In light of my last post, I wanted to say a word or two about radioactive soil and mutant vegetables.
Fathers are, by definition, the most shaping and dominating influences in any home. Make no mistake, the home you grew up in was dominated by your father. If he was a good father who honored God, who loved and honored your mother, who disciplined and nurtured you, then your childhood was dominated by a sweet and tender mercy of God. If he was cruel and abusive, you were dominated by his cruelty. If he was present bodily, but abdicated his responsibilities, you were dominated by his abdication. If he was absent, his absence was the most dominating and felt reality in your home.
There’s no escaping the dominance of fathers. He was, by nature, the head of the home you grew up in—whether you or your mother or your siblings liked it or not. This has to do with the way God the Father ordered His creation. And because it is God’s order, it is very good.
But because of sin, the absence and/or abdication of fathers in our culture is the most dominating reality that most of us have to deal with. It is the source of the nuclear meltdown. As a college pastor, I am constantly faced with the effects of this meltdown. My job might best be described as wading through Fukushima or Chernobyl in a hazmat suit, picking up the pieces. Except my job is much more impossible than that. I have to somehow reverse the mutations I encounter:
Young men who have grown up without a father’s affection and have therefore eroticized and perverted their craving for healthy masculine affection into homosexual sin. Young men who wince like wounded puppies when you pat them on the back—either because they’ve never been touched before, or because they’ve only known the back of the hand. Young women who have grown up fearing and hating men because their fathers were untrustworthy, and have instead decided they must do everything in their power to never, ever be let down by a man again. Young women so hungry for attention and affection that they prostitute their bodies to deadbeats and losers. And the list goes on.
This is the world we live in, and it’s because the central, defining reality of our lives is father hunger. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in the absence of godly fathers, we have given ourselves to every perverse thing that comes along promising to give us the discipline and affection we never received at home. This can take the form of abusive boyfriends, university professors, and bloated government bureaucracies.
How in the world can this be overcome?
It can’t be overcome until we return to the Father from whom every father gets his name. We must return to God the Father through Jesus His Son if we’re to have any hope of recovering something approximating a healthy home. Which means we must repent of our rebellion against His good fatherly rule.
This is a problem that goes back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve cast off the authority of God to worship Satan and themselves. Eating the fruit was a rejection of God’s kind and benevolent rule. He had given them every good thing to enjoy. But despising the one restriction He placed upon them, they exchanged His good and generous rule for the tyranny of sin, Satan, and self. The Fall of man secured the demise of the home as God intended it.
So if we’re to know something of God’s Fatherhood, we must return to Him as prodigal sons, repentant and humbled. We don’t deserve any kindness from Him. We don’t deserve good fathers or families. We are the sons of Satan (John 8:44), children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). But He stands ready to receive, forgive, and pardon all who return to Him. And all who come He adopts into His family, the Church, the Household of Faith. He gives us His Holy Spirit who transforms us into His likeness.
Much of this Holy Spirit wrought work comes through the regular work of the church. It comes through pastors and elders preaching, teaching, and modeling godliness. It comes through living life together under the rule of Christ.
So recovering a healthy understanding of fatherhood in our culture is the product of life together in the household of faith—the church. And men and women who know God and have been given authority in His Church must preach and teach and model godly fatherhood and family relationships in such a way that those who look at us see the Father—and are drawn to Him instead of to counterfeits. This is one of the many ways we’re called to be salt and light.
Because, as dominating a reality as our earthly fathers were, they were only meant to be a signpost pointing us to God. In the end, all of our fathers failed—the difference is just a difference in degree. Next to God all dads are deadbeats. No father has truly represented God, and we all must turn to Him if we are to be healed. And the good news is that He is a good Father, quick to forgive and eager to heal.
