Category: Family life

Dear Ella and Lee

Except for the Triune God of the Bible, and one’s integrity in relation to Him, I’ve concluded that there is nothing more important than family. The macro culture that you will grow up in will tell you otherwise at every turn. The culture will tell you that your lineage, heritage and patrimony are insignificant. The culture will push you to despise your past and whisper constantly that you are wiser then your forebears. Don’t you believe them. While it is true that Family can become absolutized and so become an idol, it is also true that when family finds it’s proper place, under the Triune God of the Bible’s authority, there is nothing else that exceeds it in import. The importance of the heritage of a godly family is seen in something that John Calvin observes in his commentary on I Timothy,

“Accordingly, he (Paul) sets before him his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, by whom he had been educated from his infancy in such a manner that he might have sucked godliness along with his milk. By this godly education, therefore, Timothy is admonished not to degenerate from himself and from his ancestors.”

Grandchildren, when one is blessed to have been raised in Christian homes one can not abandon his Kin without abandoning their God.

Because God trumps all, in terms of our allegiance, there may be times when you will have to turn your back on family. This should almost be unheard of when raised in the context of a Christian people but love of God must rise above even the tenderest of family affections if it comes to having to choose between the two.

Having given this slight introduction, I would like to tell you something about your family. One of my chief regrets (and I have my share of regrets) is that I didn’t discover more about my generations while they were still alive. So, I am writing to you to leave you at least a glimpse into some of your forebears. I won’t suggest to you that you are the scions of some great line. You’re not. Still, this family, is the family that God has been pleased to have ordained to make us part of, and so, for good or for ill I welcome you to your people. It is my prayer that you will rise above all the previous generations in terms of understanding God’s character and so having a corresponding zeal for the God of the Bible who has made us who we are, via faith and blood and who has set us in our families.

I would like to tell you a very little bit about your Great-Great-Great Grandparents. I have only the barest of memories of your Great x 3 Grandmother and no memories at all of her husband. Eva Lorraine was born in 1878. Her maiden name was Reid, but any knowledge of the Reid family is completely lost to me. I can tell you that both Reid and McAtee are fairly popular Scottish surnames and so it is not surprising to see someone from Clan Reid marry into McAtee Clan.

She, like most of your people, came from Agrarian stock. Lee and Ella your people were Farmers in these origins. Of course my memories of my Great Grandmother are sketchy as she died in 1963 when I was only 4. She lived right across a dirt road from my Grandparents and I remember going to visit her when we went to visit my Grandma McAtee (her daughter-in-law).

I have been told that when, as a toddler, I had ear aches that Grandma Great would blow smoke in my ear from her pipe in order to alleviate the pain. I was also told that Grandma Great was a bit superstitious as she would prohibit anyone from disturbing a rocking chair that was in motion from the wind, believing that it was rocking to the sway of some supernatural presence of someone gone but now visiting. We should not make too much of this kind of matter because these kinds of superstitions were not that uncommon among some rural folk. I saw a similar kind of superstition again some 35 years later in the first Church I served in South Carolina.

The only other story I have to offer from this generation is what was found when Grandma Great’s belongings were cleaned out. It seems that her husband, Murl, your Great x3 Grandfather, (who had died in 1929) was affiliated with the Klu Klux Klan. We surmise this because a Klan outfit was found in one of the closets when the house was cleaned out in 1963. It is believable, because historically we know that the Klan had a presence in that area of the State at about that time. I’ll let you do your own research on what the KKK was. Keep in mind though that the Klan had several incarnations and you’ll want to keep your eye on which incarnation of the Klan existed in the North in the 1920’s. The Klan of Nathan Bedford Forest was not the Klan of later incarnations.

Grandma Great was 85 when she passed away. She lived to see her husband and two of her children and one daughter-in-law precede her in death. Even in the early 20th century death was much closer to men then it is today and she, doubtless, knew well the pain that death creates. It is interesting to think that she died just about a month before President Kennedy was assassinated even though their worlds were far far apart. She grew up in a world where the biggest innovation was the Railroad Train and she lived to see the advent of the automobile, telephone, light bulb, electricity, record player, and the atomic bomb. As such, most of her life would have been lived without running water in the house, without a telephone, without a bathroom in the house, and she cooked most of her life with a wood stove. When she was born Railroads were the big thing. When she died men were probing space.

