The Whole Family

In the Bible a family is a people named of one father, set in God’s order, holding one inheritance, and redeemed by a kinsman; and every one of those marks is fulfilled in the family of God.

“Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:15).

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The Record Page

Most families around here have owned one at some time: a great heavy Bible, too big to carry to church, that lives on a shelf and comes down when somebody is born or somebody is buried. In the middle, between the Testaments, are the record pages. Births. Marriages. Deaths. Somebody’s grandmother kept those pages in her careful hand, and you can watch her handwriting age across forty years of entries. A wedding put a name in. A baby put a name in. A funeral closed a date out.

Every hand that takes the pen has to answer the same question. Who belongs on this page? What binds these particular names into one family, written together in one book, when the man three doors down is not?

The God who gave us the Book keeps records of His own. He commanded censuses. He preserved genealogies. He wrote families down by name and kept the list. We read those chapters as lists of the dead; He wrote them as the architecture of the living. Because He kept the record, we are not left to borrow the definition of a family from a family court docket or a university whiteboard. We can let the Bible define its own term, “comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Corinthians 2:13). We can follow the word from the census rolls in the wilderness, through the harvest field with Boaz, to the Roman prison where Paul bows his knees “unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14-15).

The Bible gives a family four marks, and every one of them is fulfilled in the family of God.

A Family Is Named of Its Father

Begin where the Bible uses the word most thickly, in the census of Numbers 26, and note the pattern. “Reuben, the eldest son of Israel: the children of Reuben; Hanoch, of whom cometh the family of the Hanochites” (Numbers 26:5). Of Pallu, the Palluites. Of Hezron, the Hezronites. Of Carmi, the Carmites, on and on through the chapter without a single variation. A man stood at the head, and the whole company after him bore his name. In scripture the father makes the family, and the family bears the father’s name.

That is why “family” and “father’s house” are used interchangeably. When the angel of the LORD called Gideon, he answered, “behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house” (Judges 6:15). His family was his father’s house; the two phrases were one thought. There is no such thing in scripture as a family without a head, or a name floating free of a father.

Paul then bows his knees to the Father, “Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” As Hanoch named the Hanochites, so the Father names His family, and everyone in it bears His name.

And how does a man come to bear that name? Not by joining it, and not by earning it. The Bible is precise about the order: “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). A man is not born again so that he can believe. He believes, and God gives him the new birth. The receiving is not the fruit of the birth; the birth is God’s answer to the receiving. They received Him, they believed on His name, and to those who did, He gave power to become the sons of God. The birth is entirely the work of God, independent of human blood or human will, but God performs that work for the man who has faith. “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26).

A family is entered one way. You must be born into it, and no one is born into this one accidentally.

Fathers, the principle applies to your own house. Your family bears your name into rooms you will never enter. The Hanochites were still called after Hanoch four hundred years after he was dust, and none of them had ever seen his face. The life you live today decides what that name will mean when your children answer to it.

A Family Is Set in God’s Order, and Holds One Inheritance

When sin was hidden in the camp at Ai, God told Joshua exactly how the search would proceed: “the tribe which the LORD taketh shall come according to the families thereof; and the family which the LORD shall take shall come by households; and the household which the LORD shall take shall come man by man” (Joshua 7:14). There is God’s own anatomy of a nation, laid out in order: the nation, the tribe, the family, the household, the man. Moses gives the identical descending order when he warns of apostasy, “man, or woman, or family, or tribe” (Deuteronomy 29:18).

The family is the middle joint of human society, standing between the lone man and the whole nation, and it is not an invention of custom. It is the architecture of God. When the earth was divided among the nations after the flood, it divided along this very seam, “every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations” (Genesis 10:5). And when God purposed to bless the whole world through Abram, He addressed the world by that same seam: “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). God numbers the world by families and blesses the world by families.

Nor does He overlook the man who has none. “God setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:6). The widow, the single man, the believer whose own kin want nothing to do with Christ: God’s answer to loneliness is not a program. It is a family, and a local church is meant to be exactly that in fact and not in a figure of speech.

The scripture tightly binds a family to its inheritance. In the year of jubile, “ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (Leviticus 25:10). The two returns are riveted together. Land could be leased away in hard years, but at the jubile it came home, because the inheritance belonged to the family and not to the market.

The daughters of Zelophehad understood the principle better than most men did. Their father had died with no son, and they stood before Moses and asked, “Why should the name of our father be done away from among his family, because he hath no son?” (Numbers 27:4). God granted their plea, and then bounded their marriages so the inheritance would stay within the family of their father’s tribe (Numbers 36:6-8). Name and inheritance travel together, and both travel through the family.

But the most valuable inheritance a family can hold is not real estate. Paul reminds Timothy of “the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice” (2 Timothy 1:5). Three generations, one inheritance, and not one blade of grass in the sentence.

