. A Christian family comes in the infinite compassion of the majestic and
glorious God. A Christian family is the product of God’s hand and of God’s heart. So we are taught in the Scriptures in
Psalm 68:6.
We read, “God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth
out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”
Psalm 68
was sung or written by David when he
brought the ark of the covenant of God out of the house of Obed-edom
up to the place that he had prepared for it in the city of
The leading, says David in verses 3 and 4 of
Psalm 68,
shall make the righteous people glad. “Let them rejoice before God:
yea, let them exceedingly rejoice,” he says. “Sing unto God, sing praises to
[God].” He calls our attention to our God’s majesty and glory, and says that He
is above all praise. He rideth, says David, upon the
heavens by his name Jah. Soaring above all that is
majestic and honorable is God Himself. The word “Jah”
is the abbreviation of “Jehovah,” which means “I AM THAT I AM.” It is found only there in
Psalm 68:4
and is really involved in the word “Hallelujah.”
“Rejoice before Jehovah”—that is what Hallelujah means.
But then, lest we think that God is exalted beyond
reach and that we can have no approach and that we must hide in terror, David
begins in verse 5 to speak of the infinite tenderness of our great and majestic
God. He says, “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in
his holy habitation,” the great heart of God for orphans and widows, for
deserted and lonely sinners. How many orphans were there in the forty years’
wilderness wanderings? As Moses led the people of God for forty years, waiting
for all those who were over twenty to die before they could enter into the
Still more, the pity and the tender heart of the
majestic Jehovah is seen in this: God sets the solitary in families. He brings
out those that are bound with chains. But the rebellious dwell in a dry land.
Again, the point is the great compassion of God. The point of the passage is
this, that our families are the glorious gift of Jehovah to us His desolate and
spiritual needy children. God’s great mercy and God’s great love in Jesus is
seen in the establishment of a Christian family. He, Jehovah, the majestic and
yet filled-with-loving-kindness-God, is the God who sets the solitary in
families. We are being taught in Holy Scripture that as Christians we must
receive in thanksgiving our family and live conscious of the blessing, of the
great good, that our families are for our spiritual life. God is pleased to
nurture and to guard our spiritual lives in our families. In the family, He is
pleased to show His love, mold our faith, comfort our sorrows, and give us true
happiness. In the family we learn and taste of His love, and we experience His care so that we can say, as in
Psalm 71:
“From youth thou art my trust.” The
family, then, is not a human contrivance. It is not the product of men. But it
is God’s gracious gift to us His children.
But you say, “Pastor, my home does not fit so
often those words. My home is troublesome. The youth, the children, don’t want
to be there. It is a place of anger and fighting.” That may be true. We are
broken sinners and we need God’s Word to heal us and to instruct us.
Maybe you say, “But I have no family. I’m
single—not married. I don’t come from a believing home. I have no children
right now to fill my house with joy. We were not given children.” And I respond
to you, “Yet the family is the great gift of God to you, for we are members of
the family of God—His church.” God’s gracious gift is the family.
Note with me that David, in
Psalm 68,
is saying
that the family is precious, first of all, because it is the place where
Jehovah gives us to experience fellowship with Him. God sets the solitary, or
lonely, in families, or in homes. Your home, then, as children of God, should
be very precious to you, not because of what it costs or the fact that you
remodeled it and did the sweat work, but your home should be precious because
in that home God is pleased to give you to enjoy fellowship with Him. As
sinners, we are described as the solitary, as the lonely. Sin always isolates.
Sin’s goal in our life is that we be alone—all alone. Sin always makes us look
within, think of ourselves. And the consequences of sin are always
isolation—isolation from God and from one another. As sinners we are solitary,
or, in other words of Scripture, we are castaways, aliens, strangers, lonely,
burdened. We cry out in our loneliness. We go through depression.
But God’s grace comes to us. And that grace
finds us a sinful, solitary soul—cast away—and unites us to Jesus Christ by
grace, unites us to the family of God (the church), and then (through marriage)
grants to us a family—a place where we might experience fellowship with God,
with Jehovah!
Going back to verse 4, David said that we extol
Him that rides upon the heavens by His name Jah, and
rejoice before Him. I said that “Jah” is the name
“Jehovah,” I AM THAT I AM, a name that looks within God, a name in which God
says, “This is what I am. I am what I am.” And, by pointing to Himself, He is
pointing to the fact that He is a God who in Himself has everlasting
fellowship. God is not lonely. We stand before the great truth of the Trinity:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the truth that shows us that God is a
living God. He is not solitary throughout eternity. He is not lonely. But Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit love one another purely, talk freely, cherish one another
dearly. And, in His grace, He is moved to bring us to experience that
fellowship with Him (which the Bible calls “covenant”). Through the blood of
Jesus Christ, He brings us to experience a fellowship that He Himself is the
author of.
And in the family, He says, “I am pleased to
give you, through faith in Me, to enjoy that
fellowship with each other.” God’s grace gives us the institution of the family
as a place where we might experience fellowship with Him and each other as we
walk as His children in a weary and lonely world.
That means that our homes need to reflect Him.
Consciously we must build our homes to reflect Him. Our homes, then, will be
filled with graciousness. Note the word, “God sets the lonely in a house.” That
oozes with His graciousness and kindness. God is so gracious and filled with
pity toward us. Are you gracious, as God is gracious to you, to the members of
your family? Do you show that? Are you intolerant of the weaknesses of a wife
or a husband? Do you say, “Why does she need to be that way all the time?” Are
you irritable with your children? Is there, in your home, unacceptance,
yelling, fighting, bickering, a big lip, arguing? Do you children want to go home?
Our homes, first of all, must be filled with a graciousness—not with the criticism: “Why can’t you…,” but
with a graciousness that God shows to us in our salvation.
Our homes must not only be filled with
graciousness, but they must also be filled with compassion. God’s heart goes
out in pity towards us and toward the suffering. The family is the place where
we invite the lonely, the aged mother or widow, the lonely teenager, the
visitor at church. Our homes are places of compassion. Within our homes we must
be compassionate one toward another.
We are very concerned in the building of a
physical house about radon and asbestos because they are threats to our health.
So, if you buy a house that has radon and asbestos in it, it has to be taken
out. If there are the radon and asbestos of ill-will, resentment, bitterness,
anger, unforgiveness, take that out of your house.
Then our homes will be filled with communication, talking. If our homes are to
reflect the fellowship of God, then homes have to be places where we talk with
each other, we open up to each other, we talk about more than just earthly,
mundane things. We talk about our faith and our walk and our spiritual life
with God. The living Word of God must be the warmth, the comfort, the basis of
our fellowship. There must be times for regular family devotions around the
Word of God. We live in a lonely world, where everyone becomes more and more
distant from others, and where everyone lives in his own room, with his face
glued to a computer, to Facebook, to a television,
and never talking. The picture of the Christian family is not that. The picture
of the Christian family is a place of communion, fellowship, talking even as
God has communion with us.
I said the family is precious because it is the
place where God is pleased to give us to enjoy fellowship with Him. But the
family is precious also, according to our text today, because it is the
gracious means of God to deliver us from a life lived under the tyranny of
sinful pride.
When we come back again to read the text, we see
that the text is talking about more than just loneliness and the prison of
feeling isolated. But let us read the complete text, the text as a whole. “God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth
out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”
Now, the verse is written in what is called Hebrew parallelism, which means
that all of the parts must be taken together and reflect upon each other. So
the evil that is considered in the text, from which the family is a gift of God
to deliver us, is being solitary, alone, dwelling in chains and rebellion. The
meaning, then, is this: Our problem, as sinners, is that we live a life for
self, rebellious. We are narcissistic, we are under
the bondage of our own pride and selfishness. And as surely as the drops of the
rain fall to the earth by the hand of God and run into the tile and then into
the ditch and stream and river and out into the lake or ocean, so also the
course of our life, the course of a child’s life, flows to self-centered
bondage, the bondage of pride and sin—unless God’s grace brings us to the joy
of forsaking ourselves and finding our all in serving Him, unless God brings us
out of that bondage of sin into the liberty of the grace of God in Christ.
And what are the means that God uses for that?
You say, “Pastor, that’s the Holy Spirit, that’s the Word of God, it’s the
preaching.” Yes, but it is also the family. Also the Christian family is the
means of God to deliver us from a life lived under the tyranny of sinful pride.
We are born chained in rebellion—rebellion
against God. We are born proud, selfish, isolated, solitary.
