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

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1900

SAVED BY FAMILIES.

By S. M. I. H.

God can not do his work in the earth without the family, any more than you can do your sewing without a needle and thread; so he must preserve it at all hazards, or utterly abandon his plan, and let Satan have the field.

The family, like any machine, is made up of certain parts. These are fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood. Lacking any one of these, the machine is broken and useless. You can not have a family without a father, without a mother, without children. There may be a husband and wife, but if there are no children, there is no family.

The question is asked, “But what if one can not live with one’s husband or wife, and yet is trying to keep the children together?” or, “What if, although a husband and wife are agreed, God has not given them any children — are they not a family?”

Such a family is a family, just as the sewing machine is a sewing machine with treadle, needle bar, drive wheel, or any other part lacking. It may be a sewing machine, but — and that “but” speaks volumes. Before the machine can be effective, something must be done to supply the lack; and every member of that broken family realizes this truth to a greater or less extent. And, as is often done with the watch or sewing machine, the effort is made to “patch up” the family. This one and that one are given a hand at it. It is tinkered with all manner of devices from divorces to remarriages, in the hope to keep it in running order; but the only sure way, if anything is wrong, out of place, lacking, broken, is to give it over to the divine Machinist,— send it back to the shop where its timbers were fashioned and joined, and allow the same hand that made it to mend it.

It may be that in setting up some especial family there was, as intimated in a former article, satanic interference from the first. It may have been made of misfitting parts, which could not by any human power be joined. Two, who should never have come together, have been married by the representative of God under the “powers that be.” They have lived together, children have been born to them, all so disjointed and misfitting that that family is a travesty on the name,— a little perdition on the earth; and yet they are all human beings, members of the same host of lost ones who had to be lost before they could be found, who had to be sinners before they could be redeemed, with the same kind of hearts, which must be replaced by the new ones which had been provided for the entire race. They are filled with the same pains and regrets that many who will be saved in the kingdom of God have known; the same longing desire to repair the mischief for the sake of the children, if not for their own.

Many are the questions that come concerning such conditions; for they are in existence among us as a people. To all there is but one answer, and it is given in the word of God. It is not necessary to employ a lawyer, or search old folios for a precedent. The Man of our counsel has it all down in black and white, for reproof, admonition, and comfort; and by a working that he understands is able to take the disjointed timbers and so refashion them that he shall make “in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;” and by this new man, reconstructed out of the divided halves which have misrepresented fatherhood and motherhood to the children, he will be able by the same power of his Spirit to bring every child, however badly born, to a new birth in Christ Jesus. Born again by the ministry of the same Spirit, there shall be realized what Paul saw when he said, “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” Eph. 2 : 13–18.

S. M. I. H.