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How the devil works to destroy the family
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February 1, 2021Pope St. John Paul II famously said: “The future of the world and of the Church passes through the family.”
If someone wanted to destroy the family and thus destroy as many societies and souls as possible, what would he do? He would undermine the very nature of marriage and get people to go along. It turns out that someone—the devil—has done precisely that. Here’s how.
The devil’s game is inversion. He cannot create a thing; he can only twist and invert God’s creation in a mocking attempt to destroy what God has made. The enemy knows well that the foundational cell of society is the family, and that the family is rooted in marriage. He knows that by inverting the order of marriage to disorder, he can inflict maximum damage to souls.
The order and nature of marriage can be seen clearly in Eden, before man’s fall from grace through sin. Marriage is the very first human-relational thing God creates, and Adam and Eve are husband and wife from the beginning. Their marriage—and thus all subsequent marriage—is three things by nature: permanent, procreative, and conjugal. Each of those essential, inherent characteristics of marriage has since been “undone” in the following ways:
1) Denying marriage’s permanent nature by legitimizing divorce. From the beginning, the Lord intended marriage to last a lifetime. Marriage provides a permanent partnership between spouses, and a permanent home and identity to the children born of that union—children who possess the natural, God-given right to be reared and educated by the mother and father who created them. To shatter this primal foundation is to bring lifelong suffering and fragmentation to the children of divorce and to future generations.
2) Denying marriage’s procreative nature by legitimizing contraception and sterilization. Because of the Fall, not all marriages can produce children; however, the marital act is always ordered toward procreation, even when conception does not occur. To willfully reject the fertility God built into marriage is to negate the very telos, or purpose, of marriage. It’s as nonsensical as saying a car isn’t made for driving or a watch isn’t made for telling time. When the natural end of marriage is purposely disconnected from the act of marriage, spouses become mere objects to be used, and a host of sins and disorders ensue.
3) Denying marriage’s conjugal nature by legitimizing “same-sex marriage.” Male and female He created them, and when husband and wife consummate their marriage, they become “one flesh.” In fact, without the physical ability to consummate a marriage, there can be no marriage at all—a truth that even the secular order has always understood. With “same-sex marriage,” performing the marital act is literally impossible. Without complementarity and conjugal union, God’s created order for marriage is mocked in a twisted simulation.
Divorce, contraception, and “same-sex marriage” are the unholy trifecta that negates the essence of marriage as designed by God. The culture has been blinded and swept away by all three, with the resulting chaos keenly felt, but not fully recognized, by modern man.
But all is not lost! The human heart is hardwired by God to seek order and to desire goodness, and this profound longing for truth can still captivate current and future generations, no matter how confused, depressed, unmoored, and lonely they are. Indeed, light is more attractive in the darkness.
By believing, living, and proclaiming these three essential truths of marriage, Christians will bring light and hope to a weary world, confident that no trick of the devil could ever ultimately destroy the order that God Himself has created.
LEILA MILLER is the author of Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues (co-authored with Trent Horn of Catholic Answers); Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak; Impossible Marriages Redeemed: They Didn’t End the Story in the Middle; and Raising Chaste Catholic Men. Leila and her husband Dean have been married for 30 years and have eight children and 10 grandchildren. They live in Phoenix.
