To the editor:
On May 21, 2023, my wife and I were watching a TV show that forced me to think once again about the ever-present cultural problem of why Christian ethics have become the ethical minority.
The show portrayed a couple that was at a crossroads. The big decision had nothing to
do with careers or choosing to move a long distance. The big decision the couple had to make was whether they wanted to start having children. The music queued. The lights dimmed. The mood grew intense.
Would this couple stay together, or would the big decision bear so much pressure that the relationship would break? The couple eventually came to an amicable agreement after counsel from family. The moral of the story was that you will have joy if you seek the other person’s good.
There is a ring of truth in that moral, even though the moral itself was not entirely accurate. A better way of stating the moral is to say, “There is joy in seeking the other person’s good.”
Whether or not you choose to rejoice in the good of others is another story.
Hopefully, you caught the logical fallacy. The show never answered the question. The show in fact ignored the question by changing the moral of the story. But changing the moral of the story did not provide a real answer to the obstacle the couple was facing. There was no true resolution.
Should the couple have children?
Secular society and many Christians would say, “No.” Don’t have children until you are
financially established. Don’t have children until you are a little more mature to take on the task. Don’t have children until you and your wife have been able to get to know one another and know how the other works. Don’t have children until you know that you will be able to spend adequate time with your family.
Each of those propositions are the most reasonable-sounding excuses I can think of with which most Christians are prone to agree. Each falls flat upon closer examination.
If you are waiting to have children until you are “financially established,” good luck. Ninety-nine percent of people will never meet their own idea of whatever being financially established means.
If you are waiting until you are a little more mature, then you have no hope since statistics say that whoever you were when you were 15 is pretty much the person you will be the rest of your life.
Knowing your wife is commendable and necessary. The problem is that you have no idea how she will handle kids until she has kids. And visa-versa. You should have a rough idea about that the day you start dating, but the challenges of raising a little person brings out the real you.
Finally, if you think you are pressed for time now, wait until your career is on the move. You will have no time then.
If you are married and waiting for children for these reasons or reasons like it, you are only
doing so because you do not have a Christ-centered view of God’s plan for you and your home. We can see that when the excuses are pressed a little. They do not hold water. They are secular. We need to align our theology of the home with the Bible.
Off the top of my head, the Bible provides us three easy reasons why you need to abandon this secular idea of waiting a while before having children after marriage.
One. Children are good because children are a blessing from God: “children are a gift from
Yahweh. The fruit of the womb is a reward” (Ps. 127:3). When someone offers you a gift, you do not show your appreciation for their generosity by placing conditions on it. If you offered me a 1925 Round Door Rolls Royce Phantom as a gift, I would not tell you, “Can you wait until my birthday or Christmas?” I would immediately say, “Yes!”
Gifts are a good thing, and they are to be immediately received with joy and gratitude. Children are a gift from Yahweh. Children are equally a “reward.” They are the result. They are the wages which God gives us through intimate union with one’s spouse. They are God’s payment for a job well done in obedience to his natural order. Children are a blessing from God.
Two. Children are a joy because they provide strength in numbers: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; They will not be ashamed When they speak with their enemies in the gate . . . if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart” (Ps. 127:4–5; Eccl. 4:12 NASB95).
Children are a joy because there is strength in numbers. Your home is a micro-kingdom. What’s a kingdom without an army to defend it? It is a defenseless kingdom. It is a kingdom with fewer forces than God intended. When you create excuses for waiting to have children, you are telling God that he does not know how to protect and build your kingdom. Following God’s plan for the home is kingdom building. It’s kingdom guarding. It’s kingdom nourishing. Children are a joy because they provide strength in numbers.
Three. Children are God’s intended result from marital union: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24 NASB95).
God’s plan for most people is to grow up, get married, and build a family for his glory. The fact that husbands and wives are joined in intimacy and ought to operate as one united
team is not the central idea in the one-flesh metaphor. The idea is that children are produced through marital union.
The one-flesh imagery is more literal than we give it credit. Intimacy is to result in the creation of “one flesh.” Marital intimacy is to result in the creation of individual people.