My Father (your Great-Grandfather) loved her dearly. To this day his Bible has a pressed rose in it he kept from her funeral.

I don’t know a thing about your Great x3 Grandparents confession of faith in Christ alone or a lack thereof. The Christian faith is typically more consistent with the Farmer then with other occupations as the people who live off the land, generally speaking, have the opportunity to have a greater sense of awareness of Providence as they are so dependent upon the seasons and the weather. Certainly your Great x3 Grandmother had a Christian burial and that says a little bit.

This is all I know or remember about this generation on the McAtee side of the family. It is very little but it is something that you would not have had if I had not given you this little snippet.

By the way … here is a link that tells about where they are buried in Colon, Michigan and gives some bare facts.

http://files.usgwarchives.net/mi/stjoseph/cemeteries/l20002.txt

Consistent with what Professor S. Y. Volfson predicted in 1929 in his work, “The Sociology of Marriage and the Family,” the family that existed in the context of Christendom, as given parameters by the Scripture of the Christian faith, has, because of the onslaught of anti-Christ Worldviews, completely lost its character and shape.

1.) Whereas in Christendom the Christian family had an economic/productive function in anti-Christ thinking such as International Capitalism and various stripes of Marxism the family is no longer a productive unit. With the loss of this economic function the family loses the sense of its interdependence and so loses its centrality. Now with the economic function of family stripped from the family other loyalties introduce themselves that could not have been as primary before the decline of the family as economic unit. In Marxist system that former family loyalty is shifted to the State in which we live and move and have our being. In Finance capitalist systems that former family loyalty is shifted to the marketplace which now replaces the family.

2.) Whereas in Christendom the Christian family was a integrated whole that operated as a joint household in terms of fellowship (as seen in shared communal meals, shared burdens, shared responsibilities) now the family is barely a bed and boarding outfit. Homes function now more as human Cattle Stalls for the State. Meals are seldom communal. Interests of the various family members are diverse and not integrated in the least. Parents are more chauffeurs for their children’s next extracurricular activity then they are fonts of wisdom for the children to learn from. The Christendom scenario of families together preparing the meals and then sharing the meals has been replaced by “catch as catch can” for each individual in the house. The sense of the communal thus has also shifted from members of the family finding their identity if the families corporate identity to members of the family finding their identity in some artificially constructed peer group to which they now belong. Each member of the family thus is integrated each into different “alien to the family” wholes.

3.) Whereas in Christendom the Christian family was primarily responsible for the rearing and educating of children which would eventually naturally arrive. However, now in our Brave New World, unaffected by the categories of the Christian faith, those who are now responsible for the rearing of Children are, with increasing commonality, State agencies. In the anti-Christ familial world children are just little cogs to eventually fit into the Statist machine. As such children must be set upon the lathe of the State in order to be shaped to fit the machine culture that they as cogs are going to fit into. Because this is so children are increasingly turned over at younger and younger ages to be reared by comparative strangers and aliens to the family. Children are often reared in state nurseries and kindergartens, state sanctioned daycare centers, or some other State approved facility. Because this is so, the loyalty of both children and parents is no longer to one another but to the State who provides for them.

4.) Whereas in Christendom the Christian family was designed to be inter-generational so that it not only cared for the young but also for the aged, now, with the destruction of the Christian family, the aged are farmed out to centers licensed and monitored by the State just as the children. Thus the sense of continuity between the generations is eclipsed and each family and each member of each family stands as an atomistic individual easily picked off by the machinations of the Zombie State. Both the care of the children and the care of the aged are cut off from the family as limbs might be cut off of a once mighty tree.

So, in all this the family is purged of its social content with the intent that it might wither away in favor of the State. Indeed, in light of all this it is not difficult to see a day coming when the family will be completely un-necessary as a distinct unit as the motto returns “everything within the state, nothing outside the state.” Already, with the State creation of artificial family social constructs (consider the recent example of California law wherein more than two people can be considered parents of a child) the reality of the Christian family continues to whither away.

