Daily Dose 25: The Keys 1: Key Purpose and Key People

Home’s Purpose:

Home is the oldest of all the social institutions, set in place by the Lord at the creation. Throughout all of man’s existence, virtually every person has had some kind of home experience. That makes for too many opinions about what might be good, bad, unique, or vital about home  as a social institution. If our priorities are going to help us oversee our homes well, those priorities need to grow from what is true,  not what we think or our cultures declare, not what we or our nations experience.

Several verses (Psalms 127:8, Psalms 78: 1-8; Deuteronomy 6: 3-9; and Proverbs 2: 1-6) work together to formulate the truth about home’s unique and vital purpose: to transmit biblical truth from one generation to the next. (Note: if our priority home were built, with a proper front door and rooms,  a statement so apparently limited to the Judeo-Christian context would require some en suite thinking time for balance points. As with the promise for context for the, “Are you a Christian?” question, I can only ask patience until we at least get inside with a roof over our heads before we sit and talk over balance points.)

What does this mean? Transmitting biblical truth from one generation to the next is crucial for the well-being of civilization. The Lord has chosen to fulfill this imperative societal need through the most widespread, and autonomous of all His institutions. Individual families are responsible to the Lord for how effectively they fulfill their home mission. For any and every event that has occurred in each and every home around the world throughout history, the priority of those events has been determined the same way: how directly and effectively did the event transmit some aspect of biblical truth from one generation to the next. Think of it: every tuck into bed, every family meal, every sickbed experience, every flooded home, every divorce, every trip to the store, every fleeing refugee family, every read-aloud, every everything that can and has happened within and to the home has either supported or undermined the transmitting of biblical truth to the next generation.

Home’s People:

Who has God chosen to participate in the truth transfer? From Ephesians 5-6 we understand that a husband married to a wife and their subsequent children are the key people in the home. We can fracture and rearrange the component parts after the fact, but without a man and a woman producing children and then staying together to rear them into adults who will in turn do the same thing, biblical homes will cease to exist, and with their demise, the core means to transmit biblical truth would also disappear. Grandparents, extended family and friends are part of the whole package, but this is the core for each family unit. Each family member has specific roles to fulfill within the home, and their individual gestalt is tied to how they embrace those roles as right and best for them.