There is no room for anybody else in our sinful pride, except that the other person become our footstool. This is what Satan instilled in
Adam and Eve: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. You are god!” And
Scripture defines our sin, for which the Son of God came to die and deliver us,
in this way: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to
his own way” (Is. 53:6). That selfishness, that pride, brings isolation. We say
it when we are filled with pride and we want our own sinful way. That is the
way we speak in the family. We say, “Well, if that’s the way it is around here,
I’m out of here!” Or we say, “My parents, who do they think they are to tell me!”
You see, there is no fellowship when rebellion and pride reign in our hearts.
There will be bickering, there will be fighting. There will only be emptiness.
We will end alone.
You say to me, “Oh, Pastor, I don’t know about
that. Look at the ungodly sinners who live according to their own sins and
pride. Look at them in their parties and in their bars. They are happy, they
are dancing, they are hugging, they are making out, they
are having a good time.” No! Hollow emptiness. It is
the clang of an empty barrel.
Young girl, you want attention? Do you want
someone to love you? And one day someone who does not know Jesus shows you some
attention. And he uses you. And, finally, you live together and you find that
he is irritable, and he hits you, and he abuses you. Sin is selfishness.
Selfishness is pride. Pride is loneliness. And it leads to bondage.
The verse speaks of chains. Our sinful pride
ensnares us. It isolates us and then sin enslaves us. Hear that. Sin first
isolates you. In your pride you leave the family. You leave the marriage. You
leave places that are going to tell you that you are wrong. You walk away
saying, “I’m not going to hear that. Not me!” Sin isolates you and then sin
enslaves you. When you think about “me, myself,” when you are filled with
self-pity and pride, the devil is bringing out the chains and he is ready to
lock you up in the chains and bondage of sin.
God’s gift of the family is so precious because
it is the institution to which His grace comes to deliver us from that sinful
pride, from a life lived in the bondage of self. That is why He gives us a
family. That is why He sets us in the church. For life in the believing family
and in the believing church is not self. The life of Jesus Christ is
fellowship. You must make room. You must destroy that idol that is called “me.”
God sets you in a family. Why did God put you in a family? This is the reason: Graciously
to turn you from the course of life that you would choose with the world, in
which you would come under the bondage of sinful pride, sinful me. He uses the
family to break that bondage by His grace so that we learn what it is to love
and to live in humble love and fellowship with each other, to yield our way, to
be considerate, to open our eyes for the other as a reflection of the grace of
God who has had respect and pity upon me.
So our families exist to teach us repentance.
Our families exist to teach us what sin is, and what selfishness and pride are,
and how we are to deal with that sin and repent. Mom and Dad are examples. That
means that Mom and Dad are not stuck on themselves—their own pleasures, their
own time, their own entertainment, their own figures. Mom and Dad are not stuck
on themselves. They teach—in how they live with each other. They teach wisely
and lovingly that life in Christ is to serve one another in self-denying love.
And they bring up their children that way. They direct the course of their
family away from the bondage of pride, the pride of the world, to the humility
and freedom of fellowship with God in Christ.
This is why the family is so precious. The
family is precious because it is the gift of God whereby we enjoy fellowship
with God. It is the gift of God whereby the tyranny of the bondage of a sinful
life lived under pride is to be broken.
Do you believe that? That is God’s Word. Then
guard your family. Guard it from the sewer, from the deluge of sexual
perversions aimed at ensnaring and destroying you and your children. Guard your
family and deliver it from the prevailing allurements of materialism.
Understand that you are not on earth simply to find out how many possessions
you can accumulate or to follow the latest fashion or to live for the dollar.
Above all things, defend your home from your
selfishness, from your pride, from your self-seeking.
The family, then, is God’s beautiful, precious
gift to us in the covenant of His grace. Cherish it by living in humble obedience
to God, by repenting of your sins and finding your refuge in the cross of Jesus
Christ.
Do you cherish your family? Do you know how
precious it is? Do you thank God for your family?
Is your family today in trouble? I know why David began
Psalm 68
as he did. He wrote: “Let God arise and, by His might, put
all His enemies to flight.” So we pray: “Lord, arise and defend my home. As
Let us pray.
Father, we thank Thee for the Word. And we pray
for Thy Spirit to work it in our hearts this day. In Jesus’
name, Amen.