Chapter Three

The Family as Spiritual Warfare

Born and reared on the West Coast, my student had never before been in the Deep South. Travelling with me to my home state of Mississippi for a speaking engagement, he was seated next to a courtly southern pastor. The pastor, knowing that the student was interning at the time in my office, assumed there might be a Mississippi connection, maybe even a family connection to a fellow minister in the state. Speaking in a low voice so as not to compete with the announcements from the podium nearby, the pastor leaned over to my student and drawled, “Who’s your Daddy?”

My student sat silently for a half-moment, wondering if this was some southern cultural way of greeting, along the lines of “How are you?” Not knowing what response would be expected, my student just guessed and said, “Um . . . you are?” The pastor stared back at him, and then looked over at me and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

The conversation turned out to be a good one, but that initial banter did not work. In order to understand one another, these two would have needed to understand that “Daddy” in a southern context can refer, often, to a grown man’s father, not just to that of a small child. They both also would have needed to understand that, in a Mississippi context, asking who one’s relatives are, or what one’s hometown is, is far more than just small talk. It’s another way of asking, “Who are you?” The wording couldn’t transcend regional cultures, but the basic principle, in many ways, does and always has. Your family background and family connections tell much about you. That will not, of course, be as immediately recognizable if you live in an urbanized area with lots of people coming and going, where people are less likely to know your family, than it would be if you are from a small, rural town. But, even in the most cosmopolitan place, much of what makes you “you” comes from all sorts of family connections, only some of which you are conscious of at any given time. We often don’t know where our genetic predispositions or our cultural practices have come from; they are just there, and they inform for us what seems “normal” or “right.” There’s much mystery there.

For some, that idea is comforting. They take pride in their family, and see in their connectedness a kind of solidarity and belonging. This is the kind of person who might keep a detailed genealogy on hand or put a family crest on the wall. For others, their family background is troubling or even smothering. They don’t want to think they might end up making the decisions their parents or grandparents or others have made. Either way, we naturally discover who we are in terms of our families. Some people do this by their similarities to their families, prizing their family heritage, or their family business, or their family religion. Some people define themselves over and against their families—spending a whole lifetime proving that they are not their fathers or their mothers. “Look at how different I am from them,” their lives seem to say. “I am my own person.” For some, to “be myself” means to distinguish themselves from their families. The ways their family backgrounds still shape who they are can be disorienting or even terrifying. Regardless, the family persists, and has a great deal to do with who we are, how we perceive ourselves, and how we evaluate the present and plan for the future. That’s why family matters—and not just for those who consider themselves “family people.”

But, behind that, there’s another reason why family matters, to all of us. Family is spiritual warfare. Such language makes some of us uneasy, sounding like the hyper-dramatic incantations they have seen in the exorcism services of some Pentecostal sect. In reality, though, the unseen subtext of the world around us is intrinsic to the thought of the Bible, and only seems antiquated or outlandish in our secularized Western context. Every ancient culture—and most cultures outside of the First World even now—has held that there are mysterious realities afoot in the cosmos, including personal beings who mean us harm. In our scientific era, we could conclude that we know better than they, that we have moved beyond their superstition. And yet, our scientific age should demonstrate to us, even more, that even with all we know about the universe, we learn every day how much we do not know. Scientific progress has not eradicated mystery but revealed mysteries we previously never even knew how to name.

The gospel does not shy away from this reality. The apostle John wrote straightforwardly: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). If we accept Jesus’ reading of the cosmic story—and I do—then we must reckon with his teaching that the world around us is like the house of a strong man that Jesus has bound and whose pirated goods Jesus is now plundering (Mark 3:27). We must further recognize that the way these “principalities and powers” (as the Scriptures call them) rule is through accusation and death (Rev. 12:10). At the cross, Jesus defeated the accusing spirits by breaking the deception they have over the human image-bearers (2 Cor. 4:4–6) and by absorbing in his sacrifice on the cross the just penalty for our rebellion against God. In the crucified Christ, God has “forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13–14). In this way, he “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:15). By sharing our human nature, and through his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus set out through his own death to “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14–15). When the kingdom of God comes, in Jesus, the old order is torn down. The kingdom of Christ means cosmic regime change, and the powers-that-be fight back against that reality.

