Christian Civics: Husbands and Fathers
Jesus is Lord, not just in Heaven but here on earth. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus Christ, given by the only One who has it to give away. God the Father has anointed God the Son as the King over every stitch of this cosmos around us (and in us).
Jesus is Lord of all, and because of that we can and should know how to govern society, beginning with ourselves, moving out into our families, then into our cities, and then out into our nations. Jesus is King over me, over my family, over Cincinnati, Ohio, and over the United States of America. Knowing He is King over this earth, I and those around me a have a responsibility to govern that which we have been given authority over as Jesus would have us do. And one of the most essential authorities God has ordained in human life is that of the husband and father.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’ (this is the first commandment with a promise), ‘that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.’ Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 5:22-6:4
Husbands and Fathers Have God-Given Authority
Fathers are to have authority in their homes, leading their wives and their children as they themselves obey God. When fathers do this, when they self-sacrificially provide for their wives and children materially, spiritually, and educationally, the civil government, the men and women at your state capitol and your county offices and in the police cruisers, are needed in your home less. Put another way: The more fathers employ Godly authority in their homes, the less the government is needed to come in to deal with crises in and around those homes.
God has given the power of the sword to earthly rulers for a reason: They are His instrument of good for putting down evildoers and upholding and administering justice.
“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.”
Romans 13:3-4
When a man is murdered or a woman’s car is stolen out of her driveway, the governing authorities should punish the wrongdoer and see that justice is done. But what has occurred over the last century in America is that, as fathers have abdicated the providing for their families financially and spiritually and educationally, our public governing bodies have filled the vacuum. As there have been less and less men working hard to provide all the money their family needs to survive, reading the Bible and praying and repenting in the living room with everyone in the family present, and teaching their children about God’s world and how He wants us to live in it, our governments have stepped in to perform those functions or functions that imitate them. Most of us think nothing of the government providing money for us to eat or buy goods and services, of the government telling us when and how it is appropriate for us to speak about or worship Jesus, or of the government teaching our children what this world is and how it came to be and what we should be doing in it. We should be unsettled by that modern American reality. God has not ordained government to be the head of our households.
The government should not be the main source of my children’s monetary support. The government should not be telling my family when and where it may speak about God and His Bible or when and where it may worship Jesus. The government should not be the main educational influence in my children’s lives. My care and leadership for my family should be so filling, so expansive, that the government can only squeeze in where it is absolutely necessary. It should administer justice when a crime is committed against my family (or, God forbid, if one of us commits a crime). It should see that injustices are not committed on our street and in our nation. But God has not instituted the government to teach my wife and my children about God and his world, to provide food and clothing for them, to facilitate worship in our home. Those things are my job. That is the calling God has given to me as husband and father.
Not every home has a husband and father. And not every home has a husband or father who is able to fulfill one or more the callings God has given to husbands and fathers. The church of Jesus Christ, the extended family, and the government are all institutions that God ordained for stepping in the gap to help when a man dies or is physically unable to provide for his family. But that is not the norm in our society. We do not have fifty million men who are unable to lead and work jobs for and teach their wives and their children. What we have are scores of millions of grown men among us who make time and space in their hearts for sports and video games and pornography but not for spending hours in prayer for their families, hours in working hard to make sure their physical needs are met, hours in teaching their wives and their children who God is and what He loves and hates. Virtually half of the children being born in our country are not being born into a family where dad is married to mom and so has covenanted to love and provide for her and their children. There are millions of boys and girls who are scarred in their souls from the damage a man has done simply by not doing what God has called him to. Even in many homes where mom and dad are married, the primary educational forces in the home are government schools and social media.
The diminishing influence of the God-ordained role of a husband/father is a current we’re all swimming against. I’m not free from its pull. I sin every day in apathy, self-centeredness, anger, laziness, prayerlessness. But we must recognize it as a problem and swim against it with all our might. We do not have television shows and movies that exalt dedicated, exercised authority from husbands and fathers for the wives and children they love. Our culture would hate such stories if any of them snuck their way onto the screen. So be it. Let us at least stop putting stories into our minds and memories that undermine the way God wants the family to be. Let’s keep our minds and our hearts clear of stories where women do what God has called men to do and where men are a joke or manhood an enemy to be fought. Our sons do not need such stories, and neither do our daughters. They harm them and harm us.
We are swimming in an ocean of government influence. We don’t give a second thought to government schools teaching our children that God did not make the world, did not create people and animals, does not define what people are and what a boy or a girl is, and that He is not the reason we exist. We rarely ask ourselves whether that check or card from the government is something we should take. Just a few short years ago we instinctively asked whether going to worship on the Lord’s Day with our church was something the government would let us to do. Where we as husbands and fathers have stepped back, the government has stepped forward.
For those of us who are not prevented from stepping up as husbands and fathers by Providence, those of us who are not unable to provide for and lead our wives and children, let us fulfill the calling our God has given us. Let us take up the charge. We are, by and large, better than the government at teaching our wives and children, instructing our families in how to be God-fearing people, giving them what they need to survive and grow in God’s world. God has made us to do such things. He gave us our wives and children to do such things for them. And he gave them us.
When men live up to their calling as husbands and fathers, the governing authorities will be less needed in what they are not called to do and more able to do what they are.