I am presently having some difficulties with my desk top computer, so am writing this on an iTouch, (small keyboard – big fingers :-/). This just to say that this will have to be very brief.
In light of what I have just posted where aiming at the truth is concerned, I need to say a word or two about “family” or “families.” It is written God “… puts the solitary in families.” (see Mark 10:29, 30) It really should not require rocket science to point out that a “family” is not the same thing as a “brotherhood.” It does not say God puts the solitary in brotherhoods. There is a significant difference between a brotherhood and a family. Two very important differences have to do with reproduction and nurture.
Under the present circumstances that is all I want to say about this for the moment, but in the days of this writing, this has become a critically important truth for me, where relationships that come from God are concerned.
Please think on these things!
- By Jay Ferris, originally published March 2011
Loving Like God 
The Father has brought my wife and I through great pains pursuant to cleaving together. Jesus said in Mark “what God has joined together, let man not separate”, yet, those we formerly called family (mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin) are what the Bible calls kin or relatives, never family – least ways if we are faithful to the Greek. Family is used just once in the NT, according to Strong’s KJV annotated, by Paul, to denote the family of God in Christ. Thus it is spirit that makes us family, not blood.
To that end, Jesus says that it is what the world calls family who may even betray those of us of the Spirit, some even betraying us unto death. We both suffered a measure of abuse (disrespect, disinclusion, dismissiveness, hatred, etc) at the hands of blood relatives – which was very hard to sort out for us. For my relatives were not kind to my wife and I tended to be blind to it – or simply to expect my wife to put up with it in the interest of my relationship with them. The same was true for me with my wife’s relatives.
So at what point do we cleave? Is it cleaving when one or the other of us are turning a blind eye to the habitual abuse of our spouse? Or when we sit down to a big holiday meal and recite a flowery prayer of thanks to Jesus, where sitting across from me at the Lord’s table is someone who has expressed hatred for me? Is it reasonable to call that person a false brother or sister?
If any man claims to love God but does not love his brother, he is a liar and the truth is not in him. (1 John). So at what point does a married couple knock the dust from their feet and leave those who are unwilling to receive the “in-law” as a brother? It’s really quite ridiculous to say of 2 people whom God says are now “one flesh”, that this one is family, that one is not. If both are one, aren’t both family? Isn’t rejecting the one rejecting the other?
By the same token, the Lord has given us friends with whom we can break bread with no such strife or contention – every meeting is marked by the sweet Spirit of the Lord’s family. Where I can’t wait for a holiday with the relatives to be over, I am always saddened by the departure of the family of God in Christ – in whom dwells the same spirit that dwells in me.
Likening it to the animals, relatives simply means of the same herd. Or that we share a common sire in our lineage. That to me explains all those “begats” in the law and why Jesus said “call no man on earth father, for you have one Father who is in heaven”. Clearly then, family is by the Spirit, not the blood – and that would be why also that Paul spoke of his own pedigree as “but dung”. It’s “offal” I know, but that’s the truth.