* * * *

So what does spiritual warfare have to do with the family, in general, or with your family in particular? First of all, it matters because in order to understand the gospel we must see that something has gone badly wrong with the universe, something Christian doctrine calls “the Fall.” When our ancestral humanity opted to align with a snake-god rather than with their Creator, their mission was derailed into exile from God’s life-giving presence. That meant catastrophe for everything connected to image-bearing humanity. And the family, among the first of God’s creation structures, bears much of the weight of this calamity. As soon as the man and woman sin, their one-flesh union is disrupted. They are ashamed in the presence of each other, and start blaming each other for their insurrection. Their marriage now is riddled with distrust and disharmony and rivalry (Gen. 3:16b). Their vocations are then directly frustrated. The woman as “mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20) now suffers pain and anguish in childbearing (Gen. 3:16a). The man’s calling to till the ground from which he came is frustrated by a cursed creation that no longer recognizes him as God’s representative (Gen. 3:17–19). Eastward from Eden, the biblical story shows us families splintering apart in virtually every kind of breakdown. We see brothers envying and murdering each other (Gen. 4:1–16), polygamy (Gen. 4:23), father/son division (Gen. 9:18–27), rape (Gen. 19:1–11; 34:1–31), incest (Gen. 19:30–38), vigilante tribal honor killings (Gen. 34:1–31), sexual blackmail (Gen. 39:1–23), even a husband willing to prostitute his wife for political influence (Gen. 12:10–20). Again, this is, mind you, all just in the first book of the Bible. The wreckage continues throughout the canon, and beyond. The peace of Eden for the family is no more.

This is important for us to recognize because in order to work toward healthy families we must grapple with the fact that all of us are part of a dysfunctional family, because all of us are rooted in the family history of Adam. Part of what our family background does for us is to embed in our psyches what we deem “normal” or “abnormal.” When a couple marries, for example, they must work to merge all sorts of habits and temperaments, and that’s hard enough. But often the ways we do things are picked up, without a rational decision, from the way we saw our parents do things.

When my wife and I married, one of the things I maintained from day one was that I would never want a dog in the house. I really didn’t have an argument beyond, “That’s nasty.” Looking back, this is probably because my parents carried an unspoken attitude that an animal in the house was always unclean and because the people I knew who did have pets in their home tended to confirm that (as they usually had an entire menagerie of them). Now, over twenty years later, I type these words while sitting at my feet is our dog Waylon. I had not thought through the question of dogs; it just didn’t fit my definition of “normal,” until I learned to see otherwise. Sometimes this grid through which we see the world is benign, but often it is not. That’s true not just for some of us, at the micro level, but for all of us, at the macro level.

The gospel informs us that we cannot understand the world around us rightly without distinguishing between those aspects that are “from the beginning,” and thus good, and those aspects that are part of the curse of the reign of death. I once heard a man justify the fact that he cheats on his wife with multiple women because it is “natural.” Monogamy is rare among mammals, he reasoned, and our evolutionary history has designed men to seek to “spread their seed” as broadly as possible. People are killed every day in mudslides and crocodile attacks, too, so should we conclude that because this is “natural” we should allow murder? We know from God’s Word that nature has gone awry. Things are not the way they are supposed to be, and much of that distortion shows up in family life.

The family is not only part of the problem, though, but part of the solution. Yes, humanity experiences difficulty and travail in childbearing, but the grace there is that humanity does in fact go forward into the future. In fact, from the very beginning, God threatened the serpent with the prophecy that its skull would be crushed by the family. The “offspring of the woman” would be the undoing of the dark rulers of this age, though not without pain and distress: “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). That’s, of course, exactly what happened. Through the human family, and specifically through the house of Abraham and Sarah, God brought to us a child through whom everything is reconciled, “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20).

* * * *

Family is difficult because we live in a fallen world. Our psyches are shaped by early childhood, and we bring that glory and brokenness into every other relationship in life. But family is also difficult because family is a staging ground for a universe in the throes of regime change. Family is difficult because family represents far more than just genetic lumping. The demonic powers care about the family not because they are in revolt against “family values” but because they are in revolt against God. These powers are intimidating in their ancient craft, but they are a relatively cowardly lot. When the incarnate Jesus walked into their presence, they would shriek in terror, often begging him to send them away (Mark 5:7–13). Why? This is because, in the sign of Jesus, the principalities and powers see their own inevitable future destruction. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” they cry out. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:24). Of course, that’s exactly who Jesus is, and not exactly what he has come to do.

