The church and the family (Part 5)

This post marks another in a series of posts in response to the following statement at a church's website:

"We believe that the family is the first and most important institution that the Lord created. Moreover, following God the family should hold the highest priority."

In my first post of this series, I asked a series of questions regarding this statement. Since then, I have replied to one or two of those questions per post as I considered the relationship between the church and the family. In this post, I am responding to another question I asked regarding the statement above:

-- Does this diminish the church and thereby diminish the work of Christ in His perfectly righteous life and totally satisfactory, substitutionary death that created the church?

Jesus' work brought into being something that did not previously exist. That something -- referred to in the Bible by such terms as a people, a body and a family -- was, and is, made up of human beings not just from one nation, one ethnicity, one tribe, one language, one skin color, one gender or one biological family. No, Jesus has produced a family made up of people unlimited by differences.

That family is the church. Jesus is the head of the church, the New Testament declares, and the church is the body of its head.

Prior to his conversion, Saul was "breathing threats and murder" against Jesus' disciples, according to Acts 9. He was on the way to Damascus to capture Christians and take them to Jerusalem. When the resurrected Jesus spoke to Saul on the road to Damascus, He asked the future apostle Paul, "[W]hy are you persecuting me?" When Saul asked for identification of the One speaking to Him, the Lord said, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." How was Saul persecuting Jesus? By persecuting His body, the church. In this exchange, Jesus closely connects His body to Himself.

If we say the nuclear family is the "most important institution" created by God and exalt it to the "highest priority" after God (and that includes the Son and the Holy Spirit), we are saying what Jesus produced by His sinless life and sacrificial death is less valuable than what God established in the natural realm.

Marriage and family are blessings established by God for humanity's good, but any man and woman can establish a nuclear family by marriage, and they can expand that family by birth or adoption. Only God can produce a family that will live forever under His Fatherhood. And God could only create such a family through the life, death and resurrection of His Son.

So, yes, the Bible seems to indicate categorizing the nuclear family as the "most important institution" and exalting it to the "highest priority" after God is diminishing the church. And diminishing the church diminishes the work of Jesus. May we love, appreciate and guard the nuclear family, but may we not exalt it above our head, Jesus, or His body.