BUILDING A HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH, Message One
“THE FOUNDATION OF THE FAMILY”
Genesis 1:26-31

If you are constructing a house, it will only be as strong as its foundation. That is true of building a family. Our home must be constructed with Christ as the cornerstone and built on the bedrock of Bible truth.

The psalmist asked, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3) There has never been a time in our nation’s history when the family has been in greater peril. The very foundations are being destroyed. Because we have departed from God and His Word, human life has been devalued and home life destabilized.

We still remember the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf coast. Similarly, a storm surge of sin has swept across America leaving human debris in its evil tide. The evidence is everywhere—abortion, infanticide, genetic engineering, physician assisted suicide, divorce, polygamy, pornography, homosexuality and such.

The foundations are being destroyed. What can the righteous do? We must faithfully proclaim the foundational truths of the family. We must purpose to live by them. In Scripture we see the family is:

1. A DIVINE PRODUCT (1:26) When I look at my watch, I know there is a watchmaker. It is the product of a designer. So human life and the family is the handiwork of God. It is not the product of random mutations, of chance, a cosmic accident, the product of millions of years of evolution. Nothing has been so destructive a weapon in the Devil’s hands as the deception of Darwinism. Evolution is an evil that has invaded all our culture and has shaken our foundations.

If human life is just a result of the survival of the fittest and we are here by chance, then what purpose is there to life? What would be wrong with abortion? Why is life sacred? What makes a human child any different than an animal? In this thinking, abortion should not only be legal, but encouraged. It will enable us to cull out the inferior and engineer a master race. Hitler would have loved to live to see this.

Those who fully buy into evolution must conclude that there is nothing sacred about marriage and the family as we have known it. Such customs and traditions have merely evolved and will continue to change. There is no room for a God who has spoken with authority in this system of belief. That is a destructive lie. The fact is that the family is a Divine product. It has:

2. A DIVINE PATTERN (1:27) Here we see male and female created for each other. Each is different by design—not just physically, but in every way—equally made in the image of God—neither superior to the other, but different in their roles. Now what our politically correct society does is try to obliterate all distinctions in the sexes in the name of equality. The harmful effects of this lie are many. Gender lines are blurred and boys and girls grow up confused about what it means to be male and female and how to embrace their sexuality.

Not only has radical feminism attacked the foundations of family life with its demand for sex sameness, but militant homosexuals are taking the assault to another level. A determined war is being waged on traditional marriage to break down all barriers to accept every kind of perversion. That’s why you can have “Brokeback Mountain” a film about two cowboys messing around with each other be so celebrated and promoted. The farther we move from the Creator, the deeper we plunge into sin. Scripture is plain about the inevitable results (Rom.1:18-32). The family as founded by God has:

3. A DIVINE PURPOSE (1:28) Sex is God’s gift for procreation of the species and pleasure of the spouses and both are important. Lest you think, that God is anti-sex, you should know He created it. Hugh Hefner did not invent sex as some would suppose. While the Bible condemns sex outside of marriage as sin, it celebrates sex within marriage. There is an entire book of the Bible devoted to the joy of married love—the Song of Solomon. The Bible says, “Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge.” (Hebrews 13:4) Sex as mere skin to skin in a casual relationship is wrong, but sex as two souls committed in marriage is wonderful. But when we abandon that humans are created in the image of God, just highly developed animals, then we buy into the philosophy promoted by the Bloodhound Gang in a song that says, “You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals. Let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

Our culture also celebrates people living together and having children out of wedlock. Hollywood stars glamorize it. Single mothers trying to raise kids on their own is too often the result—and kids need a father in the home. Yet consider the following article from Kairos Journal:

“Father Hunger”—Why Children Need a Dad
On May 19, 1992, national controversy erupted after Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech on “family values.” Quayle argued that “when families fail, society fails” and outlined ways to build strong homes in America. The media, however, zeroed in on one line in the address: “It doesn't help matters,” the Vice President observed,
when primetime TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”1
That relatively brief comment about a sitcom in an otherwise lengthy and substantive address proved to be too much for some people to handle. Quayle was pilloried by late night comedians, attacked in the op-ed pages, and ridiculed for clinging to the outmoded beliefs of the past. But the Vice-President, it turns out, had the last laugh. Less than a year after the infamous “Murphy Brown Speech,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a leading sociologist at Rutgers University, wrote a cover story for The Atlantic Monthly that said it all: “Dan Quayle Was Right.”2
Study after study bears out the fact that children need a father in the home.3 Sadly, as David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, has documented, the United States is increasingly a “fatherless America.” He reports, that in 1995, only 35 percent of children lived with their father. Furthermore, somewhere between one quarter and one half of all children never (or almost never) see their biological fathers.4
Those statistics are especially tragic in light of research that shows that the presence of a biological father, married to a mother, dramatically improves the well-being of children and society.5 Fathers protect their children; reports of child abuse—physical and sexual—have increased with the rise in fatherlessness.6 Fathers stem violence: “Sixty percent of America’s rapists, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes.”7 Fathers contribute to their children’s academic success; fatherless kids are twice as likely to drop out of high school.8 Fathers deter teenage pregnancy; girls are 2.5 times more likely to become pregnant if they lack a father’s daily contribution.9 A bevy of additional research bolsters the claim that little boys and girls need Dad.10
In spite of the evidence, some still persist in arguing that fathers are dispensable. In January of 2004, Suzi Leather, chair of Great Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, downplayed the distinctions between male and female parents: “It is the quality of the relationship that matters not that a man or woman are involved.”11 She wanted to keep doctors from discouraging single women from having kids. What is truly remarkable is that Leather’s viewpoint continues to enjoy mainstream status in the culture.
But this debate is not ultimately just about sociological data. It is about hurting children; children who suffer from what one author calls “father hunger”:
It’s an ache in the heart, a gnawing anxiety in the gut. It’s a longing for a man, not just a woman, who will care for you, protect you, and show you how to survive in the world. For a boy, especially, it’s the raw, persistent, desperate hunger for dependable male love, and for an image of maleness that is not at odds with love. Father hunger.12
Looking back, Vice President Quayle’s warning seems prophetic. The pangs of father hunger are still felt everywhere.