The Bible tells us that this visible depiction of Christ and the gospel is not limited to Jesus’ physical presence in any given space and time. God created everything after the pattern of Jesus Christ, summing up everything, seen and unseen, in him (Eph. 1:9–10). He is the pattern and blueprint for everything. Everything is created through him and for him, and in him everything “holds together” (Col. 1:16–17).

What this means is that God has embedded pictures and analogies of this ultimate truth of the cosmos in the creation itself. None of these pictures exhaustively show us the purposes of God or the gospel, but they point in that direction. Family is no exception. We long to belong, to have and to hold, not out of some random, evolutionary accident but because God is “the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14–15). Marriage is not just about companionship or procreation but is a mystery, pointing to the one-flesh union of Christ and his church (Eph. 5:32). Parenting is not just about human flourishing (although it is that), but a reflection of the Fatherhood of God (Matt. 5:7–11; Heb. 12:5–11) and the motherhood of the Holy City to which we belong in Christ (Gal. 4:26).

It is no accident, then, that the old serpent seeks, in every generation, to disrupt the peace of the marriage covenant, of the integrity of the sexual union, of the parent/child bond, of the unity of the church as the household of God. These are organic icons of the mystery of Christ, the very reality that crushes the skulls of the old order. Family points beyond itself and beyond nature to the truth about humanity: that the end of our lives is not intended to be the silence of the casket but the clinking of glasses, not a funeral but a wedding feast (Rev. 19:6–9). That’s why the demonic powers rage in fury against the family order. The destruction of a family that images and announces the gospel is just as sacrilegious as desecrating a holy place. The powers aligned against God always wish to display trophies of their presence on his ground. The Philistines wanted the ark of the covenant in the temple of their god (1 Sam. 5:2). Babylon did not wish to simply raze the City of David, but to carry back the holy vessels of the Lord with them (2 Kings 24:13). The spirit of Antichrist seats itself in the temple of God himself (2 Thess. 2:4). Those counter-kingdom powers delight in doing the same by defacing the visible sign of gospel reign in marriages, or parenting, or extended families, or—perhaps most of all—the unity of the household of the church.

This warfare is not just cosmic or social but decidedly personal. In the Proverbs, a father warns his son that adultery could appear to “just happen” when in reality it is a strategically conceived plot, the coaxing of a hunted prey into a slaughterhouse (Prov. 5–7). Perhaps you have noticed this in your own life. Just when it seems that your family situation is what you would like, or what God would like for you, something unhinges. It would be easy to blame this on the external pressures and temptations around us. We can say that technology is too difficult to navigate, that the culture is too sexualized, or that “people just don’t respect the family like they used to.” The Bible allows no such nostalgia, however, showing us the perils to the family in every generation outward from Eden.

We have different points of vulnerability, not just in our internal lives but also in our families. For some, the pull is to abandonment. For others, the pull is to infidelity. To others still, the pull is to selfishness or negligence. There are powers at work who know your vulnerabilities and those around you. You cannot fight such battles with your intelligence or your willpower. Such spiritual warfare must be met, at every point, with the gospel. The gospel informs our place in the family because the gospel redefines two points at which the devils rage the most: our identity and our inheritance.

When Jesus taught us to pray, the first words on his tongue were “Our Father.” That is, before anything else, a statement about who we are. Jesus is the son of the Father, language that situates him in his eternal relationship to God (John 5:18–23), but also situates him as the true Israel of God, God’s firstborn son (Hosea 11:1; Matt. 2:15) and as the heir of the throne of David (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:26–27). Like most evangelical Christians, I conclude most of my prayers with the words “in Jesus’ name.” Jesus told us, “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14).

In my younger days, I took this to mean that those words would especially get God’s attention, so I would pepper them all around requests that were of particular importance to me. “In Jesus’ name, please let me pass Algebra, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name.” That’s not what Jesus was telling us to do and is, in fact, the exact opposite. Before teaching his disciples to pray, he taught them how not to pray. He taught us not to use prayer as a way of public display, to seem pious to those around us. But public display is only one of his concerns.