We knew this when we got married. And many of our peers with whom we had been discipled knew it.
It took six months to get pregnant. We let Jesus take the wheel in a sense. This is
important because God gives everyone differing abilities to bear children. Some people have an excruciatingly difficult time bearing children. Others do not. And we are called to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.
We rejoiced in whatever God gave us. Today, we have four children. We are striving to build a micro-kingdom and strengthening it into a generational fortress. Generational Christianity is the first thing I look for in a quality church. There is strength in numbers. Children are not an economic burden. They are an economic addition, compelling us to work harder together to build the kingdom.
The difference between the world’s idea of children and God’s idea of children is that children are not a big step. Children are the next stage. Satan and the world have taught our nation and the church since about the 1960s that children are a burden to true freedom and happiness.
False.
Children are only a burden to ethical libertinism. Children demand attention, care and love.
Children demand that you invest in someone other than yourself. Children demand selflessness. Therefore, only selfish people view children as a step upon which to place one’s foot in an effort to get somewhere.
The world does not value children because the world does not view the person as an image bearer. So, people — and children included — are only pawns in a race to be something. But most do not know what to be. That’s because the person is only viewed as a steppingstone. Thus, the world views children as a big step because it views the person as one more cog in slavery to society.
The Christian worldview is opposite. People, and thus children, are not steppingstones. Children are God’s next stage of life upon saying, “I do.” Children are the next stage. This is an enormous distinction between the world and the church. Children are more than precious. They are essential.
A man in church once told my wife, “I love when I hear children making noise in church. It means that our church has a future.” A church that does not retain its children when
they are adults has no future. A home that does not retain its children when they are adults is broken. A society that does not retain its children is doomed.
Children truly are the future.
Christians should not complain that churches are shrinking when they have taught their now-adult children to wait on getting married and having kids. They’ve set themselves up for failure. They have become Israel in the wilderness.
Instead, we should confess our sin for even thinking this way and encourage young people to work hard, get married and have children. Children are not a big step. They are the next stage of life after marriage.
June 24, 2022, marked a historic moment in our nation’s history. It marked the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This historic overturning did not abolish the practice of child murder in our nation, which people call abortion. It shrunk the power of the federal government and placed the issue of child murder back into the hands of the states.
It is a reminder that there is much ground to be accomplished on the local state level and that the war can be won for the glory of God. What is the easiest way for the Christian to fight that war? The easiest way for the Christian to fight the war of abortion/child murder is to raise up families for Christ.
It is not to master a philosophical argument. The best way to defeat a culture of home destruction is to build a culture of home construction. This is why the fact that children are the next step in every young marriage is important.
Scripture and history expect us to get married young. When we take God’s plan to grow up, get married and raise a family for his honor and glory to heart, we create and strengthen a culture of home construction.
Satan has brought about a great deal of death and misery through the advocacy of divorce and abortion in this nation for many decades. It has ruined and feminized the culture. The easiest way to reclaim that lost ground is not through politics or getting rich or being ready for marriage — whatever that means.
It is simply by making children the next stage of life and reveling in the God-given task of raising micro-kingdoms, families for Jesus Christ.
Rev. Andres Reyes
Perry
Rev. Reyes, these people who you want to have babies to make God happy might be more open to the idea if they had started a sweet business where they never have to pay taxes on the cash that people just give them. Like you did. May I also add that, unlike how bronze-age goat herders looked upon women as breeding stock, views have evolved somewhat even in Iowa?
One more thing. You wrote “Scripture and history expect us to get married young,” and “statistics say that whoever you were when you were 15 is pretty much the person you will be the rest of your life.” You also decry a “feminized culture.” We can only assume you don’t care much for the threat of women doing man stuff, like voting and working and self-determination. But you imply that 15-year-old girls’ having babies (in church-government-sanctioned wedded bliss, of course) is God’s (and a real man’s) delight. It’s creepy and, as far as I know, they aren’t promoting that in communist San Diego.