Has family Planning become a universal or an acceptable practice for family life in the modern world? By ‘family planning’ I am talking here about the demonic euphemism for aborting a pregnancy which is often termed a ‘mistake’ or taking some scientific measures to prevent a pregnancy from taking place. The trend, which some of us think is spiritually and socially unacceptable, is growing by the day. Over 80 per cent of young couples worldwide now limit the number of children they intend to have to a maximum of two or three and some even declare unabashedly that they do not need children at all. Children, they say, can be a barrier to their career development and their living a high standard of life.
The other day, the pastor of one of the Pentecostal churches in Gakem in northern CRS mounted the pulpit and was talking about how it is very unwise for anyone to father or mother a child ‘any how’ like dogs without ‘planning’. He sounded so modern, so fashionable, so rational and so wise in his own eyes. He said he had told God that he wanted two children only whether they are all boys or all girls or a mixture of boy and girl and it would not matter to him which set God would give him. He said he was now confirming to us that, it pleased God to give him two boys and with that he was now done with the business of making babies! What his declaration means is that from now on he will be enjoying sex and forsaking the responsibility of bearing children. Fibroid and not fine boys may begin to torment his wife and he will accuse Satan of attacking him and his wife!
As he called God’s name as the One from whom he sought permission or blessing for the number of children he desired, I wanted to ask him what God said in answer to his petition. Did God approve that he should limit himself to two children or his having the two boys is his own confirmation that God approved his choice because that choice is right and proper?
I wanted to ask further whether if God told him to limit his children to two, did the same God tell him to also mount his altar to preach to a congregation of his children about the size of children they should have? By whose authority did this man have the guts to turn the platform of God to preach contrary to a command God himself gave concerning parents multiplying themselves in order for the vast earth to be filled with his children? Or, was this man of God speaking the mind of the General Overseer of his ministry?
Let someone who is knowledgeable enough tell me: What problems do having ‘’many children’’ bring to modern man? Are those problems less difficult to handle than fibroid which is becoming the number one disease or self affliction of modern fertile women who hate having children or ‘’many children’’? How many ‘’many children’’ are just intolerable for a woman to bear or a couple to have?
I am, in my own small right, a student of the Bible. I can, therefore, say with some measure of authority that from Genesis to Revelation, there is no line, no verse, no paragraph where the Bible talks approvingly about abortion or the prevention of pregnancy. In Genesis38: 9-10 where one aspect of ‘family planning’, namely, coitus interruptus, the sexual perversion of a man who senses that he is about to climax, spills out his seed unto the bed or the ground instead of pouring it inside the woman in order not to bring about conception is mentioned, it is mentioned in negative light. The man who first did it is called Onan (Genesis 38: 8) and after whom the perversion is named called onanism, was described in v10 as a wicked man and God is said to have been so vexed by that action of his that he killed him. Onan did what he did because he did not want to produce children by Tamar his late elder brother Er’s wife who died childless because the children will bear his brother’s name and not his as was the practice of the Levirate marriage of their time. From this, it is right to say that in the eyes of God, committing abortion and seeking to prevent conception and birth is a sin punishable by death. To put it more straightforwardly to the better understanding of our modern young men and women, the use of condom, pills and other techniques of contraception, is a sin punishable by death.
God created sex for the pleasure of man so that couples can bond and live more pleasurably and harmoniously in marriage. But the principal purpose of marriage and sex is for us to increase and fill the earth. As a matter of fact, the whole story of Tamar and her late husband’s brothers is that Satan was at work. Judah’s lineage was the one God had ordained that the Saviour of the world, Jesus Christ, would come from. Satan knew that and plotted to prevent the birth of Christ. That was why God, using his power of election, orchestrated the action of Judah to sleep with Tamar his daughter in-law in order to produce the twins Pharez and Zarah one of whom became the direct great great , great, great grandfather of Jesus. Sleeping with a daughter in-law is adultery but once the purpose of God was accomplished, Judah did not sleep with Tamar anymore.
So every approved sex and the children they produce are all in the will of God for man. So aborting or preventing a birth is against the will of God. You may be preventing the emergence of a savior, a preacher, a scientist, a medical doctor, a great journalist, a first class administrator, etc.
By the way, those great family planners that are now trying to rule the world and becoming God by themselves, how would it be if their fathers and mothers had decided to ‘plan’ them out of this world, where will they be today to lecture us on sustainable family planning and plan that others should not come into the world because of the economic situation allegedly besetting them?
The famous Joseph of the Bible and Yusuf of the Quran was the eleventh born of the twelve sons of Jacob. What if Jacob had ‘planned’ Joseph out because he had a house full of children already? Who would have played the role of the dreamer and a stranger carried to a strange land who by divine orchestration became ‘’a father to Pharaoh’’?