And in the family of God the same law holds: “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). Because we are in the family, we hold the inheritance. No child of God is ever disinherited, and no jubile is required, because this inheritance cannot be leased away in a hard year.

A Family Is Redeemed by a Kinsman

If an Israelite grew poor and sold himself to a stranger, the law provided him a way out, and the way was closely specified: “one of his brethren may redeem him: Either his uncle, or his uncle’s son, may redeem him, or any that is nigh of kin unto him of his family may redeem him” (Leviticus 25:48-49). The right of redemption ran along blood lines. A rich stranger, however wealthy and however willing, had no standing in the matter. He could not buy that man out, because he was not kin. In the Bible, redemption is family business.

That law governs the book of Ruth. “And Naomi had a kinsman of her husband’s, a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech; and his name was Boaz” (Ruth 2:1). His wealth gave him the means. His kinship gave him the right. Take away either one and there is no redemption in that book, and Ruth is a foreigner gleaning at the edge of a field until she dies.

If redemption requires a kinsman, and the whole race of Adam is sold under sin, then our Redeemer had to be one of us. And He became one of us: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). That is the doctrine of the incarnation stated in the vocabulary of Leviticus 25. He took flesh and blood in order to stand nigh of kin to us, because a stranger, however rich, had no right to redeem.

And the extent of it is stated in the same passage without hedge or qualification: “that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9). For every man. The provision is exactly as wide as the family of Adam, and whosoever will may claim this Kinsman. God excluded no man from that provision, and any theology that does sets themselves at direct odds with the Lord Himself.

And having done it, He is not embarrassed by the connection. He “is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Hebrews 2:11).

Israel’s Family and the Body’s

Three things must be kept straight here, or this study will hand the church a set of promises that were never addressed to it.

First, the institutions themselves belong to Israel. The jubile, the kinsman’s right of redemption, and the inheritance held in the land are law-age arrangements given to a particular nation, tied to a particular territory held on covenant terms. We do not convert Israel’s land grants into church property, and we do not spiritualize them into a figure for the assembly. They were real, they were Israel’s, and what remains unfulfilled of them will be fulfilled to Israel.

Second, what crosses the divide is not the institution but the principle it was built to teach. The law of the kinsman-redeemer was a schoolroom, and the lesson in it was that redemption is family business and the redeemer must be kin. That lesson does not expire with the dispensation that taught it. It is precisely why the Son of God took flesh and blood, and it is why the provision He made reaches every man.

Third, Israel’s accountability is Israel’s. God says to that nation, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2), and the mourning of Zechariah 12, family by family and apart, is a future scene in Jerusalem and belongs to that people. Cite those passages, label them, and stop. Do not slide from Israel’s national reckoning into a threat over a Christian household, because the standing of the Body is not national and is not on those terms.

State the household principle for the Body separately, and state it from the passages that address us. The family of God is entered by birth and not by census. It cannot be disinherited. And its members are told plainly how to treat one another: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).

One more caution belongs here, because a much-loved verse is often stretched past what it says. The Philippian jailer was told, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31), and men have taken that to mean a father’s faith saves his children by proxy. Read the next three verses. Paul and Silas spoke the word of the Lord to all that were in his house, and the man was baptized, he and all his, and he rejoiced “believing in God with all his house.” Every one of them heard, and every one of them believed. The promise was not that the household would be saved without faith. It was that the same gospel which saved the jailer was available to every soul under his roof, and that night it reached all of them.

A Record Page That Cannot Be Closed

Every one of the four marks is fulfilled in the summit text. Named of the Father, for “the whole family in heaven and earth is named” of Him. Set in His order, for we are “of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). Holding one inheritance, as heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. And redeemed by a Kinsman who took our flesh and blood in order to have the right.

That family presently lives “in heaven and earth.” Part of it is already home, for to be “absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Part of it is still here, still laboring, still burying its dead and drying its eyes. But there are not two families. There is one, with one name over both halves of it.

The record page in the front room is written in a hand that stopped writing years ago. When a date is closed out beside a name in that book, and the person belonged to Jesus Christ, only his presence here ended. His place in the family did not. Death can move a member from one room of the Father’s house into another, but it cannot take the name off him.

To the man who heads a family: what is your name doing to the people who bear it? They will bear it into rooms you will never enter, long after you are dust, exactly as the Hanochites bore Hanoch’s.

To the man who has never been born into the family of God: you cannot join it, you cannot buy your way in, and you cannot inherit it from your mother, however godly she was. You must receive the Son. The Kinsman has already tasted death for every man, which means He has done so for you. Receive Him, and your name goes onto a record page that no fire, no flood, and no funeral will ever close out.

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Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com

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