Fruitfulness

     The first command in the Bible, in order of importance, is, "Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength."  The first command in the Bible that you will find if you start reading at the beginning is, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth..." Since this is one of the very first things God told man it must be pretty important.

     It is essentially saying, "have children, have children, have children..." However, as I thought about this it occurred to me that being fruitful refers directly to having one's own children, multiplying is what happens when one's children each are fruitful and replenishing the earth is what happens when this happens for generations. God created mankind to have dominion over the earth but obviously Adam could not do this by himself so God gave him a helper and told him to have children.

     This means that couples ought to desire to have children and actively do their duty. When a couple decides to use any form of birth control to prevent or space children, whether they realize it or not, they are deciding to not obey this command, at least for a time. How many children should one have? All the children that God will give by right means! One should not disobey one of God's principles to have children like Abraham did. Some couples will be barren and some may only have one, but if God gives a couple twenty, that would be great!

     One of the implications of this command is that it is normative for people to get married. Furthermore, if God enables one to be prepared and able, it is better to marry young so there can be more years to have children.  Thomas Malthus (one of the bad philosophers from the 1800's) said that famines, disease, and war were good for mankind because they kept our numbers low. He also taught that couples should marry older so they would have less children. In contrast to this, the Bible speaks of the wife of one's youth and Psalm 127 speaks of 'children of the youth.'
    Just as God blessed man telling him to be fruitful God wants all to come to repentance and become sons of God. God told the apostles to preach the gospel to every creature. They could not tell all the world by themselves but as those they taught teach others the Church can multiply also.

P.S. To whom it may concern: while I enjoy blogging and think that it is a good idea, I feel that it takes some time that I could really use in other things while at the same time I do not think that I'm giving this blog enough time to do it well. Therefore I think I shall cease to post for a time. Perhaps I shall resume sometime in the future.