Faith First Media

Is Jesus Anti-Family?

by Matthew Elton

© 2010 Matthew Elton

matt@faithfirstmedia.com

Question:

Did Jesus say that he came to destroy families by making family members hate each other?

In Matthew 10:34-35, Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.”

Does Jesus really demand people to love him more then they love their own family? How can we love someone that we can’t even see more than the people we do see? Isn’t love an emotion pertaining to physical existence, not to faithful ideologies?

In Matthew 10:21, Jesus said, “And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.”

In Matthew 19:29, Jesus promises a reward to those who leave children because of him, saying, “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.” Does Jesus command child abuse? Is Jesus anti-family?

Answer:

In Matthew 10:34, Jesus said: "I came not to send peace, but a sword." However, if you keep reading, you’ll see that it is not a sword of violence, but a sword of division. That's what swords do - they cut things. In this case, families will be divided because of Jesus. It's not that Jesus came to divide families, as if that's what he wanted. But conflict is almost inevitable when one family member follows Jesus and another doesn't. The Christian will be tempted to compromise her or his faith to please family members who don't share the same moral values. This is why just two verses later, Jesus says: "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

What Jesus is saying is, essentially, "If you actually follow me, your family may not agree with you, and if that happens, you'll have to choose between following me even if it displeases them (which could cause division) or compromising your obedience to me in order to please your family. I need to be first in your life."

Considering the incredible sacrifice that Jesus made for us by dying in our place, I don't think this is too much to ask. You ask “Isn’t love an emotion pertaining to physical existence, not to faithful ideologies?” But to think of love as merely an emotion is to misunderstand the biblical view of love. In the Bible, love is not an emotion. Love is an action. Love is a verb. Love means caring about someone else more than you care about yourself. That's why love is selfless and sacrificial in nature. Selfishness is essentially the opposite of love. Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). That's the greatest love because you care so much more about someone else than you care about yourself that you are willing to sacrifice everything for that person (which, by the way, is what Jesus did for us).

When Jesus says we must love him more than father or mother, he is not talking about a warm fuzzy feeling. In three different verses in John 14, Jesus says that love is synonymous with obedience (e.g. "He who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me"). It really doesn't matter if you have a warm fuzzy feeling about Jesus or not, although many people do. What matters is obedience. Jesus isn't saying not to love our families. He's saying that if faced with a choice between obeying family and obeying Jesus, Christians must obey Jesus.

In Matthew 19:29, Jesus is not saying to abandon houses, brethren, sisters, father, mother, wife, children, or lands. That would go against what he taught in the Sermon on the Mount and at the Last Supper concerning loving one another (it would also make Christians a bunch of homeless bums). Just as Jesus said that Christians must be willing to follow Jesus over their own families, here Jesus is saying Christians must be willing to give up everything to follow Jesus, if necessary. Jesus must always come first. Following Jesus requires sacrifice, but what we sacrifice in this life will be repaid a hundred times in the age to come.

In conclusion, Jesus is not anti-family. These verses which you took out of context are not a command to divide families or abandon children, but a warning that division is almost inevitable when a Christian chooses to follow Jesus and put Christ first in everything. Jesus did not command us to leave our family, but he warns us that a Christian must be willing to sacrifice in order to be a disciple of Jesus, because, as we have seen in Christ’s teachings on love, true love is sacrificial in nature.

“Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome.”

--1 John 5:3, NLT

“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.”

--Jesus, John 14:21