Creation Order, Broken Families, and God’s Grace

Teaching apologetics has taught me a lot. It’s made me learn to think on my feet, and it’s challenged me to think through questions I would never have thought to ask. It has also, at times, helped me to see common yet wrong thinking. This happened a few years ago as we were going through God’s design for the family. 

I was laying out the biblical teaching that the ideal situation for a family is a father, mother, and their children, and was a little surprised when I got pushback. “What about widows?” “Can single people adopt?” “What about blended families?” “Should someone move in with a single aunt or with a foster family?” “What about couples that can’t have children?” I was a little surprised by the responses. Clearly we were talking past each other at some level. As the conversation continued, I began to see that they believed it was wrong to say that one kind of family was “best” or “ideal.” In their minds, this meant that families that didn’t have a father, mother, or children were somehow inferior. So, how should we think about this?

 

Down with the Nuclear Family?

There is a faction in America who think that our ideas of the “nuclear family” are optional at best, and oppressive at worst. Perhaps most famously, the Black Lives Matter website at one time described one of its goals as 

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

This claim was quickly taken down after it received a severe backlash. When trying to put the best spin on this, one professor said:

I don’t think there’s any reasonable basis to claim [that the group’s website] is promoting an actual reduction in the proportion of people actually living in a Western nuclear family structure — but rather, to imagine ‘successful’ families as more inclusive than this particular vision of family… It is a call to disrupt the notion that the nuclear family structure is the only way to ensure neighborhood stability and vitality, and to affirm that neighborhoods that contain a high volume of non-traditional family structures (e.g. households with a single parent or grandparents / other familial figures as primary caregivers for kids) are just as capable of — and just as deserving of — policies and practices that contribute to neighborhood stability and vitality.

In other words, this professor is arguing that we shouldn’t think of the family as just one thing – a husband, wife, and their children. We should instead think of family as malleable. And furthermore, we should view alternative forms of family, where a mom and a grandmother are doing the raising or where a single father raises three kids with help from his parents, as just as viable as the “traditional” father, mother, kids. 

 

Creation Order

Does family have to be one way? And if so, who gets to decide what that one way looks like? Here it’s important to introduce a helpful theological concept called, “Creation Order.” This principle simply states that when God made the world, He made it to work a certain way. If you want things to work well, if you want humans to flourish, you have to do things the way God designed them to be done. You have to go with the grain of creation, not against it. 

Maybe an example will help. If you are going to do yard work, there are at least three tools you could use: a lawnmower, a weed eater, and pruning shears. The lawnmower takes care of most of the grass, the weed eater gets the grass near a wall or in those hard to reach areas, and the pruning shears are good for getting branches and weeds that have gotten a little too thick. Now, could you do your yard without one of those tools? Perhaps, but it would be quite the challenge. You theoretically could use a weed eater to mow the lawn, but man would it be hard! You could use pruning shears instead of a weed eater, but be prepared for the job to take way, way longer. For yard work to run smoothly, you need to use tools as they were meant to be used. 

In a similar way, God designed the family. He gave us the blueprint in biblical passages like Genesis 1-2, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and throughout the book of Proverbs. Yes, God intends for one man and one woman to be married, for life. Yes, the normal plan for that marriage will be to have children whom they raise and in whom they instill their values and instruct in the way of the Lord. That’s the way it is supposed to work. Any and every deviation away from that will make it harder for families to do well what families were made to do. 

 

But What about Broken Families?

But to come back to the issue that concerned my students: what about broken families? Does saying that a family does not meet the pattern in God’s creation order mean that those involved are in sin? Is their family somehow less special or are they less God-honoring? Let me say clearly and unequivocally – no!

First, it’s important to state that a broken family does not necessarily mean that anyone sinned. Parents die unexpectedly. Couples are infertile. These things can happen and the brokenness that results does not imply that anyone has done anything wrong. Even when there is sin involved, through a dad skipping town, parents who lose custody due to drugs, or any other such sin, there are always innocent parties. Children often pay the brunt for others’ selfish, sinful behavior.

So how does God feel about broken families? He loves them. He has a heart for them. He claims in Scripture to stand in for the fatherless and the widow (Exodus 22:22-24; Psalm 27:10; 68:5) and calls on His people to do the same (James 1:27). We God’s care for such people throughout the pages of the Bible, whether it’s Hagar running for her life with her child in the desert, or Hannah quietly pleading for a son while her husband’s other wife torments her, or God sending His prophet to care for a widow and her son during a drought. God’s heart is for the downcast and the hurting.

I can’t help but write this post and think of families that have been broken, either because of sin or simply through the normal suffering of life. Names and faces flash across my mind, and my heart goes out to them. God loves broken families, and He has special grace reserved for them. Not only that, God wants us to love broken families and to step in and do what we can to help make up for their loss. He calls on us to have a heart of compassion and to show real love to those in need.

There’s a balance here. We want to show kindness, compassion, and love to broken families. God sees broken families and God loves broken families. We see that all throughout Scripture. But there is a difference between saying, “God gives grace to broken families” and “there is no such thing as a broken family.” God designed the family to work a certain way, but in a world filled with sin and suffering that pattern will not always be possible. The solution isn’t to redefine what a family should look like, but rather to show compassion and help to families that are struggling. 

So let’s hold up God’s good plan for families. Let’s fight for dads, moms, and kids. Let’s push back on anything that might undermine that, from gay marriage to divorce to cohabitation to couples who reject having children. And at the same time, let’s have a heart for those families that have been broken by sin or suffering. Let’s mourn with them, rejoice with them, and pray for them. And let’s encourage them. They can still have a family marked by love, faith, and God’s grace, despite the brokenness. It might be corny, but I think the Disney character Stitch captured this well when he said, “This is my family… it’s little and broken, but good.”

 

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.

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Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash