A Wife Is A Good Gift from God
There are three spheres of life that have been established in the world and recognized in Christianity– family, government, and the church. They were created in this order, and each overlap, but are constantly trying to encroach into the other’s sphere.
Family comes first, as family was the first unit created by God. God saw that it was not good for man to be alone, and he needed a helper, and so he created the perfect woman and brought her to the man. He gave them a mission and a plan, and as the wise king states, he’s been doing it ever since:
A house and wealth are inherited from fathers,
Proverbs 19:14
but a prudent wife is from the Lord.
This is not to say that every husband or wife is perfect, as we all know, and Proverbs is full of reminding us, but this is to say that the Lord does provide us with good gifts, and marriage is a good gift!
In this modern era, we often forget or have problems with what family means, what it should do, or the point of it all because of the encroachment of society upon it. Some will look back to the 1950s, assuming that the nuclear family with the husband away for most of the day and the wife taking care of the home and kids is the traditional family– but this is far from the biblical plan.
The home as a place to sleep, play, and as a launch pad would also be very foreign to those looking at the family from the past, and this is because of what the government and other spheres have done to break apart and minimize the very force that was created to do the work in the world from the beginning.
From the beginning, a husband and wife were a team to build a multi-generational family that would be able to accomplish a vision that would provide for the elderly and the young. Children were brought up to be an asset to the family home that produced for the good of all. That child who learned how to be a blacksmith would help the family farm to blacksmith. The child that had an interest in sales could help in the shop. Some would be able to take care of the old, and others could help with the food. The family would be a unit that could survive and have an inheritance that was more than numbers on a page.
The truth of this is scattered all around traditions that we now do for formality’s sake. The asking for the bride’s father’s permission recognized how much the woman brought to her family and the fact that losing her would cause an issue for that family. There are many father-and-son businesses, and our older movies and stories are full of children who are rebelling from their place in the family and seeking to go out on their own– meaning that the usual path was to be a part of the family. Jesus himself said that his purpose was to be about his father’s business.
When we are separated and isolated, when each new unit has to buy a new house, or when we are convinced that we don’t need our parents and that our house is only a launch pad, we spend away the wealth of our youth, enslaving ourselves to the banks and the government, and we lose the close family ties that should bind us together on mission. We sell the house and spend the wealth we inherit from our fathers and we don’t value the prudent wife (or husband) from God, and we wonder why we feel a lack of purpose.
We were never meant to live this way.