My Grandfather Jacobs spent much of his life as a dairy farmer in Indiana. He was as rough hewed as one might expect given his less then tender upbringing. The man had a work ethic like no one I’ve ever met or known since. My Uncles (His Sons) tell me that his work ethic was even more intense when they were growing up then when I knew him and when I was around he was still working 16 hour days.

Grandpa Jacobs won a bronze star in Europe for disobeying orders while with the Big Red One. He was ordered to wait for ground support before moving forward. Instead, he cleared an obstacle from the road and continued to push on. I suspect there was more to the story then that but like most war vets he tended towards understatement when it came to these kinds of war stories.

However, the story I want to tell from Grandpa Jacobs was about another episode of his disobeying orders. He did not earn any medals for what I am about to tell. However, he may have slept better at night because he disobeyed these orders.

This story was told to me on Lake Michigan sometime in the late 8o’s or early 90’s. We were all on my Step-Father’s large fishing boat and were fishing. This is a story about the nobility of a man in disobeying orders.

My Grandfather was in WW II fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. As some of you know the Germans were at this point in the war so short on man power they had taken for soldiers those men who had seen too many winters or alternately too few winters. The German ranks were bolstered by the too young and the too old.

My Grandfather’s company captured some of these men (boys) in the midst of battle. He was ordered by somebody in the Chain of command to “take them out back and shoot them.” I can imagine that this was a fairly common order and in the heat of a intense battle such a order, from a certain perspective, is understandable. One can easily imagine that there was not enough man power to assign men the task of watching and keeping prisoners.

As he told the story Grandpa Jacobs told us that he told the officer who gave the command that, “I have boys not much younger than this age at home. I can’t do that.”

And he didn’t.

I don’t know what happen to those boys. He probably didn’t either. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if others were found to obey the order. There is a reason that someone once said, “War is Hell.”

But the fact that he disobeyed that order is the proudest live story I am somehow connected with from WW II.

And it also reminds me that War is such a terrible terrible reality that it should be pursued only as the last possible option and only in the context of Christian Just War Theory.

Of course that which makes a marriage uniquely Christian is the pledged allegiance of both the Christian Husband and the Christian Wife to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Here we have two people who have been set apart for salvation from eternity, and who have been declared righteous in Christ in God’s court. They have been united to Christ by the Spirit’s work and now they enter into marriage. Very well then, it is quite obvious that that which will make the marriage Christian is their bowing to the Lordship of their King and Savior in their marriage.

This concern about the Lordship of Jesus Christ begins even before marriage in the courting process and manifests itself first in the careful attention of each that they are marrying someone who is suitable for them.

This is what God said in Genesis

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now, it stands to reason that this woman who was to be suitable for Adam found an Adam that in turn was suitable for her. This is just to say that Adam and Eve were a fit. They were quite literally made for each other.

First of course they were a fit in the sense that they understood that they were God’s creatures and were beholden to Him. In our language today we might say that they shared a common faith. No marriage should be entered into where man and wife do not share a common understanding of their shared Christian faith. Indeed Scripture forbids it for Christians when it forbids unequal yoking.

But the correspondence, — or suitability if you prefer — between our first parents of course only began with Adam and Eve’s common faith — a common faith that found each of them trusting in God at each turn.

But beyond this common faith were other commonalities. They were yoked in other ways. After all this was a woman who was, in Adam’s own words, “Bone of my Bone, and Flesh of my Flesh.” Adam and Eve mirrored one another. I suspect that Adam and Eve corresponded to each other in the way that they looked and in their mannerisms, in their likes and dislikes. They not only shared a faith and a bed but they shared common delights, common palates, common speech patterns, and common characteristics.

Rudyard Kipling caught something of what I am getting at in terms of the need for commonalities in uniquely Christian marriage that is never less than a common faith but is always more than a common faith when he wrote,

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

Dr. Clarence Macartney, a well known Reformed Minister from my Grandparent’s generation put this time-tested concept, if also time-worn idea, in a sermon he preached on Marriage and family life. Macartney preached,

“Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”

I know that Anthony and Rachel share the kind of commonalities that the Lordship of Christ anticipates for a uniquely Christian marriage. They are not strangers to one another in terms of suitability. They share a common understanding of their common faith. They share a worldview. They come from similar family cultures and backgrounds and they share a people group. They are suitable for each other.