He also said we shouldn’t “heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matt. 6:7). That was certainly true of virtually every other people on the earth, who thought of their gods as distant, impersonal figures who, at best, regarded human beings as their servants. With gods like that, a people would need to learn how to find ways to gain an audience. Think of the priests of Baal cutting themselves and screaming into the sky: “but there was no voice. No one answered; no one paid attention” (1 Kings 18:29). The prophet Elijah, on the other hand merely prayed, and the fire fell (1 Kings 18:36–38). Of those who feel the need to manipulate their god with their constructed phrases or magical incantations, Jesus said, “Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). There are two crucial parts of that statement; “your Father” and “what you need”: identity and inheritance.

Our family backgrounds are meant to tell us something about who we are and, more importantly, what we are not. We aren’t self-creating, self-sustaining gods. We are part of someone else’s story—backward into the past and, perhaps, forward into the future. You and I are each the product of a near-infinite series of decisions that other people made. If your great-great-grandfather had not emigrated from his homeland, you might not be able to read the language on this page. If my grandmother had not decided to disregard her parents’ wishes and elope as a teenager with that older man, I would not exist. I would not want anyone else to repeat her decision, and can only imagine my dismay if one of my own children were to do likewise, but, nonetheless, I am glad I exist.

A sense of identity is marked out in many ways, starting with our names. Think of how much of the Bible is taken up with genealogies. I was once horrified to hear a preacher reading through a text of Scripture, skipping over a list of “begats” with the words “yada . . . yada . . . yada” before starting back up with the narrative. Setting aside this man’s thoughtless handling of the Word of God, one can understand something of why the preacher did not want to get bogged down in a series of names as “the father of . . .” and “the son of . . .” one another. It doesn’t seem relevant. But it is. Note how often the Bible refers to figures as “Joshua, son of Nun” or “Saul, son of Kish” or “John, the son of Zebedee.” Even in our individualistic cultural moment, we haven’t quite transcended this.

You probably don’t know anything about my relatives, but if you know me you are confronted immediately with at least something about them when you learn my name. “Moore” tells you who my father’s family is, and, if one wanted, tells a story that could be traced back to, I’m told, the moors of England. Even if that proved not to be where my name came from, the family lore of it would still tell you something about us: that we’re the kind of people that would like to be from the moors of England. I suppose, if I wanted, I could seek to individuate myself by rejecting my family name, and just be “Russell.” That too, though, would point back to my family. The fact that my name is “Russell” and not “Sergei” or “Moon Unit” is because my parents were neither Russians nor hippies.

In fact, even if I were to rename myself, the people around me still would have tied my name to my family: “That’s Ozymandias, Gary and Renee’s little boy . . . something’s wrong with him.” Far deeper, though, than the relative superficiality of our names is the way that we learn who we are, very early on, from our interactions with our families. Psychologists tell us how our personalities can be shaped lifelong by the ways that our parents “mirrored” back to us who we were as individuals and as those who belong in the larger family structure. Identity is rooted in family.

Inheritance is a concept Western people, at first glance, find even harder to relate to their lives. We tend to think of inheritance as a transfer of assets. As I write this, I have just heard of yet another family torn apart by grown children bickering over a newly dead parent’s belongings, fighting one another tooth-and-toenail over quilts and ceramic cats. That’s not what an inheritance is about, in the biblical understanding of the word.

An inheritance wasn’t so much a transfer of money and property as the cultivation of a way of life. The original humanity was created to cultivate a garden. Within the bounds of Israel, God gave detailed instructions on how to care for the ground, maintaining cycles of crops, for example. The inheritance of a farming family would be not just the land but the lifetime of working that went into it, along with the received practical wisdom of agriculture. Simon Peter would have inherited nets and fishing supplies from his father, but along with that he would have inherited the expertise of knowing when to cast a net, how to sail a boat, how to spot a storm. Indeed, the Old Testament idea of Jubilee is rooted in the idea of inheritance. Because families were connected economically through the generations, one person’s financial woes were not his own individual problem. As Christopher Wright argues, “The economic collapse of a family in one generation was not to condemn all future generations to the bondage of perpetual indebtedness.”2 The Jubilee is not just a pattern of old covenant law. Jesus’ inaugural sermon, announcing his kingdom, was a lyrical ode to the concept of Jubilee, a release from debt and captivity for all of those for whom God has favor (Luke 4:18–19).

When Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father,” this comes with inheritance language too. “Give us this day our daily bread,” we cry out, knowing that our Father knows what we need. This is not a storehouse of bread in the future (although we certainly have a future inheritance waiting for us) but the ongoing, everyday supply of bread. Inheritance is not about merely receiving but being invited to participate. The family is meant to teach us this, to teach us what it means to function in an economy, in an order. This is to be seen in the ways we live our lives in the now, as well as in the fact that we will one day be part of a vast cosmic order (with different kinds of callings) in the kingdom of God.

* * * *

The cross is a crisis of identity and inheritance. The jeering crowds around Jesus weren’t especially cruel or sacrilegious compared to everyone else. They just knew their Bibles. They could see that Jesus was hanged on a tree and therefore, according the book of Deuteronomy, he was cursed by God (Deut. 21:23). This was a family matter. The language of this curse starts with a question of family identity. The Bible says, “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of the city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of the city, ‘This our son . . . is a glutton and a drunkard’” (Deut. 21:18–20). Jesus was indeed charged by the elders with being a drunkard and a glutton (Matt. 11:19). He was indeed charged with being a rebellious son; one who, they said, would dishonor the Sabbath and even threaten to tear down the temple of God itself. The book of Moses said what would happen to such a man: “Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:21). Jesus’ kinsmen had already dragged him outside the borders of their town and attempted to stone him with stones (Luke 4:29–30; John 8:59). At the end, though, they went even further, hanging him on a tree in crucifixion, the ultimate sign of the curse of God.

This has everything to do with both identity (is God with us?) and inheritance (what will God give to us?). Moses said, “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you shall hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance” (Deut. 21:22–23). Jesus’ crucifixion meant, those standing around would have reasoned, that he was rejected as God’s Son and that he had forfeited his inheritance. That’s why the cross was a scandal, both to Jews and to Gentiles. Who could follow a God-cursed, humiliated criminal? And how could a crucified man ever give a kingdom to his followers, when he could not even escape execution himself?

The entire New Testament unpacks this reality. That’s why the apostle Paul claims that he knew “nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). This seems, at first glance, to be untrue. After all, the apostle Paul gave instructions on all sorts of things—many of them discussed in these pages—such as what criteria there should be for financial support of widows or how often married couples should have sex with each other. This is not inconsistent. The entire Christian life is lived by those who have been crucified with Christ, and who therefore now live through him (Gal. 2:20). We are cursed with Christ at the cross. There we have experienced death and hell. That means the accusing powers have no say over us anymore. We cannot be re-cursed, re-damned, re-crucified. And, joined to Christ by the cross, we have a new identity and a new inheritance. The cross happens “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:14).

The gospel means then that all of us, no matter what our background or origin, are all now children of God, and if children then heirs, in fact joint-heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:16–17). We know that we are in Christ because we cry out, often in pained groaning, “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15), and we find in so doing that Jesus is himself actually crying out through us (Gal. 4:6). Jesus does not merely instruct us on how to pray to “Our Father.” We often do not know how or what to pray (Rom. 8:26–27). He actually then prays through us by the Spirit. The Lord’s Prayer coming from our lips is quite often literally the Lord’s prayer. It is by means of this cross-rooted reality that we do warfare against the principalities and powers that stand against us.

Before a long period of silence from God, the prophet Malachi said that God would send the prophet Elijah “before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes” (Mal. 4:5). The prophet “will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Mal. 4:6). Jesus identified this spirit of Elijah with his cousin, John the Baptist (Matt. 17:10–13). John’s preaching in the wilderness attacked the presumption of identity and inheritance the people had. John confronted the Israelites who presumed upon God’s favor simply because they were biological descendants of Abraham. God’s axe was at the root of that family tree (Matt. 3:9–10). The question was, where was the faithful remnant God had promised? Where was the son to whom God would offer the ends of the earth as an inheritance? Right there at those waters, Jesus submitted to baptism—signifying the judgment that would come upon him for his people later at the cross (Luke 12:50; Rom. 6:4). As he came up out of the water, a voice boomed from the skies above, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). The heart of the Father was turned toward his Son; the heart of the Son turned toward his Father.

