Sermon Tone Analysis

Text - Hebrews 11.7

A spiritual war is being waged against the human family.

There is a clamour to change, even remove, the family structure.

Notes John MacArthur, Jr. in his book, “The Fulfilled Family”:

We may be watching the death of the germ-cell of all civilization, the family.

Signs of the family’s demise are abundantly clear all around us.

Numerous facts confirm the grim prognosis.

There’s almost no need to cite statistics.

For the past forty years or more the signs of the family’s collapse have been paraded before us continually: divorce, the sexual revolution, abortion, sterilization, delinquency, infidelity, homosexuality, radical feminism, the “children’s-rights” movement, together with the normalization of the single-parent home, the decline of the nuclear family, and other similar signs.

We have been watching the braiding of an intricate rope that will ultimately strangle the family to death.

Ideas and attempts have been drawn to kill the family:

In his 1971 book, The Death of the Family,7 British psychiatrist Dr. David Cooper suggested that it is time to do away with the family completely.

Kate Millet’s 1970 feminist manifesto, Sexual Politics.8

She claimed that families, along with all patriarchal structures, must go because they are nothing more than tools for the oppression and enslavement of women.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, would like to hand over to the federal government some of the rights and responsibilities of child rearing.

Mrs. Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, 9 was written to set forth an agenda that would move America closer to state- sponsored parenting.

Although she gives lip service to the importance of the parents’ and grandparents’ roles, she clearly believes that parents should not be permitted to train their own children unsupervised by the secular government.

She also suggests that a more socialist approach to parenting should be the new norm, including state-sponsored day-care centers and full-day preschools for children as young as three.

It appears that the village Mrs. Clinton envisions is a morass of federally-funded programs designed to indoctrinate children with whatever values the state deems acceptable.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, former president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, says she would like to eliminate all sex, marriage, motherhood, and love.

“Marriage is legalized servitude,” she says, “and family relations are the basis for all human oppression.”10

Gore Vidal, best-selling author and social critic, agrees.

He proposes reorganizing society to eliminate the family as we now know it.

Instead, he would like to see a central authority with the power to control human population, food distribution, and the use of natural resources.11

Today’s families have become mostly dysfunctional

Indications of a dysfunctional home

poor male leadership

abusive leadership

addiction

unsettled conflicts

fear

control

poor communication

The systematic attack against the family

The attack against today’s families was systematic and thorough.

Satan is effectively destroying the woman, the man, and finally the children.

The first attack took place in the Garden of Eden

The whole humanity is under the power of sin because the Satan was successful in destroying the “first family”.

First, Satan-possessed serpent deceived Eve.

He convinced her to partake of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil

Read - Genesis 3.1-6

Second, Adam concedes to the work of the enemy.

The enemy did not attack Adam directly, but indirectly through the woman.

Surprisingly, Adam gives in wilfully to his wife.

Third, the first kids fight.

Cain kills his brother Abel.

He is cursed by God.

The first signs of a dysfunctional family begin to appear.

Read - Genesis 4.1-15

Other significant attack against families recorded in the Bible:

The attack against Israel’s children in Egypt

Unfortunately, Jacob’s family was dysfunctional

he raised children from legal wives as well as concubines

he was guilty of favoritism - he favored Joseph and Benjamin over all his children

the rest of his boys had a grudge against their father and Joseph

they tried to kill Joseph; later they sold him to Ishmaelite merchants

When Joseph, and a new pharaoh had risen, the children of Israel began to suffer:

they were forced into hard labor;

the king of Egypt instructed the midwives to kill the baby boys at birth

Pharaoh commanded all Egyptians to kill all the male child

Every time God prepares to do a mighty work in a given generation, the enemy was there attempting to destroy families so that God’s work will be hindered.

The attack against the Child Jesus

Mary and her child were almost abandoned!

King Herod kills children in Bethlehem

Although the enemy tries to destroy the work of God by destroying homes, God would not allow the the “elect” children to be destroyed.

Moses was delivered.

The children of Exodus were delivered.

Jesus was delivered.

The attack against today’s family

The enemy’s attack against families today is by far his ‘best’ work.

Feminism - a direct attack against the man and the woman

Although it can be said that today’s women are in far better situation compared to 200 years ago, the harmful effects of feminism far outweigh the good.

It encouraged women to do what men can do.

It encouraged women to leave household work and child-reading to “kasambahay” in order to pursue their own careers.

It emasculated men - they would rather be silent than face charges of harassment

It undermined the leadership of man in the house

It paved the way for LGBT to flourish

Quotes from the article “The End Of Men”:

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind.

But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.

Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other.

And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide.

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.

The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions.

Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same.

Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women.

Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men.

But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach.

Feminism - a direct attack against children

abortion

single-parent kids

perverted view of family, leadership and motherhood

kids who lack discipline

Feminism is not all the woman’s fault.

Men are also to blame for the rise of this evil ideology by failing to be the man that God wants him to be: godly, kind, caring and gentle.

William Branham prophetically described the world today:

93 Now, I’m… You’re my sisters.

See?

But look, there’s only one place in the whole universe that gives a man his credit; that’s God gives it to him.