II.) When it comes to a uniquely Christian marriage not only is the Lordship of Christ pursued in the issue of the suitableness of each for one another but it is also pursued in each of them submitting to God’s Law.

Remember we are speaking here of a Christian marriage and in a Christian marriage you have two people who have had wrought within them the desire to look to the interest of the other. You have two people, who, when they say they “love” each other they understand that love is an empty concept unless if is defined by God’s law. Anthony must not love Rachel in ways that are inconsistent w/ God’s revealed word and Rachel must not love Anthony by defining what love is by her own law word. In order for their marriage to be Christian each must love in ways consistent with God’s revealed law-word.

Of course you already know that never was a word more cheapened in our culture than the word “love.” We have sentimentalized it, we have coarsened it, we have invoked it in order to cover the most hateful of actions. And the reason for this is that “love” has no stable meaning because each man loves as is right in his own eyes. This is not so in a Christian marriage that takes the Lordship of Christ into account. A Christian marriage understands that “love” is regulated and finds it’s meaning in God’s law being applied. Jesus Himself draws our attention to the same point when He told his disciples, “If you love me keep my commandments.”

The fact that marriages fail so often can be accounted both by the fact that two people married who did not correspond to one another to begin with and by the fact that both people in the marriage are seeking to regulate the marriage according to their own self-governing law word. In short, marriages fail because one if not both partners are seeking to be God in the relationship. It can get pretty ugly when the Gods go to war.

When both husband and wife submit to a royal law of love that is defined and regulated by God’s Law-Word then the conflict of the wills have a boundary in order to limit them.

So, a uniquely Christian marriage finds God’s revealed law-word governing their marriage and their homes. Anthony shows his love to Rachel by serving her much as Christ served the Church in the washing of his disciples’ feet. He serves her by leading, protecting, providing, and by nurturing her in her undoubted catholic Christian faith. Rachel shows her love to Anthony by submitting to him, by being a complement to him, and as Christ always delighted to do the will of His Father so Rachel will delight in doing the will of her husband who will lay down his life for her.

III.) The Lordship of Jesus Christ is expressed in uniquely Christian marriages by the teleology or goal of the Marriage.

Theologians will tell you that part of what constitutes man as the “image of God” is the fact that he was charged with having dominion over God’s creation. He was to be a ruling steward over creation for God as King.

When God gave Eve to Adam that giving was in the context of Adam’s dominion work. The giving of Eve to Adam was for the purpose of aiding and assisting Adam in his work of dominion.

In the Christian understanding nothing has happened since Adam was created to exercise dominion and since Eve was created from Adam to be a help-meet in that dominion taking that has rescinded the idea that the ultimate goal of marriage is a Husband and Wife co-operating, under God’s regency and Law-Word, in exercising godly dominion. The Husband and Wife, together as man and wife, are to reconstruct all they put their hands too in a Christ honoring direction. Even the having and rearing of children is to be unto the end of being able to more readily exercise dominion to the glory of God.

And clearly we live in times that desperately need humble Christian dominion taking. Clearly we live in times where we should pray that God will raise up a host of Christian marriages that understand the charge to begin dominion taking first by reconstructing marriage and family again along Biblical lines.

You see, the ordaining of marriages is not about our creature comforts. When God joins suitable Redeemed men and women together, as under His law word, they are commissioned to the end of going on quest to reconstruct all of the un-real reality around us so as to be consonant to God’s Kingdom reality. And if the sound of dominion lands to roughly upon your ears look at what I am speaking of as Christian marriages contributing to the healing of a broken world with the medicine of God’s Word.

If we were to put this in terms of a epic adventure novel, Christian Marriage is an adventure where the husband is a Knight of the Lord Christ’s round table protecting his wife and family by taking dominion over the serpent dragon who would seek to destroy Christ’s authority and Kingdom at every turn. The wife is no helpless damsel in distress but she is helping the husband to better able to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and the advance of His Kingdom.

And so a uniquely Christian marriage looks to the Lordship of Christ in these three areas

I.) Suitability
II.) Governance by God’s Law
III.) Dominion”