Posted by Jesus, when explaining how it was he could expel demons, said,
“How can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house.” (Matthew 12:29)
In the same way, how can Satan enter the house of a strong man and steal the hearts of his children if he doesn’t first tie up that strong man? The answer is obvious, He can’t. The father is Satan’s target number one in his attack on the family, civil society and the Church. Knowing that the father is the main line of defense, we must now have an honest assessment of the condition of those defenses. In much the same way as the biblical leader Nehemiah set out to inspect the walls of Jerusalem, we now need to mount up together and ride out to inspect the condition of GOD’s ordained defensive structures.
“By night I went out through the Valley Gate toward the Jackal Well and the Dung Gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem” Nehemiah 2:13a
Holes in the Wall
Sadly, across all levels of society, but especially among the poor, Satan has had great success in eliminating the strong man. He has used a wide variety of tools including addiction, pornography, popular culture, liberalized divorce laws, the modern feminist movement and government welfare programs that seek to replace the father and encourage out-of-wedlock births. In this way he has effectively removed the strong man from many families, communities and even the church.
According to the US census bureau, some 24 million children live in fatherless homes. That is nearly 48 million American children who are without their major protector, provider, teacher and friend. Today 40% of all children in the United States are born to single mothers. Outside the US the picture isn’t any better. In Brazil, where I work with at-risk children, 700,000 children are born each year without a father figure. Roughly 30% of the entire population of Brazil doesn’t shop for a gift on Father’s Day because they don’t know the man. These children are incredibly vulnerable. Just consider for a moment the pounding they are taking –
Incarceration Rates. “Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families…those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated — even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant.” (Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University cited in “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration.” Journal of Research on Adolescence 14 (September 2004): 369-397.)That is not of course including the millions of children with unengaged, abusive or negligent fathers that live at home.
Suicide. 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of the Census)
Behavioral Disorders. 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (United States Center for Disease Control)
High School Dropouts. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes (National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools.)
Educational Attainment. Kids living in single-parent homes or in step-families report lower educational expectations on the part of their parents, less parental monitoring of school work, and less overall social supervision than children from intact families. (N.M. Astore and S. McLanahan, American Sociological Review, No. 56 (1991)
Juvenile Detention Rates. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988)
Confused Identities. Boys who grow up in father-absent homes are more likely than those in father-present homes to have trouble establishing appropriate sex roles and gender identity.(P.L. Adams, J.R. Milner, and N.A. Schrepf, Fatherless Children, New York, Wiley Press, 1984).
Aggression. In a longitudinal study of 1,197 fourth-grade students, researchers observed “greater levels of aggression in boys from mother-only households than from boys in mother-father households.” (N. Vaden-Kierman, N. Ialongo, J. Pearson, and S. Kellam, “Household Family Structure and Children’s Aggressive Behavior: A Longitudinal Study of Urban Elementary School Children,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 23, no. 5 (1995).
Achievement. Children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes. Almost twice as many high achievers come from two-parent homes as one-parent homes. (One-Parent Families and Their Children, Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 1990).
Delinquency. Only 13 percent of juvenile delinquents come from families in which the biological mother and father are married to each other. By contract, 33 percent have parents who are either divorced or separated and 44 percent have parents who were never married. (Wisconsin Dept. of Health and Social Services, April 1994).
Criminal Activity. The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families. Source: A. Anne Hill, June O’Neill, Underclass Behaviors in the United States, CUNY, Baruch College. 1993
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