Piper—Perspectives On Family -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 01:4 (Oct 1996)
Article: Piper—Perspectives On Family
Author: Anonymous


Piper—Perspectives On Family

In October 1995, John Piper, Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, faced Ruth Tucker, Visiting Professor of Missions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in a public debate held at Wheaton College, sponsored by the Wheaton Student Association. During the debate, Dr. Piper, longtime CBMW council member, challenged the audience to establish families on Biblical foundations, forsaking the broken cisterns of cultural conformity. Piper provided a basic statement concerning the family: “The family exists by the creation and design of God, it is sustained by the providence of God, it is ordered by the Word of God, and its reason for being is the glory of God.”

Dr. Piper then set forth ten propositions on family, beginning with statements that would have most universal acceptance among evangelicals, moving toward those that become more controversial in our day when egalitarian positions have begun to erode Biblical truth. Following are ten propositions follow with appropriate Scriptures in parentheses.

1. The family is not God, and all the satisfaction that we get from marriage and children is potential idolatry, as are all other pleasures pursued apart from God. Even the innocent pleasures of family can choke out the seed of the Word.

2. The family is the first place, the last place, and the greatest place of pain and futility in human life. Thus the family is the primary place of learning the price of forsaking and neglecting God. (Gen. 1–3)

3. In a fallen world, God ordains the pain of loving discipline from parents to rescue children from folly and to reveal the holiness of God (Heb. 12).

4. God commands parents, especially fathers, to take primary responsibility for building biblical truth into the lives of children with a view to preserving confidence in God for all generations (Eph. 6:1–4; Ps. 78).

5. In a fallen world, the harmony and cohesiveness of human families are subordinate to the purposes of God in Christ (Matt. 10: 34–37).

6. While it is good for man not to be alone (Gen. 2:18), it is worse to be married when called and gifted to be single for the Lord’s sake.The ideal aim of marriage in the created order is subordinate to the demand of devotion to Christ (1 Cor. 7:32–35).

7. Marriage is the one and only sacred haven for sexual union. This union is God’s ministry of protection from Satan’s temptation of husbands and wives. (...

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