The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home

by Russell D. Moore

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” he said (Luke 14:26). Most people would not want that as the theme verse of their church’s summer children’s camp, much less written in frosting on a wedding or anniversary celebration cake. When we hear this verse referenced at all, it usually is mostly in terms of what the verse does not say, reassuring people that “hate” here does not mean hostility or disrespect but priority of affection. That’s true enough, and needs to be said.

Regarding this verse, C. S. Lewis was, no doubt, correct in saying it is “profitable only to those who read it with horror.” As he put it, “The man who finds it easy enough to hate his father, the woman whose life is a long struggle not to hate her mother, had probably best keep clear of it.”3

If we seek first the kingdom, we are better able to seek the welfare of our families. If we love Jesus more than family, we are freed to love our families more than we ever would have otherwise. If we give up our suffocating grasp on our family—whether that’s our idyllic view of our family in the now, our nostalgia for the family of long ago, our scars from family wounds, or our worries for our family’s future—we are then free to be family, starting with our place in the new creation family of the church. Family is a blessing, yes. But family is only a blessing if family is not first.

Unmarried Christians often feel as though they are deficient (which would mean that our religion itself is deficient since Jesus himself never married).

And, as we go, the church is a household economy, where all of us use our gifts for the sake of the mission. The fact that every person has a gift for the upbuilding of the rest of us is one more way of God signaling to us that we belong. We are wanted. We are loved.

We are family. That means no Christian lives alone, and no Christian dies alone. There’s no such thing as a “single” Christian.

My marriage is my church’s business. My fellow church members’ struggles with matters unique to singleness are not his issues alone but mine too. We belong to one another.

When Peter said to Jesus that he had left everything to follow him (which certainly seemed to be true), Jesus responded, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).

We should expect persecution in this age, but we should also expect to find within the community of the cross a “hundredfold” the family we may have left behind. That’s in this present age. We have even more waiting for us in the life that is to come. Jesus’ saying that in the resurrection there would be no marrying or giving in marriage but that we would be “like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25) can yield a great deal of confusion. In fact, it can cause us to squirm, if we are honest. We want to go to heaven, but we see it as an uprooting of what really matters to us—friendships, family, relationships. That was what Jesus was undoing in his controversy with the Sadducees, in which he made the “no marriage in heaven” comment. These religious leaders, who did not believe in bodily resurrection, sought to trap him with a ridiculous scenario of a woman who married one brother after another, each dying. Will she be the wife of seven husbands in the new creation, they asked? They presupposed a view of the future that is not resurrection life but a kind of zombie existence—an extension of this age’s priorities and callings into eternity. The calling of marrying and populating the earth will be over, because Jesus will have presented to his Father the full number of his human children. The universe will be alive with human life and human rule. Our impoverished view of the supernatural leads us to conclude that “angelic” existence means a lonely, passionless, static boredom. The ang...

It’s hard to imagine Wonder Woman as overweight or unattractive by the standards of Madison Avenue. In that sense, she seems to reinforce the cultural message that a woman’s value is, at least in part, in whether she seems physically attractive to men, that the supermodels shall inherit the earth.

Moreover, Wonder Woman almost couldn’t exist if not for gender wars. Many men were indeed willing to become her slaves, if for no other reason than her ability to relieve them of the burdens culture puts on men to bear responsibility for the provision and protection of women.

In this letter, God is disclosing something monumental, something Paul said had been hidden from previous generations and was now unveiled. The mystery is this, that God’s purposes are seen in Christ,

“as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9–10). This mystery is further explained in the makeup and mission of the church, “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:6).

In this mystery, we see that the gospel is not an afterthought rescue operation, but the point of all of crea...

There’s a powerful force at work, driving people toward sexual union, a force that sometimes makes us feel as

though we are going crazy.

The same is true for both men and women (perhaps an even more shocking claim in a first-century context). Both Jews and Gentiles, both men and women, are considered “sons” in the context of inheritance. An inheritance, of course, went from father to son, usually the first-born son. A woman’s share of an inheritance was derived from her marriage, which is why widows were especially economically threatened. In Christ, though, women as well as men will rule and reign in the new creation awaiting us.

Often, the “other woman” or “other man” in a marriage is not a real person with which a spouse is having an affair, but instead is an imagined, idealized husband or wife to which the spouse is constantly compared.

Moreover, “abandonment” is more, in my view, than simply the walking away from the physical location of the home. Paul is speaking of a marriage in which the other partner has determined that the marriage is over. This is obvious to see in the case where, for instance, a man’s wife leaves him and refuses to come home, saying that she’s “moving on”

I believe abandonment would also include, for instance, abusive behavior that makes the home an unsafe environment for a person or his or her children. If you are being abused, or if your children are in danger of being abused, leave the home immediately.

Such satanic behavior toward the vulnerable makes a home uninhabitable and thus, in my view, clearly constitutes abandonment. Someone escaping such abuse is not in sin to divorce the abusive spouse and is, in my view, free to remarry.

Some would say that this abandonment exception applies only to those with an “unbelieving” spouse, and yet the New Testament does not categorize “believing” merely as those who are formally aligned with a church. The one who is unrepentant in sin may or may not be personally regenerate;

That person, though, is to be, finally, where there is no repentance shown, treated “as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matt. 18:17). That doesn’t mean irredeemable (consider how Jesus treated sinners and Gentiles and tax collectors!); it does mean that the person is to be considered outside of the people ...

As I’ve detailed elsewhere, God intervened in our lives, wrecking me and reconstructing me in all sorts of ways, making me realize what an awful father I would have been if children had been as easy to birth as they had been to avoid.