The following events took place during the plagues of Egypt, and before the actual Passover. After seven of the ten plagues had occurred, Moses and Aaron were brought again unto Pharaoh: and he said unto them, Go, serve the Lord your God; but who are they that shall go? Notice: Who are they that shall go? And Moses said, We will go with our young and with our old; with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds will we go; for we must hold a feast unto the Lord. And he said unto them, So be the Lord with you, as I will let you go, and your little ones: look to it; for evil is before you. Not so: go now ye that are men, and serve the Lord; for that is what ye desire. And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence. Exodus 10:8–11. Then came the eighth plague, the plague of the locusts.
After the completion of the ninth plague, the plague of darkness, Pharaoh called unto Moses, and said, Go ye, serve the Lord; only let your flocks and your herds be stayed: let your little ones also go with you. And Moses said, Thou must also give into our hand sacrifices and burnt-offerings, that we may sacrifice unto the Lord our God. Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not a hoof be left behind; for thereof must we take to serve the Lord our God; and we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come thither. Exodus 10:24–26. This passage is important to us. It holds a message for us, for we also do not know with what we must serve the Lord.
God never intended the Israelites to come out of the land of Egypt so that they could live unto themselves. The purpose of their deliverance was not just so that they would not have to raise their children in Egypt. It was not just so they could escape the rigors of bondage. They were being brought out of Egypt to worship the Lord. And because they were being brought out to worship the Lord and to serve Him, everything had to go with them. Moses and Aaron never did say, “We’re going to leave Egypt completely.” I think with each request Pharaoh had a chance to retain the relationship to the children of Israel. But God said, “I’m going to deliver you out.”
Moses said to Pharaoh, “Let us go out in the wilderness for three days’ journey to worship and make sacrifices.” That is exactly the way Moses expressed it to him.
Pharaoh answered, “All right, the men can go.”
“No, we’re going to take our wives and children with us.”
“All right, but leave the herds and flocks behind.”
“No! Not a hoof will be left behind. We don’t know how we’re going to have to serve the Lord when we get out there.”
The demand was not: “Let this people go. Let this people go from their bondage. Loose this free labor that is bolstering Egypt’s economy.” That was not the idea. God was saying, “I want to bring them out here and let them worship Me for three days.” Because of Pharaoh’s resistance to letting God’s people worship the Lord as families—as the units that God wanted to raise up to serve Him with all they had, with everything they possessed, and with all they were themselves—God not only delivered them to worship; He delivered them, period! He delivered them out of every hold that Egypt had or could ever have on them. The family was a unit in God’s economy.
There are times when God raises up families, and there have been times when God has frowned on families. We find Paul saying in the seventh chapter of I Corinthians, that he who is married should not seek to be unmarried, and he who is unmarried should not seek to be married. In verse 21 he says, “If you are a slave, serve in that state, but if you can get your freedom, use it for the glory of God.” Then he says, “In this present emergency or distress it is good for a man to remain single.” And he said he thought he had the mind of the Lord in that matter.
What was the distress like in New Testament times? A man could see his wife ravished and his children killed; he could be put through tortures himself and be sold as a slave. Anything could happen because they were Christians. “In the present distress,” Paul said, “it’s better not to be in this kind of situation,” because in order to express his own loyalty to Jesus Christ, a man would sometimes be put through trials which God never intended for him, such as seeing his family die. So in that present distress God worked it a little differently: “It’s better that a man not marry.” The early Church was guided by those words.
Here in America we have had the cult of marriage very much in our minds. Frankly, I am in the rising tide which is against marriage as it exists in the United States. Other nations of the world have called us “child cultists” because we have become so child-centered, believing that children are almost the whole objective of life. Marriage has been blown out of all proportion. No other nation in the world holds these views to the same extent. We have been addicted to the idea of marriage. Girls begin to feel desperate when they reach the age of twenty or twenty-one and are not yet married. They do not realize that in God’s time and in God’s will their lives can be worked out. Marriage is not the end-all of life. At the present time marriage, as we have known it in the United States, is obsolete.
Today in America about seventy-five percent of the population live in cities, and about twenty-five percent live on farms. One hundred years ago the ratio was reversed. On the farms, big families were necessary. Someone had to milk the cows, do the plowing, do the chores. Children grew up under that discipline, and it produced many good men and women. (It also produced many people who completely hate the idea of living on a farm.)
