GODFREY: We've had intense discussions of that historically in the church,
"Is it right to limit the family or is it right to take all the children that God gives?"
And, of course, that assumes that God is thwarted by our actions if we prevent pregnancies.
The first thing to say is, of course, that where providentially a couple does not have children,
that is God's providential will for them and clearly is not a failing or a fault.
They may feel it as a deprivation, but as I was listening to some of the discussion of suffering,
God calls us to different paths of service in different ways.
And I think we have to ask ourselves, "Why might we limit the size of our family? Is it for selfish
reasons or are there perhaps some legitimate health reasons or economic reasons?" I think
God called us to be responsible individuals and therefore we have to look at our own distinct
circumstances and callings and responsibilities. The Dutch Reformed answer is you can have as
many children as you can afford to send to the Christian school.
FERGUSON:
Let me chip in something here, Chris. I think it's easy in questions like this
to become almost neurotic about them when this is the kind of question that belongs to
many questions in the Christian life where God tells us to be responsible in applying
the general principles of Scripture to the situations in which we find ourselves,
which actually includes if you are a man whether you married this woman in the first place
or whether you didn't. You know, Paul's kind of striking words about the virgin
in 1 Corinthians, "He does well if he marries her. He does well if he doesn't marry her."
Whatever else it means, it means that there is a responsible choice
in whatever the peculiar circumstances may have been that lie behind that that an individual has
to make. And that applies all the way across the board and in so many dimensions of married life.
Now, it would be sinful to rebel against one of the reasons why God has established marriage,
which is the continuation of family life,
the raising of godly seed, to be stubbornly rebellious. But there is nothing in Scripture that
governs some of the areas of our ordinary life. And, you know, if I can just throw in a
penny's worth here of something I think I've come to feel very strongly, I think we need to be very
cautious about books published by experts who tell us exactly how many children a quiver full is
or exactly how every couple's marriage should be usually an identical copy of the marriage
of the person who has written the book. By and large, Scripture gives us these marvelous general
principles and says, you know, each couple is going to have to work these things out
on their own because they are basically two incompatible people who thought they knew
each other suddenly discovering they don't really know each other very well. And there are constant
decisions that we've got to make based on, "How do I wisely apply the general principles to the
life that I'm living?" And it's not necessarily going to be exactly an identical of somebody else.