A foolish son is ruin to his father, and a wife’s quarreling is a continual dripping of rain.
Familial discord is a problem as old as sin (what, you think Adam and Eve didn’t have some issues over the events of Genesis 3?), and it has the power to hurt like few other hurts. Family is close, like it or not, and discord in relationships properly so intense will hurt, whether the participants want it to or not. Family has power over us, power we sinners misuse, and there’s only one remedy.
A quarrelling wife, a foolish son, these are problems directed both inward and outward. The foolish son will be foolish within the family. ‘Foolishness,’ of course, is more than stupidity; it is rejection of God (Ps. 53:1) and of His law (53:1-3, 19:7). It has many faces- laziness, pride, lust, anger, cowardice. These faces will show themselves in turn in the foolish son, some predominating, and he will hurt his parents, his siblings, his kin; he will harm others too, hurting the family’s relationship with the rest of the world by casting filth on their name and attaching them to sin.
Of course, we’re all foolish at times (Gen. 6:5; 1 John 1:10), and by God’s grace only at times.
The quarrelling wife, meanwhile, has a more specific but no less pervasive sin. Quarrelsomeness rises from many points, from pride, from fear, from anger, but whether it is the uncertain desperate to assert undeserved greatness or the prideful desperate to defend asserted greatness, it savages relationships. This woman will quarrel with her husband, of course, unless he is too derelict to object (and perhaps all the more then); she will quarrel with her children, or tyrannize; she will quarrel with the world around. Just as with the foolish son, the sin spills outward, and the damage spills back inward.
We’re all more quarrelsome than we ought, prone to taking unnecessary or unjustified offense (Prov. 19:11), asserting rights and deserts God never gave us.
These sins are destructive in all contexts. In the family, however, they gain power. Every experience, every memory, every affection becomes a lever, in sin’s hands, a lever to pull down the other. The sinner takes no account of the grim certainty that every block pulled out of my neighbor requires me to counterweight by pulling out a block of my own. Only justice can destroy without being destroyed (Gen. 18:25; Rom. 6:23), and sin is never just (Job 14:4). Sin would leverage all the beauty and power and perceived authority (for there is no authority to do evil (Rom. 13:1)), and it would leverage it against all God has made, but particularly against His image (Gen. 1:26).
We should not let ourselves hide behind impersonal language, behind structure. ‘Sin’ has no choice or power; ‘sin’ is just the characteristic of the sinner, the denial and rejection of God and His law (Ps. 119) which drives acts of sin. We are the sinners and, quite often, the sinned against.
As the sinned against, we must remember the counsel of the Law and of Gospel, of justice and of mercy. The counsel of law guides us to holiness’s shape. By it we see to disregard falsehood, to be not offended except with righteous anger, to seek peace through truth rather than at its cost. But, for the sinner, law has only the sentence of death, and so even for life on this earth we must turn to gospel. The gospel is this: Christ Jesus bore all sins. Therefore we can forgive (__article16:6). Therefore we can show others the way to repent and to reconcile. Therefore we can rejoice in Him who loves us even when our closest kin bring only torment, can love even those who hate us (while hating their sin), knowing that we ourselves have been forgiven and loved while unworthy (Matt. 18:32-35) and that he who is not by brother is the Lord’s alone to judge (Jer. 13:14).
As the sinners, who wound others, we have a duty first to repent, abhorring the sin and scouring it from our course wherever we find it. This task will not be complete on this earth (1 John 1:8-10), but we are called nonetheless to the work (Eph. 5:1), knowing that He who calls us to it will not let our work, however small, be in vain (Is. 65:21-23). Within this duty of holiness (to which the law is our guide), we find also the work of reconciliation, of making amends and repairing those relationships which we have a duty to continue; we find also the constancy of His love to give us strength, to last us when those relationships refuse to heal, when reconciliation is refused.
And always, in all times, we must remember that though our relationship with God may hurt like nothing else, like truly nothing else (Job 1-42), He will never leave us or forsake us (Deut. 3:16), will keep those whose faith He has called to Him (Rom. 8:28-30). In this, we can have surety and rest, no matter the fallenness of ourselves and our kindred, no matter the pain, in the certainty not of emotion but of Scripture’s immutability.
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