We not only learn who we are; we often gain an inheritance through the family. We gain patterns of life, expectations, models, and wounds from our families of origin. Our life stories show us that we are part of a larger story—a story brimming with other characters. No matter how much we want to believe that we have shaped and formed ourselves, that we control our own personality and destiny, we all come from somewhere, and, more to the point, from some people. For many, this inheritance is good. Maybe you can see with gratitude all the things you carry with you from your family—how to bake a cake or how to change a tire or, much more importantly, how to trust Jesus, and how to pray. For some, the inheritance is mixed, or even quite dark. Even those who wish to cut themselves off from their families are often frustrated at how difficult this can actually be to accomplish. One can leave home and never speak to one’s relatives again, make the opposite of all of their religious, political, and career choices—and still see one’s father’s eyes in the mirror or hear oneself saying the sort of thing one’s mother used to say.

Many of you learned in the training-ground of your families a distortion of identity and inheritance. Perhaps a parent told you, explicitly or implicitly, that you would never amount to anything. Perhaps a parent saw you as just an extension of himself or herself. Maybe you inherited a biological disposition toward crippling depression or addiction. Or maybe you inherited a family system filled with strife and trauma. Perhaps your family background left you with limited economic and social means to escape a situation filled with despair or even violence. The good news is that Jesus not only taught us to pray “Our Father,” but followed those words with these, “in heaven, hallowed be your name” (Matt. 6:9). There’s an analogy between what we are intended to experience in our family formation and the Fatherhood of God. But the Fatherhood of God, even in the best circumstances, infinitely transcends those earthly categories. God is “Father,” near to us, but he is also “in heaven,” distant from us. We know the name of our God (nearness) but that name is holy (distance). This God asks: “To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me that we might be alike?” (Isa. 46:5). You can come out of the best or the worst of family backgrounds and still come to know, and to teach others, what it means to call out to God as Father.

* * * *

We should pursue every opportunity to cultivate healthy families because what goes on in our families shapes our consciences and personalities and souls. Family is more than food and shelter. It ripples out through generations, transforming how countless people see God, the gospel, and themselves. We must work, if we are parents, to discipline our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, that they might see a reflection of something of what God is like.

But you don’t have to come from a good family, or even know who your parents were, to experience the Fatherhood of God. In reality, every family is, to some degree or other, a broken family. If you’ve come from a terrible situation, God is not surprised by this. After all, Jesus loves you; the Good Shepherd came out searching for you. You are not just that collection of cells, or that bundle of DNA. You are also your memory, your experiences, your story. An essential part of who you are is the story of where you came from. The fact that you know that something was wrong is itself grace. The fact that the gospel has come to you means that God, fully knowing your background, offers you, right along with the rest of us, a new identity and a new inheritance. As the prophet Daniel said of God, “he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him” (Dan. 2:22).

We see this throughout the Scriptures, even through horrible family patterns of which God does not approve. It’s hard to imagine a family more dysfunctional than a band of brothers beating their little sibling to near-death, and then selling him into a human trafficking racket. Early in Israel’s story, though, that’s precisely what happened to Joseph. God condemned this for what it was: wickedness. At the same time, though, God was at work, turning this awfulness around, to save Israel by Joseph’s providing grain in a time of nation-threatening famine. Joseph said to the brothers, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen. 50:20).

Unlike Joseph, we don’t have direct revelation, to see exactly why God permitted you to go through the awful things back in the background that some of you have experienced. In some ways, you might be able to look back and see how God was with you, even in the valley of the shadow of death. You might be able to see how the scars you bear made you into who you are or prepared you to minister later to others. Or you might not be able to make sense of any of it at all. Our family stories demonstrate, from the very beginning of our existences that we are part of a plotline, but that plotline can often seem confused and mysterious and unseen to us. We know this, though. We know that God is just and will call every evil to account. We know that you cannot go back in time and undo those things. You can fantasize about an alternative reality where you had better parents or where you were a better parent, where you had better children or where you were a better child. But those fantasies cannot force those alternative universes into existence.

