The Family Unit Is Essential to Kingdom Politics

In our land today, we are living with kingdoms in conflict. We are living with kingdoms who are each competing for the attention of children and youth. These competing kingdoms oftentimes seek to rip away the fabric of the family. It’s not just one kingdom that seeks to dismantle the home either. We have the kingdom of entertainment. We have the kingdom of sports. We have the kingdom of social media. And, of course, we have the kingdom of politics. All these various kingdoms share a similar goal: much of what they intend to do is absorb attention through a myriad of distractions that seek to supersede and redefine the family’s influence in the home.

Family Is the Foundation of Society

The family is the target because the family is the first institution established by God that would serve as the foundation for the well-being of society and civilization. Like pouring a foundation for a building will determine the stability of what you build on it, when God established the family, He poured the foundation upon which civilization and society would stand. If and when the foundation of the family is shaken, cracked, or broken, the society that rests upon it will be in grave danger. The saga of a nation is the saga of its families written large.

Whoever owns the family owns the future.

When the family structure breaks down, all manner of calamity and chaos enter into society. When the family breaks down, crime goes up, poverty goes up, abuse goes up. When the family breaks down, gender confusion and role confusion go up. I could go on, but you get the point.

It is the role of civil government to promote and protect the family as God created it to be. This role is critical because the family serves as the foundation for the stability of the nation. Statistics demonstrate holistically that when families are intact—no matter the nation—crime is down, productivity is up, and peace is prevalent.

Whoever owns the family owns the future.

When wrong or false definitions undermine the roles in the family and the purpose of the family according to God’s prescribed way, we witness the devolution of society. This is especially apparent whenever the government takes an active role in seeking to undermine and replace the structure of the family itself.

The Devolution of Society

In Isaiah 3:12 and 25–26, God gives us a glimpse of what happens when He is removed from society and His prescribed order for the family is removed from a nation. We read:

O My people! Their oppressors are children,
And women rule over them.
O My people! Those who guide you lead you astray
And confuse the direction of your paths. (v. 12)

Your men will fall by the sword
And your mighty ones in battle.
And her gates will lament and mourn,
And deserted she will sit on the ground. (vv. 25–26)

God tells us in this passage that when the structure of the family got confused, the children became rebellious, and the women abandoned their biblical role in life and the home. Men became passive and weak to such a degree that the structures of society collapsed and fell.

Even if we go all the way back to Genesis 6, we are given a view of the evil breakdown of the family. When men became demonized and married women who then gave birth to demonically influenced children, violence broke out in all the earth. The inhabitants of the land became so wicked and immoral that God even regretted having made them. He says in Genesis 6:7, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”

God literally destroyed all of humanity, barring one family, with the flood because the foundation of the family and thus the foundation of society had become ruined. Society devolved to the point of destruction.

In order to reboot society, God returned to His original plan. He started it all over again. And He did so with a family. God had informed Noah that He would send a flood but that He would also establish His covenant through him. In this way, God had Noah enter the ark with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives, along with every living creature represented in groups of two. The two were to reflect a male and a female because without this gender representation, the creature would become extinct.

The Family Unit and Politics

The breakdown of the family is not an inconsequential situation. The distortion of gender roles is not a mere sideshow. Our entire future as a nation is banking on the family unit remaining intact and being able to survive the onslaught of the enemy’s tactics. But when the government joins hands with the enemy in order to seek to work against the family as well—through undermining it, redefining it, or trying to replace it—we as believers in Jesus Christ must take a stand politically. We cannot expect healing in our land if we turn a blind eye to the targeted attack on God’s definition of the family.

God owns the family, and He owns it by creative fiat.

The family structure is to set the pace for which society was created. Government does not own the family. Government has no children. God owns the family, and He owns it by creative fiat. In other words, He decided that it would exist and so He determined what it would be. He only backs what He created and when His creation abides by how He created us to function. If we choose to go our own way, we pick up the tab to fix the issues that arise.

When you purchase a product from the store, they often give you a manufacturer’s warranty. What this warranty states, without saying so directly, is that they stand behind the product. They back what they created. They warrant the viability of their product because they are willing to assume the costs should it break.

However, a warranty can become void. This happens when the user of the product decides to do something different with it than was originally intended. If a person takes a toaster, for example, and uses it as a baking pan in the oven rather to heat up toast on its own, then the toaster will no longer be under warranty. This is because a warranty remains valid only if the item is used according to its created purposes.

Similarly, God has warrantied society to work by virtue of the family structure. When the government, or any entity or individual for that matter, decides that the family should be about something other than what God has determined, society loses out on the warranty. When society loses the warranty, society is no longer covered. God is only going to stand by the product He created based on the reason why He created it. There will be no spiritual bailouts for a society gone astray from God’s intended purposes.