Your Oikos Alumnae Association
“You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” (Deuteronomy 5:9)
That’s some strong language, right there! But I guess He made His point. God refuses to let us worship anyone or anything else without consequences. And it looks like those consequences are even stronger than the language.
But something else is clear in that passage, and we can’t afford to miss it.
Jesus doesn’t want us to use addition to grow His Church. Simply put, multiplying people changes the world faster than adding people!
The Bible is actually quite specific about some of the metrics involved in relational influence. The impact we have in life usually lasts for a maximum of four generations. We interact with our spouse or peers (the first generation), down to our children and their peers (the second generation), to our grandchildren and their peers (the third generation), and to our great-grandchildren and their peers (the fourth generation).
After making personal investments in those four generations, death tends to really cramp our style! If we ever meet our great-great-grandchildren, it will probably only be for a short time. After that, a continued legacy then depends only on reports about what we were like, not on the relationship itself, the first-hand example of the life we either lived well or not so well.
In the more negative, yet perhaps more memorable “sins of the fathers” passages, the numbers provide a warning to those of us who claim to have the desire to build God’s Kingdom. But the good news is, those same numbers are also applied in Scripture to describe the positive side of our potential impact. And that gives us a hint about our potential for world change, through opportunities built into the ripples of multiple generations.
“The LORD said to Jehu, “Because you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all I had in mind to do, your descendants will sit on the throne of Israel to the fourth generation.” (2 Kings 10:30)
Those generational metrics also answer the question about why Jesus chose to leverage the oikos principle as a tactical approach to building His Church. I mean, look at “generations” as something besides bloodlines, but ripples of influence. When you consider your oikos, seeing a relational world as comprised of eight to fifteen people does not mean that those parameters limit your potential impact over the long haul. Because everyone in your oikos also has their own oikos!
For example, whenever I see the ripples resulting from something falling into the water, I immediately notice two things. Each outward-moving ripple is a bit less defined than the one before it, but each one reaches a wider swath of surface space. Our direct influence is most impactful with a few, anywhere from eight to fifteen people. But those eight to fifteen also carry some level of our influence to their own eight to fifteen. Our personal imprint on the next ripple of people may not be quite as clear, but it will certainly be broader.
We might only have the social energy to invest in eight to fifteen people’s lives at a time. But over the course of an entire lifetime, our ever-evolving oikos “alumnae association” might cumulatively end up encompassing more. Evidently, a lot more.