You are not your genealogy. You are not your family tree. You are not your family. After all, if you are in Christ, you are a new creation. You are not doomed to carry on the dark family traditions that would harm you or drive you away from God or other people. That will entail the sort of ongoing prayer and effort the Bible refers to in spiritual warfare terms. That’s not just a task for those who come from “dysfunctional families” but for all of us, just in differing ways. The religious leaders around Jesus were quite proud of their family tree—a family tree we call “the Old Testament.” And yet, Jesus reminded them that, like their ancestors, they were not above killing the prophets among them (Matt. 23:29–36; Luke 11:47–51). Stephen the martyr told his fellow Israelites much the same, that they were repeating the errors of their ancestors by stifling the prophetic word (Acts 7:51). The apostle Paul warned a Gentile congregation that they should not “walk as the Gentiles do” (Eph. 4:17). And the apostle Peter reminded another Gentile band of new Christians not to go back to the “futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18). That means that they should overcome their natural backgrounds by following Christ. This is not done by sheer willpower. It is done by clinging to the gospel, remembering your new identity and your new inheritance in Christ. You are ransomed from your old inheritance “not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:18–19).

Do many of you have good, stable family backgrounds for which you should give thanks? Yes. You should not therefore boast as though this makes you better than another; “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7). Do many of you have wounds that you carry throughout life? Yes. Must you unlearn old patterns and models? Yes. Are you then hopeless? Are you predestined to repeat the disappointments or traumas enacted upon you? By no means. Your inheritance is not just your future reward in the world to come. Your inheritance is also a new Spirit and a new community, able to overcome through you all of the snares of the Evil One.

Family dynamics have consequences, to be sure. If you are a parent, you cannot assume that your refusal to stay married or to keep a job, that your alcohol abuse or drug addiction or cutting words, will have no influence on your children—or, for that matter, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. You will give an account. “For it is necessary that temptations come,” Jesus said, “but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes” (Matt. 18:7). If you are downstream from that, though, the important thing is that you recognize the good—the longing for home, say—and the bad that comes to you from your situation. The dangers for you are not the patterns you can see and identify but those that you do not see at all. Yes, many children of absent fathers grow up to abandon their own families. Yes, children of alcoholics grow up to drink their lives away too. Yes, the children of violent people sometimes grow up to be just as violent when they are in a place of relative power. That happens, but usually in people who do not see their own vulnerability.

When I talk to someone who fears repeating his or her family’s dysfunctional patterns, I almost never worry for their future. They see the problems there and are thus armed to go, by the power of the Spirit, in a different direction. Some of the best marriages I know of are people who lived through their own parents’ divorces. Some of the best parents I know are those who had absent or abusive or negligent parents. Some of the most compassionate advocates for children I know were emotionally or physically or sexually abused themselves as children. They survived, and spend their lives making sure no one else will go through the same trauma. The danger is for those who don’t even think about how their family’s yelling of profanities at one another or serial adulteries or string of divorces is simply accepted as the way things are. Often, those who lived through such things are more proactive than their peers at putting good practices in place ahead of time. A person who grew up with a family given to screaming at one another, for instance, might map out ahead of time that he will take a walk during a time of intense stress, to calm down and pray before dealing with a controversial family matter. In some instances, he may ask his spouse from a more even-tempered family background to handle a situation. That’s not weakness but grace.

That’s where there is peril, not the presence of brokenness itself. As a matter of fact, counselors tell us that they worry when they encounter someone who describes a completely idyllic golden age of a childhood. Often, they find the opposite to be the case. The person idealized his or her backstory because he or she couldn’t bear to live with the actual story. That’s where the danger is.

Some of you might struggle to believe that God loves you because of the ways you have rebelled in the past—your alcoholism, your abortions, your sexual history, your relationship breakups, your prison time, or whatever. Some of you live then in fear, cringing as though God were angry with you, looking to punish you. Some of you maybe have lived that way so long that you’ve just given up, choosing just to rebel because you’ve concluded that’s just who you are.

My situation is in some ways the exact opposite from that, but it just might be even more dangerous. I laughed to myself when I noticed that I referenced in this chapter, in an aside, my teenage fears about passing Algebra. That’s very telling because, in some ways, it seems that my whole life is an exercise in taking a report card in to my father, for his approval or disapproval. I’ve always been the one who has to do everything right—to be the well-behaved one, the well-mannered one, the hard-working one, the smart one, the pious one, the one who does everything he is supposed to do. I was in church virtually every time the doors were open when I was a child. I was the one who, from the age of five, made sure that my grandmother’s yard was mowed, her garden tilled, and who, inexplicably as one who was just out of toddler stage, counseled her through the loss of her husband and even stood in the backseat as she was learning late in life to drive a car, telling her she could do it. I preached my first sermon at twelve. I was running communications for a United States congressman’s campaign before I was twenty. I later earned a doctorate and was, before I knew it, dean of my theological seminary at age thirty-two. None of that is because I am particularly talented, but because I am perhaps unusually driven. I realize now how much of that drive came from believing I could only be loved if I earned my keep, if I behaved and performed better than anyone else around me. The fears and insecurities I picked up as a child were the devils I would run from to this very moment.