God’s intent was to fill the earth with godly offspring, products of a functional family of faith!

4. A DIVINE PROVISION (1:29-30) We are stewards of creation. We’ve been given its resources. So many have accepted the myth of overpopulation and dwindling resources.

Our world is not overpopulated. You can drive for miles down the interstate without seeing scarcely a house. Sure, you'll come to cities and villages and metropolitan areas densely populated, but most of America is still wide open spaces. I've been to India that is often described as an example of overpopulation. It is true that in the urban areas there are wall to wall people, but when you leave those cities you find vasts forests and fields with few residents.

Do people starve to death in India? Every day. But it isn't because of dwindling resources. They grow enough grain to feed their population, but rats devour much of it. You can't kill the rats because in Hinduism they may be Grandma reincarnated, and some definitely resemble a brother-in-law! People starve to death there because of false religion. In other places there is famine because of brutal regimes attempting genocide, dictators hoarding the nation's resources and foreign aid, denying it to entire people groups. In America we throw away enough food to feed the world. Selfishness and sin are the reasons that people perish--not that God hasn't provided enough food.

Then, for the family, there is:

5. A DIVINE PRONOUNCEMENT (1:31) God pronounces blessing on all those who build a family by His blueprint. How can we do that? If the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do? We must repent--that word literally means to change our mind. We must believe and receive the truth rather than the lies spawned in hell. Rather than conforming to our culture, we must renew our minds by the Word of God. Then, building our family on a foundation of faith, God can gaze on us and declare, "Very good!"

Footnotes :
1
Dan Quayle, “Address to the Commonwealth Club of California,” ( Commonwealth Club, California, May 19, 1992), Commonwealthclub.org, http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/20thcentury/92-05quayle-speech.html.
2
Whitehead had the research to back her thesis up. See Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1993, 47-84. Whitehead followed up her article with the thoroughly researched work, The Divorce Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
3
See Kairos Journal articles, "Top Ten Father Facts," "Fathers Are Shepherds" & "What's a Dad to Do?"
4
It is commonly reported that over half of all marriages now end in divorce and that the mother is usually granted custody of the kids. While forty percent of these mothers lived with the father for a time, cohabiting partners rarely stay together. See Paul R. Amato and Julie M. Sobolewski, “The Effects of Divorce on Fathers and Children: Nonresidential Fathers and Stepfathers,” in The Role of the Father in Child Development, ed. Michael E. Lamb (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 341, 342, 348. Among family specialists, the above statistics are rarely contested. “We are all aware of the increase in marital breakdown, single-parent families and the dramatic change in women’s position in society—all of which reduce the significance of fathers . . . Nonetheless, we believe that good fathers are profoundly important for the child’s development and the establishment of sound mental health. . .” Judith Trowell, “Setting the Scene,” in The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-evaluation, eds. Judith Trowell and Alicia Etchegoyen (New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2002), 17. “Increased divorce rates and the inexorable rise in single-parent families have contributed to a social climate in which fathers, as consistent and stable role models, are increasingly unavailable to the next generation. Even unstable fathering role models are in short supply.” Anton Obholzer, “Foreword,” in The Importance of Fathers, xv. “Marriages are not only breaking up in large numbers, but the institution itself is in decline. The marriage rate is dropping. In place of marriage we are witnessing the rapid rise of nonmarital cohabitation, which by its very nature implies a lower level of commitment. More problematic still is the increase in ‘single parenting by choice.’” David Popenoe, Life without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5.
5
“Overall, the high level of divorce in American society has not only undermined the goal of encouraging greater paternal involvement in children’s lives, but also increased risk of a variety of financial, educational, and psychological problems for children.” Ibid., 360. “[I]t is clear that the absence of the biological father reduces children’s access to important economic, parental, and community resources. The loss of those resources affects cognitive development and future opportunities.” Sara McLanahan, “Growing Up without a Father,” in Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, ed. Cynthia R. Daniels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 91.
6
Popenoe, Ibid., 66-73.
7
Ibid., 63. This may be because, as studies have shown, fathers contribute something to discipline that, generally speaking, mothers do not. Ibid., 146. Positively speaking, it has been shown that the presence of fathers leads to more compassionate, affectionate adults. Ibid., 148-149.
8
McLanahan, “Growing Up without a Father,” 86.
9
Ibid.
10
Sociologists note that fathers are more likely to roughhouse with their young children. In such contexts, kids are exposed to healthy competition and risk-taking skills. Furthermore, they learn how to regulate their emotions and practice self-control. Popenoe, Ibid., 144. Additionally, fathers complement a mother’s discipline: “Several studies have found that fathers are more effective than mothers at getting quick action.” Ibid., 146.
11
Jeremy Laurence, “IVF Revolution: ‘It’s the Relationships Quality that Counts, not People’s Sex,’” The Independent, January 21, 2004, 6. Italics added. A copy of this article can be found at http://www.canadiancrc.com/articles/Indep_Suzi_Leather_relationships_21JAN04.htm (accessed August 10, 2005).
12
Maggie Gallagher, “Father Hunger,” in Lost Fathers, 165.