When the mass move to the cities took place, the family began changing in form, and juvenile delinquency increased. The whole structure of the family changed, and that severe headship—almost a dictatorship—that the father had wielded in our more pioneer days gave way. Within that one hundred years’ time we actually became what sociologists call a matriarchy, and women have since been in the position to rule. Today more than half of all the property and real estate and wealth of the country (including the individually, not corporately owned stocks and bonds) is owned by and in the names of women. The pattern has been reversed.
The women’s liberation movement is voicing certain things which at the present time would be disastrous to the American economy because they are still insisting upon the man being the responsible one as the head of the family, while pushing for equal opportunities in employment. Women should not have equal employment opportunities when they do not have equal responsibilities in society. The financial responsibilities rest upon the men, and therefore the largest salary should be given to them. Many times it is necessary for a man to work, plus his wife, plus others in the family, in order to manage financially. So if we take away all the edge that a man has now, we could destroy him completely.
Today there are perhaps a million husbands on the run. They will not stay with their responsibilities because they cannot meet them. Many of those fathers have forsaken their families at the expressed desire of the wife and mother because, if they have several children, she can get more financial support through welfare than that man can earn and bring home. Although she is apparently deserted, often the husband sneaks home and is gone only enough to avoid discovery by the welfare people, because she can have more money to keep the family going as a deserted wife than if her husband were working hard as a laborer.
The entire family structure has changed. Children are no longer a family asset for milking the cows and doing the chores. They are a liability. And most of them have accepted the fact that they are a liability. Very few of them, even after they have begun to reach maturity, earn enough money to anywhere near pay their own way. They are almost worthless when it comes to contributing to the family’s well-being. Labor-saving devices are the only things that have alleviated the homemaker’s tedious labor—not the adherence to the old belief that children should do at least the common chores.
Even among our own Body of people, the family is not so structured as to be a unit that God can use. It is still a cohesion of individuals tied together, often by bloodline alone. Many times they are not even bound together in spirit, for each member is going his own way and living his own life. They have no burden for one another. The wife does not have the burden to be the spiritual helpmate, who could help her husband achieve the will of God for his life. Sometimes a husband is fighting an irresistible tide which is sweeping against him.
I want to tell you that we have not tried to keep homes together that are irrevocably divided in spirit. When I see a woman trying to serve God and her husband going the other way, I do not try to change the situation beyond what I think is the reasonable demand that the Holy Spirit requires of us according to the word of the Lord. By that I mean we work with it perhaps four or five years until the time finally comes when the husband says, “Look, you’re going to give up that church—or else.” We have had those who have come along and said they were not going to serve God. I counseled one woman for whom I was greatly concerned, and she was shot down, fleeing from her own front yard. I am impressed that she is better off dead than tied to a man like that. I hold to the Scriptures that the believer is not bound in such a case. There is a lot more to life than holding together some obsolete form of marriage. There is a lot more to life than being a slave to some family situation with no meaning to it whatsoever. But if you are going to contend for the marriage and the family that God wants, you will have something really worthwhile.
We know not with what we must serve the Lord, but we say with Moses, “We are not going to leave our wives behind. We are not going to leave our children behind. We are not going to leave our flocks and our herds behind.” Not one hoof will be left behind because we are going out to meet God, and we do not know what we will have to be as families. We do not know what we will have to be as individuals in order to serve Him, but that is the way we are going!
God must have something for us in the form of a Kingdom marriage. The first question a couple should ask is: “By divine revelation, by the confirmed word of prophecy over us, can we two walk in the perfect will of God?” That is the first consideration, because those who are in this walk can really love each other if they are going to do the will of God. But if they are not going to do the will of God or even one is dragging his feet, they will find it very difficult to walk in the love that God requires for a husband and wife. They are going to find it very, very difficult.
Love cannot exist between a superior and an inferior in a Kingdom marriage. That is what God is talking about when He says that there is to be neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, but you are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28). That inequality is what He is talking about. He does not mean that those distinctions do not exist; He means they do not exist as far as the spiritual level is concerned. I am rather glad that some of these differences still exist. I am glad people of differing backgrounds—religious, racial, financial, educational, cultural—are being brought together in this Body of people in Christ. I like the idea that there are male and female, but not because I think that there ought to be, or will ultimately be, any distinction in our levels in the Kingdom of God.
