Buffalo Creek Ministries

What Does it Mean to be a Family?

Part 1 in series.

19 November 2006

Good Morning and the blessings of our Messiah and God be with you all evermore.

Never before has mankind been given as many choices and abundance as we are witness to in our time. Yet we are wanting in a way that no other generation has ever wanted since the beginning of our recorded history. In today’s readings the one thing that stands out as a common thread woven between the various passages is the idea of family. God gave us the family from the very beginning of this creation. Look to Gen 1:26-28 (GNB) “Then God said, ‘And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us. They will have power over the fish, the birds, and all animals, domestic and wild, large and small." So God created human beings, making them to be like himself. He created them male and female, blessed them, and said, "Have many children, so that your descendants will live all over the earth and bring it under their control. I am putting you in charge of the fish, the birds, and all the wild animals.’” So, God created mankind to live as families, father, mother, and children living and working together to bring forth a good and wonderful world. We must ask ourselves, is that the world we see around us?

In today’s modern, contemporary, and politically correct society the family has been pushed to the very bottom of the list. Society no longer revolves around God’s social structure we call the family, instead it revolves around the Satanism we call commercialism. Today we have churches, agencies, groups, authorities, and companies that run our everyday life and control each of us to an extreme that most tyrannical of Roman emperors would be envious of and God’s plan for us is all but forgotten. It is a wonder that we have made it this long but as God tells us through his prophets past and present the end is coming and the beginning of the end is already here. We my friends are just like Esau, in that we sold our salvation for gold and the prestige that Satan offers through his cleverly crafted social structures.

When we remember the story of Esau and how out of greed and impatience he sold everything he was to inherit, as the eldest son of Jacob, for a meal. Why didn’t he just make his own dinner? Because Esau couldn’t wait he wanted immediate satisfaction for his hunger. We as a society have become like Esau in many ways in that we are looking for instant gratification and this trend in society has already significantly eroded our family structure. Families are scattered across the globe like they have never been before deteriorating any sense of family unity to nothing. Today for the first time in recorded history, more then half of our children are living in single parent homes. One in three children are born to unmarried parents. The number of babies born per year to unmarried women quadrupled in less then 20 years. More then half of all marriages end in divorce. More than half of us alive today have been, are, or will be in one or more stepfamily situations. Although polygamy is outlawed here in the United States, we as a society are promoting through our government, church, and commercial institutions what is known as “serial polygamy” or repeated marriage, divorce and remarriage, at an occurrence rate far exceeding any polygamist rate in recorded history. Churches are turning a deaf ear to the word of God by encouraging the break up of families through condoning the concept that divorce in single parent families are supported by scriptural blessing. Our states now require couples to enter marriage contracts between them individually and the state, not between each other and God. Are we even trying, to live the family life God told us to?

God designed a family model for us, based on himself, not on what is convenient for lawyers and politicians. All of God’s creation is integrated to work together as he designed it and families are the most important part of creation given for mankind. Don’t you think Satan know this? Don’t you think that what happen in the Garden of Eden was a prelude to the divorce remarry cycle of today? Satan seduced Eve, he tried to drive a wedge between Adam and his wife Eve. Yes his wife. The word woman as used in the Bible doesn’t merely mean female it literally and constantly means wife. When any one of us put aside our need for instant gratification and find the time to give to God, to study the words he sent to us through his messengers and prophets, as he expects each of us to do, then anyone of us can understand what happen to Adam and Eve’s family. The underlying Hebrew word for Beguile, nâshâ', means to wholly seduce according to Strong’s Bible Dictionary. Yes, seduce in the sexual sense just as we would use the word today. We find a confirmation of this in 2Co 11:3 “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty…” Here we see the Greek word exapataō which means to seduce wholly. Now English Bibles translate the Hebrew word 'âkal as eat when it is used in Geneses chapter 3 but the same Hebrew word is translated elsewhere in the Bible, such as, Genesis chapter 31, Exodus Chapter 3, Leviticus chapter 6 and a number of other occurrences as consume. So the sentence is speaking about consuming something, such as, when we say, “he devoured the lecture on robotics” or “she really ate that tale up” we are not eating in the food sense as a fig or potato. Are we? Of course not. Now lets look at the next word, which is the Hebrew word nâga‛ and is translated most often as touch but as we see in Strong’s it means euphemistically “to lie with a woman”. You see my brothers and sisters, Satan convinced Eve to lie with him, to break her marriage vows with Adam, all in an attempt to destroy the family that God had ordained. Why would Satan bother? Because the classical family now outdated in our contemporary society, with a male father at its head, is the only stable building block of God’s kingdom. When Yeshua comes back to reign he will reign over a Kingdom, not a democracy or republic, but an absolute monarchy, where the social structure is predicated on strong, organized, and fully functional families. Satan wants these families gone because when family bonds are weakened; the void is filled with greed and selfishness the perfect breeding ground to promote sin and misery. Satan hopes by destroying the model of family given us by God and replacing it with totally dysfunctional substitutes there will be no Godly people for Yeshua to rule over.

