SAVED BY FAMILIES by S. M. I. H.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 30, 1900

SAVED BY FAMILIES.

By S. M. I. H.

The position to which God has exalted the family in his plan of work for the earth is so important as to cause the thoughtful mind to marvel. In the first place, it has cost not a little to fit up this earth for a people, and, later on, to redeem it from its traitorous betrayal. The long, long war against the enemy into whose hands the primeval home was betrayed would soon have drained any but a kingdom blessed with inexhaustible resources. And all this outlay of treasure has been for the preservation of the family; for there is the heritage of God, and his only reward for all that he has expended in the earth, both to create and to redeem. Ps. 127: 3.

The home is the safety deposit. The family, like an ornament set with jewels, is the chief glory of the crown that is to be worn by the King of the whole earth at his coronation.

This being so, we would naturally suppose that God would not have taken any risk in preserving his heritage; but for some reason he chose the risk of utter loss rather than to have all assured by any arbitrary means. And this leads to the conclusion that no arbitrary methods will preserve anything that is worth having. Although such immense interests are depending upon the result, God has given to the head of the family the power to deny his claim, disregard his every right, and shut him out of his reward. But in taking this risk, God has revealed his confidence in the strength of the tie that binds these human fractions into the family unit.

He has by this made known his estimate of the measure of the Spirit manifested in parental instinct, which is undoubtedly the strongest manifestation of the power of God in human life, and which has been set apart for a special service in the gospel. The danger that his children might be ruined by following his bad example, and for lack of his safe leading, has constrained many a father to forsake an evil course, and to so consider his relations to God as to bring him to repentance and salvation. Many a mother has been forced to call upon God, and to begin such a life of prayer as led to a true consecration of herself, because of her sense of inability to train her children aright.

Here again the children of this world have been wiser in their generation than the children of light; for tradesmen and saloon keepers everywhere recognize the importance, and make much, of the family, and the opportunity that it affords them to make a profit out of any trade. Goods of all sorts bear the family label, even down to liquors and soap; and yet family religion has not come to be a very widely recognized factor. The church, of course, in a way recognizes the family; but when you come to look for signs of the recognition, you will be disappointed. The hymns of the church reveal this lack. A few pages in our own hymn-book are given to “family devotion,” but only four of these hymns make any reference to the family; and one of these, number 549, presupposes that the children are to “remain regardless of Thy word without a hope of heaven.” The same significant omission of family mention is to be found in nearly every hymn-book that I have ever examined, and I have examined a great many. And, strange as it may seem, I have been regarded as guilty of “raising a breeze” more than once by saying that God intends to save us by families; and have been met on the right and on the left with questions and quotations intended to nullify that statement. I have more than once been challenged with every token of belligerence to “prove it,” just as if by such an utterance I had brought them bad news instead of the most precious of all truths.

For my part, the strongest consolation that the gospel has for me is not that by its gracious provisions I myself am to have an eternal home in the new earth, but that it is God’s purpose to place my family there with me; that those for whom I longed and suffered, whom I loved so much better than self that if there could not be eternal life enough to go round, I would gladly surrender my share to them, and rejoice in the privilege, are included in the same promise upon which I rest my all of hope. Acts 2: 38, 39.

In one instance, even this summer of 1899, I discovered such a condition of things at the conclusion of one study on this subject that I was constrained to say that if it were possible for any people to convince the race of mothers that it was certain that with all their best efforts they must of necessity lose a part of their children by eternal death, it would certainly work to separate those mothers from Christ; for, unless restrained by a rare gift of sanctified intelligence, a mother will follow her child wherever it must go, even if she has to sin to do it. And this is an expression of God in essential motherhood, of the same quality as that which sent Christ down, and which in Christ came himself down, into the depths of eternal death to redeem the family that had been sold to sin, and was reserved for destruction.

S. M. I. H.