Not That Kind of Blessing . . .

A few years ago, I wrote eleven theses on birth control, which you can read here. But the fact that a certain line of discussion broke out in the comments of another recent post made me want to develop my eighth and ninth points, which is that children are covenant blessing, not an automatic blessing.

In my recent post, I was exhorting Christians not to use their liberty in the area of birth control to blind them to the fact that some forms of birth control are unlawful. After all, abortion is also used by many as a form of birth control, and the fact that the phrase can be okay doesn’t mean that it must be okay. We must not take a phrase that can be used lawfully and stretch it to cover unlawful practices. In the course of making that point, I said that if not using these unlawful forms of birth control meant that you were going to have “ten babies in a row,” well, then, I said, you need to have ten babies in a row.

This was taken by some as a disparagement of having ten children, as though I believe having a large family is the necessary lesser of two evils. Not at all — I was stepping into the thought processes of someone who was thinking about using an abortifacient, and I was saying that if given a choice between what you would regard as inconvenient and what we all should agree is the taking of your children’s lives to avoid such inconvenience, you should choose the inconvenience. To understand this better, use the scare quotes — “inconvenience.”

But the interaction revealed some things that we have to develop further. I believe with all my heart that children are a blessing, and more children are more of a blessing. When children are being brought up to love the Lord their God, no one believes more heartily than I that the more we have of that the better. Don’t forget that every Saturday evening, when we celebrate our Sabbath dinner, our house is teeming with a covenantal future. That delights me — but it delights me because the kids are all Christians.

So they are a covenantal blessing, not simply a sentimental one. Covenants among men, by their very nature, bring blessings and curses with them. We live in a world where choices make a difference, and this includes the choices made by us in bringing up our children, and by our children as they grow. A man is not more greatly blessed if he has five sons sleeping through harvest instead of two (Prov. 10:5). Samuel would not have been more greatly blessed with five sons who took bribes instead of two (1 Sam. 8:3). Eli would not have been more greatly blessed with four sons who slept with the women attendants at the tabernacle instead of two (1 Sam. 2:22). And the man who contends with his enemies in the city gate would not be more greatly blessed if his sons were all across the way, on the wrong side, standing shoulder to shoulder with his enemies (Ps. 127:5).

A covenantal understanding allows us to speak to this pretty forcefully, and a sentimental understanding does not. “Every life is precious.” Yes, it is, but not the way many people assume. If I say that under some circumstances, it would be better if a particular family had not had that baker’s dozen, the comeback seems easy — which child would you pick out of the line-up, and say it would have been better if that one had never been born? But never forget . . . Judas had a mom.

“The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born” (Mark 14:21).

Children are a blessing. Scripture speaks that way, and so should we. But children are a blessing in the covenant. The cup of blessing at the Lord’s Supper is a blessing — it is called the cup of blessing. And yet, there were some at Corinth who were sick and who had died because of how they mishandled that blessing (1 Cor. 11:30). The mercy seat on the ark of the covenant was a mercy seat — but was Uzzah struck dead because he touched it (2 Sam. 6:7)?

This means that children, in order to be experienced as the kind of blessing that God wants them to be for us, must be received in faith, by faith, and through faith. The just shall live by faith, and this includes life together in a family as the children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

To anticipate one objection, obviously parents cannot use birth control in order to weed out the Judases. That is not possible for us to do — we do not have that kind of knowledge. What they have to do, walking by faith, and refusing to listen to the anti-child propaganda that the world dishes up, is to make their decisions before the Lord. They have to refrain from unlawful means, and they have to walk in true wisdom with the rest.