I want to get to our family problems today but I want to show that the attack on families we see today has been growing for millennia, only blooming forth as it is now, in these final days. Remember Noah, how he was a just man, he was a pure blooded man, inter bred with the seed of Satan. He was pure in his generations. But yet from him came the Canaanites who God cursed. Why would God curse Canaan and his descendents? Because Ham Noah’s son and Canaan’s father transgressed the family structure that God ordained. Just as the Kenites are the cursed descendents of Cain from Satan’s transgression of the family so then are the Canaanites cursed by God. Many people believe Ham, Noah’s son saw Noah naked when they read Genesis 9:22, but this is not the truth. First when is seeing your father naked a sin? Second, then why would Canaan be cursed? Why wouldn’t Ham be the one cursed? God tells us in Deuteronomy 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." So then why is Canaan cursed? Because he is the bastard offspring of Ham. What Ham did is have intercourse with Noah’s wife! The Bible explains itself to us if we are willing to make time out of our busy schedule for God and study the Bible as we should. See what it says in Genesis 9:22 "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.” Now look to both Levitcus 18:8 "The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness. (KJV)" Well, you say, that is perhaps a suggestion, but I don't know... and Leviticus 20:11 "And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” It wasn’t seeing Noah naked that was the issue, it was having intercourse with Noah’s wife that lead to a cursed son. Canaan was a son of Ham and Ham’s mother who was Noah’s wife.

But crafty Satan wasn’t planning on stopping there. No he wanted all the boys to share in his fun. Shem and Japheth would have nothing to do with it however. They stood true to God’s plan and went in and covered mother up. Satan wanted to pollute the last remnants of Adam’s descendents to be corrupt like his own descendents the Kenites.

Satan latterly is the tree of good and evil. Satan using his craftiness’, sorcery, and powers of persuasion convinced Eve to lay with him to destroy the model family God created in Adam and Eve. Yet it didn’t work because God intervened. Without God’s intervention Satan would have won and the Family of Adam and eve would have been destroyed. What about in your life? Are you letting Satan in to destroy your family? Or are you from a family already withering despair from the spasms of torment brought on by Satan and his agents infiltrating your family.

As true believers in God and our Messiah Yeshua, we must stand up individually and collectively as God’s family and make that stand. We must resist the temptation to join the crowds of those who flock to Satan, and call for the renewal of family units as ordained by God. Every child should have a right to his mother and his father. Every man must take full responsibility for the care and protection of a woman he fathers children with by brining her into his home and being her husband in all sense of the word. Our daughters must be taught that they have an absolute moral responsibility to God once they conceive by a man, to remain with him as his woman and not go off with someone else. Fathers and mothers must reclaim their authority over their households and families and enforce God’s laws as best they can, not the rules and doctrines of the populist or some church group morality. Each of us must accept and act on our obligation to God and the Messiah to make the time to study his word directly. We must verify every word we read to ensure we are understanding God’s meanings and not following some random doctrine imposed by society acting under the oversight of Satan.

Fathers and mothers must teach and train their children in the ways of God as they apply to family life. Brothers and sisters should love each other and be there to support and help each other. Children should respect their parents not just by doing what they are told, but by living in their heart the rules of family given us by God. Parents have to be there for their children as parents not just buddies. Parents need to be nurturing but firm. They need to be strong and discipline their children to walk in God’s laws first above all else. Just like when we truly believe in and love the Messiah we are tried by our works, so then we must try our faith in God’s plan for each of us by testing the truthfulness of our love for God through our works in building strong families around the world.

The peace of the Messiah be with you evermore. Amen.