Advent 2016 — Micah 4 …. The Eschaton & The Family

Ill. — Christians are like Tolkien’s elves who occupy two worlds at the same time.

As being citizens in the age to come we are God’s agents of change as inveighing against this present evil age wherever we find it. We are those whom God uses to turn the wilderness of this present wicked age into the garden of the Lord so that it blooms with age to come beauty.

All of this makes us a future-oriented people but it is a future orientation which is rooted and grounded in the past because the future orientation is dependent upon how the Christ event brought the future into the then present and so into our present.

It is true that we are moving towards the future eschatological age but this is only true because in the Christ event the future eschatological age located and locates itself in the present.

So, for the Christian time is Linear, as it moves towards the 2nd Advent but it moves towards that 2nd Advent as all of life is interpreted through the 1st Advent.

All of this is why St. Paul could say, “We are more than conquerors.” We might say it this way … “Victory is inevitable.”

Alright … all that by way of review. It is an important concept and if I could I would get it into you by translating it to a recipe and then whipping up a batch and providing it as a dish @ one of our fellowship meals.

Given this understanding, we have seen how with the coming of the Messiah these prophetic words of Micah 4 came to pass.

I.) Christ was and is the Mountain Kingdom that has lifted himself above all other Kingdoms

II.) With the Arrival of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom, we have seen people streaming into the House of the God of Jacob

III.) With the Arrival of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom we have seen the rise of Law as informed by God’s law. People have asked for God’s ways and have been taught God’s path.

IV.) With the Arrival of Christ and His Kingdom we have seen the rise of peace (swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks) where the Gospel has flourished.

V.) Today we want to look at how with the Advent of Christ the family is restored.

We may have to do this in two bites.

First, we want to see where we find the family in this passage,

We note that every time we see the word peoples and nations spoken of we recognize that language is merely communicating the idea of extended family.

Etymologically speaking — Hebrew — goyim  / Greek ethnos

Particular people groups related by blood and covenant.

nation (n.) c. 1300, from Old French nacion “birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland” (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe,” literally “that which has been born,” from natus, past participle of nasci “be born” (Old Latin gnasci; see genus). Political sense has gradually predominated, but earliest English examples inclined toward the racial meaning “large group of people with common ancestry.” Older sense preserved in application to North American Indian peoples (1640s).

Building on that Edmund Burke defined a people as being

constituted by the living who recognize, respect, and identify with their dead in the things and imprints of places that they left behind. The living love their dead by training their young into the social affections that keep their dead alive to them…

This idea of families as being a group with a common ancestry and the work of the Messiah in relation to them also comes through in the vs. we are looking at today.

And each of them (the nations) will sit under his
Vine and under his Fig Tree

Micah, sees in the Latter days that nations (extended families) will exist and each have their own property uniquely theirs. We will have more to say about property in the future but we want to stay concentrated today on the importance of family.

Everything in our culture is designed to destroy the stable family. First, we  have the whole New World Order agenda devoted to taking us out of our families and giving us in exchange the universal “family of man.” We have the demasculinizing of man; and the rise of Feminism, which is nothing but the de-feminization of women; we see, the attempt to create revolution among children demanding their rights (UN Children’s rights). We have The multi-tens of billions of dollars pornography industry and the reality of how it is ripping families apart. We have the FEDS inheritance laws that have been written so as to weaken the family and instead strengthen the government as the FEDS become in essence the first born son who receives the double inheritance.  We have social legislation that subsidizes behavior that is destructive to strong family life.  We have the purposeful creation of a culture that has stripped the family of its role as an economic unit. We now have the redefinition of marriage and with the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of family comes in its wake. Our Churches too often reinforce this attack on the family by how they age segregate members of the family once you walk in the door.

“On no single institution has the modern political state rested with more destructive weight than on the family.”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 238

And of course, the reason for this attack is that the family unit — in both its nuclear and extended clan expression — is the foundational social order unit in a Christian civilization. The foundational social order unit is not as so many suggest the individual. It is not that the individual is unimportant in Biblical Christianity. Indeed only in Biblical Christianity does the individual find importance. However, it is the case that the primary social unit that God has ordained is the family. The whole idea of covenant screams this truth.

