No outrage in our society better exemplifies the need for a return to biblical morality than the present scourge of family violence. Yet most domestic violence dialogue today becomes a diatribe against Christian patterns for the home.

New figures released recently by the U.S. Department of Justice paint a bleak picture of family violence in our nation.

Those figures show:

 Murders within the family account for 16 percent of all large city homicides.

In white families where spouses are murdered, 62 per-cent of the victims are wives and 38 percent husbands.

In black families where spouses are murdered, 53 per-cent of victims were wives and 47 percent husbands.

One in four spouse killers is unemployed.

In 48 percent of spouse homicides the killer had been drinking alcohol before the killing; and, about the same percentage of victims also had been drinking.

Children are twice as likely to be killed by their parents as are parents to be killed by their children.

The only area in which females were more likely to be murderers than males was in the killing of children.

Mothers accounted for 55 percent of all defendants in child murders.

These statistics are sad. But sadder is the abysmal failure to use the best tool in the world to remedy this warfare between the sexes and the violence that leaves too many children dead.

Biblical morality, if taught from youth upward, endorsed through education and exemplified in more families, would reduce phenomenally the murders of husbands, wives and children.

God's morality teaches a man to "love his wife just asChrist loved the church and gave himself for it" (Eph. 5:25). Husbands further are taught to "love their own wives as their own bodies" (Eph. 5:28).

Fathers are further directed to "not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord" (Eph. 6:4).

And women are taught in Scripture "to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands" (Tit. 2:4-5).

Children are taught to "obey your parents" and to "honor your father and mother" (Eph. 6:1).

These moral regulations are not just naive or wishful thinking. They are rules of conduct (laws of God) that need to be inculcated in the thinking of every man, woman, boy and girl.

Men who love their wives and children as they do them-selves will not murder, brutally beat or otherwise abuse and harm such loved ones.

Women who love their husbands and children won't be killing them either. And, children, raised in such loving homes and taught to honor and respect their parents won't often turn into child killers.

Guardian of Truth XXXIX: No. 19, p. 18
October 5, 1995