I cannot look upon women as second-rate citizens in the Kingdom. Never. And I will do everything I can, as the Lord’s servant, to change the situation where women are second-rate creatures in their thinking or in a man’s thinking. We are not going to walk as superiors and inferiors. I am not your superior and you are not my inferior just because I have authority over you. That is not the case. That is not what authority means! We walk together equally important. No one is more important than another in the Kingdom of God. The designation of God’s authority upon each one differs, and we have gifts that differ according to the grace of God, but we are not inferior. Not one of us! How much the Lord emphasized that. Even when they brought the little children to Him, He said, “Of such is the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). If you want to enter in, you come in like one of the little children. You may think of the children as inferior, but they are not inferior. Our little children can pray and seek the Lord, and He will answer their prayers as quickly as He will those of the older people—sometimes a lot quicker.
There cannot be superior and inferior relationships. There must be some way that we are brought into an equality in the Lord Jesus Christ, even though He may designate one as the spiritual head and one as the helpmate. Each should magnify and glorify his office and be glad for it because it is by divine designation that it takes place. The Lord is not creating families as we have known them, but families that are like units of warfare. Together they form a division that can go in and take a stronghold of hell. They become centers of intercession. They are little places where the culture and nurture of the Body of Christ takes place. The family is the area where the teaching and the faith activities should be the strongest. Then we can all gather together and worship the Lord with all our hearts!
The pattern of marriage is changing in our country. Young men are avoiding marriage. Young women who have come from unhappy homes are avoiding marriage. They would rather sleep around than be tied down with the obligation and responsibility of a relationship with one person. The world has almost deceived itself into believing that sexual relations can be separated from real love. And if it ever succeeds in so doing, we will be recognizing only the animal side of our nature. When you can have sex without commitment, without responsibility, without purpose, without functioning in a oneness with another person, without a commitment of yourself, without a sense of responsibility for your actions and for the emotional reactions that your actions cause in another, you have ceased to be what God created as a human being. You have to have all that; for if you do not, and have attempted to engage in sex without it, you have tried to take the scalpel and carefully separate the soul and spirit of a man from his physical nature, saying, “I’ll throw away the soul and spirit. I’ll only be an animal.” In the reports that I read of so-called wife-swapping (it is really mate-swapping), the claim is made that the returning partners love each other more intently and passionately than before, That is absolutely not true!
Satan is the antagonist that is trying to produce warfare between the sexes! He desires that there be real warfare and contention between them! More of the resentment and bitterness of feeling in the world exist between male and female than between male and male or female and female. God did not make us to bring us into relationships where resentment becomes the ruling emotion or where community property and children are the things that hold us together. God purposed an irrevocable commitment, an entwining of lives, not just to create a oneness, but to create a unit—a unit for service unto God.
When God wants an elder or a deacon, His Word says, “Let him be the husband of one wife” (I Timothy 3:2–12). This can be interpreted many ways, but the main idea was to get away from polygamy. A man was not to be married to more than one wife. But there was another thing involved: he had to be married because alone he could not possibly understand the scope of his service to people. For example: as a male, the agonies of childbirth would be incomprehensible to him, but his wife could understand what another woman might be experiencing. As husband and wife they could relate themselves to each other and to the Body of Christ, becoming a unit by which understanding would come.
The family is going to change. Marriage is going to change. We have not had a marriage in the local church for years where there has not first been a careful inquiry: “Is this the will of God for us?” We have learned to realize that even a good relationship in the flesh—a good, companionable relationship—does not outweigh missing the perfect will of God.
There is a Scripture that talks about a day we may soon be in: “Woe unto them that are with child and to them that give suck in those days.” I am inclined to think that this warning in Matthew 24 was referring to the fall of Jerusalem, when even the carrying of a child would slow them down in the brief, split moment when the siege under Titus was lifted, and the Christians, remembering the words of Jesus, fled out of Jerusalem. I understand that even those who fled in the latter part of the vanguard were caught. If they delayed, it was just too late. Jesus said, “Flee. If you are on the housetop, do not come down to take anything out of your house. Just get going as fast as you can go.” And they did. As soon as the Romans moved out, they ran for it. The Christians had scarcely gone when the armies returned, and that siege continued until the utter destruction of Jerusalem was accomplished. So I think that the prophecy was fulfilled, although there may be a time in which there will be another fulfillment of it. But God will give us the warning.
