A Thoughtful Response - Purposeful Childlessnes is a Hatred of Life

I was surprised to discover that my earlier post on the Time Magazine cover article was linked to in a blog post of a friend of the author of that cover article. Not only a friend, he introduced the author to the family that was pictured on the cover. Needless to say I was rather surprised that my mini post was chosen as the one to link to! If the discussion is going to go that way though, more needs to be said.

There is a lot more to the discussion of family size than simply, finances, happiness, ease of life, and/or "faith." As Doug Phillips has so well said, there is literally a war going on behind the scenes. It is a war against God. Therefore, discussions on family size actually must start at the very base level - who is your God and whose happiness are you here for? In reality, this question is always answered - even if is not written down or spoken out loud. It determines everything else in the discussion. If God is God, then that is where the discussion starts. If man is god, then man's happiness and ease is the highest goal. And this is the center of the war. Is God God or is man God?

I believe that God is God and that defines how I look at this. Purposeful childlessness in marriage is a hatred of life because it is a rebellion against the commands of God to be fruitful and multiply and it is contrary to sound wisdom. Wisdom cries out, "But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death." Prov. 8:36.

So how should we as Christians look at the issue of fruitfulness? Starting at the beginning: God created the world and He created it for a purpose: to be inhabited. Isaiah 45:18. Not only did God make life, He created man in His image for His glory and He created marriage. One of the reasons for marriage was to bring forth a godly seed: Malachi 2:15. From the very beginning, the one who is the enemy of God, Lucifer or Satan, has been at war with those made in God's own image, seeking their complete destruction - the last thing he wants is a godly seed! The last thing he wants is large, dominion taking families that think multigenerationally. From seeking to tempt man to rebel against God in the Garden by saying that they would become gods and not die, to working to encourage men to rebel against the command to fill the earth after the flood (when men built the tower of babel and were scattered over the earth after the Lord confused their languages), to advancing religions that involved child sacrifice, to seeking to kill the son of God Himself in Bethlehem, and yes, to seeking the eradication of the next generation through the destructive work of abortion and birth control - the devil is at war with God and with man, who is made in the image of God.

Children must then be viewed as God views them not as Satan wants us to view them. They must be seen as a blessing. I.e. When times get tough, have more not less! Ok, back to the point, the blessed man has many children around his table. Psalm 128:3. The blessed nation has fruitful wives: Deuteronomy 7:14. Children are the heritage of the Lord and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. Psalm 127:3-5. We cannnot view children in any other way for any other view is to have a mind conformed to this world and not to the mind of Christ. Suffer the Little children to come to me, says Christ, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:14.

Let's consider the blessing of children from a purely practical standpoint. In the Time article, children were viewed as a financial burden. The author states she is amazed that anyone can afford a second child, "forget about a third." This is however extremely short cited and a result of our materialistic, self-centered society. Rather than saying, children are a blessing and they should, as God gives them ability, be able to be an economically viable part of the home, the world says that we must not let them work, we must send them to every game they can be involved in, we must let them watch TV for hours every week, we must let them go to movies, we must let them play computer games all day... We end up raising seriously expensive, economically disastrous, potentially lazy children. The solution isn't stop having them. The answer is raise them up in the way they should go so that when they are old they will not deaprt from it. You raise a computer game addict and he will play games when he is 30. You raise a hard working, Godly young man or woman and they will be hard working when they leave the home. The issue is the training and the value of the training and example we give our children will be the value of what we get out. The world, autimatically looking at things from the wrong foot sees children as seriously expensive. But they don't have to be if we stick with God's economy. Get them out of sports, computer games, entertainments, and TV and give them a vision for real life. We say that youth should lay around because they are kids, God says "Go to the ant thou sluggard."

Then there is the generational impact of one child. One plus one now equals one instead of 10, 12, or 14 like a lot of my ancestors had. In every generation, you shrink your population. And while you shrink the population, you get a larger and larger number of elderly until the point comes that the society collapses. It can no longer support itself. Watch the Demographic Bomb or Demographic Winter. That day of economic reckoning is coming and recession is already on us.

Finally, consider the generational strength of a large family. Statistically, if I have 10 children, and each of those 10 children, and each of those have 10 children, My line of direct descendants will be at 1,000 in the third generation. 10,000 in the fourth. 100,000 in the fifth. At the same time, one child families will be half in overall number every generation. The combined economic worth (raw material, knowledge, means of production, monetary value, etc.) of a family that is 100,000 strong is far greater than the economic worth of a whole line of single child families. Having one child by choice is very short sighted because it does not consider the future fruit of its decision and will result in the destruction of a society if it becomes the dominate viewpoint.

As I said in a previous post, God says that He will curse a wicked nation in the fruit of their womb by causing them to destroy their own seed in order that they may know He is God. "Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD." Consider well then that the Lord, He is God and the nation which has a low birth rate is under His curse and not His blessing. Children truly are the heritage of the Lord and the fruit of the womb is His reward. Go have as many as the Lord will bless you with and raise them in the fear of God!