You and Your Household
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

All in favor of family values, raise your hands. Have you ever wondered what family values are? Are family values fans those who buy the jumbo size detergent at the grocery store? Those who stay at those motels where kids stay free? We're all for families, but too often we don't know why. In these pages we have argued that we must begin to put away that worldly wisdom that divides families, that puts each member in its appropriate demographic, and thus grants them an identity. When the world sees my oldest daughter they see a six-year old girl. That means Teletubbies, and pretty soon, Ricky Martin. But when Darby looks at herself, she sees a Sproul. Her identity is bound up in being a member of our family. To put it another way, she has more in common with this now 35 year old man than she does with the little girl down the street.

And we have, in these pages, highlighted all manner of social ills that come from failing to see ourselves as a family, as well as all manner of cultural manners and mores that encourage such destructive thinking. But I hope that we are for families not because the world is for individuals, and we're against what the world is for, but that we are for families because the Bible is for families. We don't want to be reactionary; we want to be biblical.

The Bible demonstrates that it is for families on page one. God did not make a covenant with Adam. Nope, not before the fall, not after the fall. God never made a covenant with Noah, or one with Abraham, Moses, David, not even a covenant with believers. Each and every time a covenant is made between God and man, it is made between God, and the man, and the household, and as many as are afar off. God makes covenants with families.

But such is not a function of Hebrew thinking. The same principle applies in the New Covenant, as the covenant goes to the Gentiles. In Acts 16 we have an almost comical example of this. Paul and Silas are in jail, praying and singing. The ground begins to shake; Paul and Silas, and all the prisoners are loosed from their chains. In runs the jailer, like sleepy-eyed Barney Fife, ready to put that one bullet in his head. But Paul stops him, telling him that none have escaped. The jailer calls for a light, runs into Paul and Silas in tears and asks, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" This is no Jew. He thinks just like a twentieth century American. It's all about him. Gotta take care of number one. He forgets his family while contemplating a suicide that will make of them a widow and orphans. And he forgets them when he begins to look forward with hope.

"So they said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.'" He asked the wrong question, but they gave him the right answer. Now the biblical idea of covenants and families is making its way into the Gentile community. They must stop thinking like American individualists. They must begin to see their own organic unity with their family, the way God sees it.

We're told both that all of the jailer's house next heard the gospel preached, that he and his house were baptized, and they had a feast in celebration of all the household having believed God. Does that mean that there are two ways into heaven, that either one must believe on the Lord, or that one must be the child of one who believes? Of course not. It seems rather likely that after a generation of two, if not in that first one, we would have discovered that not all jailer children were jailer children, as not all Israel was Israel. I don't doubt that there would be covenant breakers in the family. But that's what they are, covenant breakers. They aren't little halfway covenant children who failed to make it all the way in. Neither were they all the way in, and somehow slipped from God's hands and lost their salvation. Rather, as those bearing the mark of the covenant, baptism, we are to assume that they were in the one covenant, that covenant by which men are redeemed. And if they either repudiated the faith that one must hold to be redeemed, to be in the covenant, then they were never really in, and so are covenant breakers.

It's not that complicated. We only have trouble with this because we still think like the jailer first thought. We know we are justified by faith alone. We know that without faith there is no salvation. And yet even in our day we see children getting the mark of salvation, who end up outside the camp. Just like the Jews. When a child was circumcised in the Old Testament, no one said a prayer hoping the child would one day be in covenant with God. Nobody spent the next six to twelve years resting in the soft pillow of the strange notion of an age of accountability. Nobody stayed up nights over that same time frame waiting, and hoping and praying that when that child was older he would make a decision. Nobody let out a great sigh of relief when the child stood before the temple and made a profession. He wore his profession, everywhere he went. When he repudiated it, he was cut off, just like his 8-day-old foreskin.

As did the family of the Philippian jailer, and as we do, at least those of us who bring our children to the water. One covenant, unavoidable, and we either keep it in faith, which we never really know, or we break it. For us and our families, and for as many as are afar off. His grace is boundless, from generation to generation. Paul and Silas sang of it. The jailer rejoiced in it. If only we believed it.