With the family as being God’s primary social unit, naturally, then God’s enemy as our enemy desires to destroy the family. Again, it is the family that God primarily deals with. When God calls Noah God saves Noah with His family. When God calls Abraham one of the promises is that “in you, all the families (nations) of the earth will be blessed.” It is promised that the forerunner of the Messiah will, in anticipation of the Messianic age,   “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers;”  Even in the new Jerusalem in the book of Revelation we see the presence, not of a conglomeration of people, nor of just mass atomized people, but the new Jerusalem is occupied by the families of men (nations).

All this is underscored in the NT. The NT is family-centric and rife with instructions for family including instructions for husbands in providing for their family and kin, instructions on how families are to take care of widows, instructions for raising children, instructions to children on honoring parents, instructions on how husbands are to treat wives and how wives are to treat husbands.

Micah tells us though that in those latter days that came with Christ the family would be again prioritized so that

And each of them (the nations) will sit under his
Vine and under his Fig Tree

Robert Nisbet speaks of the importance of family,

“Every great age, and every great people … is characterized at bottom by the strength of the kinship principle. We can, he argued, use the family as an almost infallible touchstone of the material and cultural prosperity of a people. When it is strong, closely linked with private property, treated as the essential context of education in society, and its sanctity recognized by law and custom, the probability is extremely high that we shall find the rest of the social order characterized by that subtle but puissant (having great power or influence) fusion of stability and individual mobility which is the hallmark of great ages.”

Twilight of Authority — pg. 232

We can agree with Nisbet when just a few paragraphs later he observes,

“Family yet remains the greatest single element of a creative culture.”
Robert Nisbet — pg. 233

But of course, hell being hell, it opposes the family and the modern God-state being the agency that Mephistopheles possesses is a bureaucratic state and with the ever growing expansion of bureaucracy comes the expansion of egalitarianism if only because the bureaucrat is a great lover of a uniform standardized everything. The modern god-state with its egalitarianism is death to the family because families are by definition not the same. They are not equal. The hierarchy families introduce is also anti-egalitarian.

As such the family must be eliminated. You see uniformity is to the bureaucrat what catnip is to your household kitty. The bureaucrat dreams of an assembly line social order where all citizens are easily replaceable cogs. Less paperwork that way. Biblical Family gets in the way of all that.

“It is impossible to be certain in such matters, but the historic roots of the greater ages have lain in diverse, varied, relatively small areas rather than in the atmosphere that goes with bigness, impersonality, and standardization.”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 243

But Micah sees that in the latter days there will be these families and of course Christian civilization in the West has been organized around the family unit.  Indeed, wherever Christianity has flourished there you find the flourishing of the Biblical family and thus we can know that this promise of Micah was fulfilled in an inaugural sense. Conversely, wherever you find Christianity in decline there you find family life shattered and so broken individuals and there you also find the certainty that Christ will again bring the power of the eschaton to the healing of family lives again.

Bavinck offers on this score,

The human cannot create; the foundations of society have been laid by God himself once and for all; but on those foundations, he can build further and restore what needs restoration. One must never despair about the reformation of human and family and society; even if the modern human despaired about this, the Christian must not give in to this despondency, because true godliness holds promise for both the present life and the life to come. (1908ch, 185; 1912ch, 193; for the last sentence, cf. 1 Tim. 4:8)

So, the Redemption event of Christ has happened. The future has taken up residence in the present because of that past event, and as such, we look forward to the time when families will once again be biblically patriarchal. Victory on this score is inevitable.

And the reason that it is inevitable, despite temporary setbacks, is that Christ, has come and on the Cross, He defeated all principalities and powers that would resist His intent to cover the globe with Christ-honoring families. In His Cross work Christ paid for the sins that make for the ruination of families and in the outpouring of the Spirit upon those who have been owned by Christ the Spirit works to continuously tame the selfishness and lust which so often are the reasons why family life is ugly.

In the Cross all things are reconciled to God and one of those “all things” is the family. In Christ, our tumbleweed social order that is characterized by the lack of family health will be renewed so that we are once again a Christian people with Christian roots.

The Cross is the center. Micah speaks of these latter days but these latter days could not have arrived apart from Christ’s defeat of Satan in the Cross.