How Does Satan Attack Families?

Question 08099

When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a household, and God has been working through households ever since. That alone tells you why the family draws so much fire.

Over the years I have watched a great many families in the churches I have served, and the patterns repeat with a regularity that would be dull if it were not so painful. Very little of it is dramatic. Almost all of it is slow.

The Pattern Starts Immediately

Genesis wastes no time. Adam and Eve are barely out of the garden before their firstborn kills his brother in a field. One chapter after the fall, the first family in history is destroyed by jealousy and murder, and God’s question to Cain beforehand is one of the most searching in Scripture: “sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”

Read on through Genesis and the picture does not improve. Favouritism in Isaac’s house. Deception in Jacob’s. Brothers selling a brother into slavery. These are the families through whom God chose to work, and the honesty of the record is one of the reasons I trust it.

So when the enemy attacks families he is not doing anything new. He is exploiting the same fractures that have run through households since the beginning, and he is patient about it. He attacks families the way water attacks stone, which is to say without hurry and with complete confidence in the effect of time.

Where He Attacks Families Most Often

Bitterness between generations is the one I encounter most. Something was said thirty years ago, or something was not said, and it has calcified. Hebrews warns about a root of bitterness springing up and causing trouble, “and by it many become defiled.” That word many is exact. Bitterness never stays with the person carrying it.

Then there is the quiet abdication of spiritual responsibility in the home. Deuteronomy 6 tells parents to talk of God’s words when they sit in the house, walk by the way, lie down and rise. That is not a formal devotional slot; it is a whole texture of conversation. When that disappears, faith becomes something that happens at a building on Sunday, and children draw the obvious conclusion.

And there is busyness, which is the most respectable of the lot. Nobody feels guilty about a full diary. Yet a household in which everyone is exhausted and nobody has a conversation lasting longer than four minutes is a household with no defences at all. The enemy attacks families through the calendar far more often than through anything sinister.

Job and the Limits Set Around a Household

There is one passage where we are shown the enemy looking at a family from the outside, and it is worth sitting with. Satan complains to God that Job is protected: “Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?” The complaint is an unintended testimony. There was a hedge, and the accuser could see it and could not cross it.

What follows is painful and I would not pretend otherwise. Job loses his children in a single afternoon. But every stage of it happens by permission and within a stated boundary, and the accuser has to come back and ask again before he can go further. When the enemy attacks families he does so on a leash, and the hand holding it belongs to God.

Job also shows us a father who prayed for his grown children regularly, offering sacrifices on their behalf in case they had sinned. He could not control them and he did not try. He prayed for them, consistently, over years. For many parents of adult children that is the only avenue left, and Job suggests it is not a small one.

What About Generational Patterns?

People often ask whether the trouble in their family is a curse passed down the line. I would want to distinguish two things carefully here. Patterns of sin genuinely do run through families. The child of an angry father learns anger. Addiction, secrecy, coldness and infidelity are learned in the home as surely as accent and table manners.

But that is inheritance by imitation and environment, not a spiritual curse requiring a ritual to break. Ezekiel is explicit that the soul who sins shall die, and that the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father. Whatever your family history, you stand before God on your own account. I have set that out more fully in my answer on whether generational curses are real.

The practical difference matters. If the problem is a curse, you need a specialist. If the problem is a learned pattern, you need repentance, new habits and the ordinary means of grace, and those are available to everybody. I have watched people spend years and a good deal of money looking for the first when the second was the answer all along. The enemy attacks families quite happily through our own inherited habits, and he never minds being given credit for something we could have addressed ourselves.

The Culture Does a Great Deal of the Work

Much of the pressure now is atmospheric rather than personal. A society that treats commitment as optional, autonomy as the highest good and children as a lifestyle choice does not need demonic assistance to erode households. It manages perfectly well on its own. That is worth saying plainly, because Christians sometimes look for a demon where a set of shared assumptions would explain everything.

Screens deserve a mention, not because devices are evil but because of what they displace. A family can sit in one room for an entire evening and have no shared experience whatsoever. Whatever else the enemy attacks families with, isolation has always been among his favourite tools, and we have never made it easier for him.

I would add the idolatry of the family itself, which is a peculiarly Christian danger. A home can become the thing you actually worship, and Jesus had some very sharp things to say about loving father or mother or son or daughter more than him. A family held too tightly is not safer. It is simply weighted down with a burden it was never made to bear.

What Actually Holds a Household

The defences are ordinary and they work. Confession that happens quickly, because families are wrecked by accumulated unsaid things far more than by single events. Prayer together, however awkward and however brief, since it is remarkably difficult to nurse a grievance against someone you have just prayed with.

Then there is the simple presence of Scripture in the house as something normal rather than ceremonial. Timothy’s faith, Paul says, lived first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. Two generations of women in one household, and the result was a man who served alongside the apostle. Nobody would have predicted that from the outside.

And the household needs other believers in it. Families that never open their doors become families nobody can help. The enemy attacks families most successfully where there is no one close enough to notice what is happening.

If Your Family Is Already Fractured

Some who read this will be carrying an estrangement that has lasted years, or watching a child walk away from everything they were taught. I would not insult you with easy answers, and I would not let anyone tell you that this is simply a failure of parenting.

Every person in your family has a will of their own, and God himself has grown children who have gone their own way. What is asked of you is faithfulness, not results. Keep the door open, keep praying, keep the relationship alive where you can, and refuse to let bitterness take root in you while you wait. That last one is the hardest and the most necessary, because a bitter parent has nothing to offer a returning child except the thing that drove them away.

So, now what?

Pick the relationship in your family that you have been quietly avoiding, and make the first move this week. A message, a phone call, an apology that costs you something. It does not have to fix anything. It only has to be honest. The enemy attacks families through silence, and silence is broken one sentence at a time.

And put something regular back into the life of your household, however small. Reading a few verses together at a meal. Praying before people scatter for the day. The enemy attacks families patiently over decades, and households are rebuilt the same way, one unremarkable evening at a time.

Who in your family have you stopped talking to about anything that matters? And what would it actually cost you to change that before the year is out?

But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.

Joshua 24:15 (ESV)