The days may come in which we will have to hold everything very lightly. What if the prophecies began to speak and be confirmed about our large cities being bombed—by visions and real prophets of God until we had no question about it—would you get in your car and make haste to get out of the area? Would you go where the Lord told you to go? The Body would just pick up, leaving houses and lands behind. You would leave everything because there would be so little you could take with you. You had better think about that because we are going to be a Spirit-led community. We are going to be a prophetic community that will be guided by the Lord.
Some groups claim that God has already led them out of the city. They have even sold their churches and their homes and have moved out. I will not do it until God tells me because I want to be where the action is. I want to be where God is doing a certain thing. I will leave Sodom and Gomorrah when God says to, but in the meantime I remember that He said He was going to build a New Testament church in the midst of Sodom and Gomorrah. And that is happening. I do not want to be away from the area where the people are who need God and with whom God is dealing. I do not want to go where there are no people. I want to preach to people who can hear the creative word of God and respond to it in their spirits.
God has something for us to do, and the families can become a great instrument in His hand. We must start gearing ourselves as families to do the will of the Lord. We should train the children to do the chores around the house, taking some responsibility from dad and mother, who then can serve the Lord in other ways. We must see that the mothers are not chained to their children. (They can be good mothers without being chained to them.) They form a great pool of labor for the Lord that we could draw upon. Many of our women are trained and capable of moving in and solving problems in the audio department, in the publications and elsewhere, but they are baby-sitting throughout the day. The families need to get together and, using wisdom, arrange to baby-sit for each other in a way that releases ministries to labor for the Lord.
Some of the husbands can pitch in and help a little more. I am not trying to make you domesticated, but in this day things have changed a great deal. The man does not sit down as the autocrat and say, “Wait on me!” when his wife has been busy at a dozen different things all day. He should pitch in! He can throw a load of clothes in the washing machine and get it going. With today’s mechanized labor, the men could learn all that they need to know about many household routines in half an hour. We must begin to work together. We must learn how to be a unit for God, one solid unit doing the will of God together.
Sometimes it may be an advantage for the wife to earn the money while the husband spends his time memorizing Scriptures, studying the Word, listening to tapes, and waiting on the Lord, as he prepares himself to pastor a church. A young pastor and his family may find that they can manage financially if he has only a part-time job, giving him more time to study and wait on the Lord and do the work of a pastor. If he were attending a seminary, much sacrifice would be required to see him through those years; and in his devotion to the Word and the tapes he is becoming even better disciplined than in a seminary. He is living in the things that are teaching him more than he could ever learn any other way.
Some of the girls should look around and ask, “Where is a young man who is going to be a prophet? Lord, lead me to one whom I can support for four or five years while he becomes a prophet of God.” Perhaps you are laughing, but I am not kidding you.
For two people in love the idea of sleeping together is marvelous and romantic, but it is not reason enough for marriage. Only the perfect will of God is reason enough for marriage. The other things will come and go. You better believe me! Romantic love, with all its aspects is beautiful—with the children coming and then the grandchildren—but there will come a time in which your soul will catch up with you and smite you with conviction: “Everything that God told me to be, everything He ever called me to be, I’ve put by the board. And I’ve missed the will of God.” How you will regret it. Now and for all eternity you will regret that. You have a life to be lived, so let it be lived in the perfect will of the Lord.
The family must be a unit. It is not an end in itself. It is an instrument in the hand of God, a means to an end. And these spiritual families raised up by God are going to attain that end. You say, “It takes more than just one family.” Yes, but one can just about turn the trick if its members know how.
Families will be raised up as units. We watch them as they go through their problems. I have not seen a family or a home coming into this walk with God that does not have even more serious problems than the people in the world. The people in the world do not really care at all about a lot of things. But when you come into this walk with God and you begin to care about something, then the devil comes in and pushes, and you get tried and tested on it. But you would not be tested on it if you were not in the perfect will of the Lord. Instead you would settle into the kind of twisted arrangement that many marriages are in, where they finally work out some check-and-balance system and that is all. Today it often seems there is nothing to hold marriages together, so they just hang together.
In this walk, God puts the fire to you, and you change. That is why you have so much trouble—you are always changing. A wife says, “My husband was a Mr. Milquetoast, and I was running things, but now he is becoming a tiger that runs around claiming he is the head of the house, and I don’t like it.” So the Lord has to deal with that arrogant spirit in her and that vindictiveness in him, and they keep changing and changing. It is adjustment. After a while the Lord will have a real unit to do His will, people who can do the will of God right from the heart.
We make the same claims for our families as did Israel of old. And the same requirements that God made of them, let Him require of us now.