I would like to say that that has gone away, but it hasn’t. A newspaper wrote an article one time about some people who criticized me, really sharply, for not taking political stands they would want me to take. I was crushed by this, to the point that I wondered sometimes if I could even get out of bed in the morning. I wondered why. I really was not worried about what those people thought of me. I believed what I believed. I was not worried about some bad consequences for me or for my ministry. Most people were affirming and supportive, even more than ever before. I slowly came to realize that what I was feeling was not regret or fear but shame. The main thing I worried about was my father seeing that article, or a sort of surrogate father-in-ministry seeing it, and concluding that I was a failure. I was worried that my children would see it, and think that I had failed them. I was standing there with the report card. Again.

Like the older brother in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal, I too often believe I can earn my place in the house, my future inheritance, by doing the right thing—by behaving and performing and being deemed useful and likable. And like the returning exile in that story, I too often believe that I should be a hired hand, not a welcomed son, in the Father’s house (Luke 15:19). My drive to succeed is really not ambition but a drive to belong, to hear the words, “You are my beloved son, and with you I am well pleased.” Behind virtually everything I do, from teaching my children dinner-table manners to writing this book, there’s a little boy looking behind him for his parents, to see if they’re looking, to see if they’re proud of him. That’s brokenness. But that’s not my identity, and that’s not my inheritance. The gospel has to interrupt me constantly, taking me away from my futile whirling dervish-like performance right back to that sky above the Jordan River.

Many of you are in a similar place. Whether you hide behind your athletic skill or your intellectual caliber or your artistic brilliance or your spirituality and morality, those who perform for a Father’s recognition will find themselves failing. Performing for your identity and your inheritance does not lead to holiness but to exhaustion, bitterness, and ultimately, death. To do otherwise is spiritual warfare. And it’s hard.

* * * *

When we learn to say “Our Father,” we enter into battle. As dependent children, we look to our parents for, among other things, the basic needs of security: provision and protection. Jesus asked, “Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9–11). No matter your family background, you are not an orphan in the cosmos. The same Jesus who taught us to call God our Father also taught us to look to him for provision (“Give us this day our daily bread”) and protection (“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”). These are not separate requests. The devil came to our Lord in the desert and asked him to turn stones into bread. The devil was not just trying to tempt Jesus; he was trying to adopt him. Family is meant to teach us, among other things, that we are creatures, that we cannot, ultimately, provide for and protect ourselves. We are dependent in our infancy, and dependent again in our old age. That sense of need is the first step to overcoming, in a war-torn universe in which the family is often ground zero.

In this, Jesus is not absent from us or ashamed of us. He is with us. He finds his identity in his Father’s blessing (Matt. 3:17). He watches his Father’s vocation, and finds there his own (John 5:19–21). He also, at the cross, finds himself “a stranger to my brothers,” and “alien to my mother’s sons,” because the zeal for his Father’s house “consumed” him (Ps. 69:8–9). The cross informs what it means for us to be a family, and our lives in our families are meant to drive us back to the cross. The kingdom is breaking through. The family is a sign of this kingdom, and that’s one reason why the powers of darkness want to rage against it. That’s not true only for “The Family” in abstract but for your family, in particular. Whatever your family background, you can be faithful to your family. Whatever your family situation, you can be a part of the family of the church. You can fight this battle. But you can only do so if you know who you are, and if you know where you’re going. No matter what—the call to be family is a call to hardship, to suffering, to combat in the spiritual realm. And sometimes the only weapon you can find is the battle cry, “Jesus loves me, this I know.” Through it all you will hear a persistent question from the defeated powers of this age, from the nagging fears in your own psyche. The question is, “Who is your Father?” You have an answer to that question.

The answer is shaped like a cross.