It’s very easy to point at the things which particularly concern us and declare with great conviction, ‘This is the reason why we are witnessing the disintegration of society’. If we make claims like this we should be prepared to back them up.

To put my cards on the table, I happen to believe that the majority of suffering and wretchedness in our society could be cured if people would accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and allow Him to refashion their lives. A major positive impact would be that we would abandon the secular world-view which has brought about the disintegration of the family, and instead adopt God’s biblical standard for marriage and family life. Even if people were not converted to Christ but only attempted to follow the Bible’s teaching outwardly, there would be a marked alteration for the better in human behaviour.

The Family In The Bible

This might not be as easy to back up as some may expect because the Bible does not contain a single clear definition of what a family is. A superficial reading of Scripture reveals very differing examples of family life and the relationships between men and women, parents and children. We witness polygamy, concubinage, adultery, fornication, slave women being used to carry on a family line, even wholesale abduction of women (Judges 21:23) as a method of preventing a tribe of Israel from dying out. Some of the most celebrated men and women in Scripture were spectacularly bad parents, particularly when it came to favouritism between their children.

Opponents of Christianity immediately jump on this and see the examples of poor behaviour amongst biblical leaders as signifying Scriptural approval, or at least acceptance, of such conduct. What unbelievers choose to ignore is that above all the Bible is a realistic book and accurately describes human behaviour as it is, warts and all. That David organised the murder of Uriah, the husband of his lover Bathsheba, does not signify God’s approval of either murder or adultery: it shows instead that there are no plaster saints, just fallen human beings. The descriptive is not the prescriptive. What we have to do is look for the principles within Scripture which teach us about family life.

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