What the Doctrine of Creation Tells us about Contraception

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As Charles Spurgeon once noted, “The best way to defend a lion is to let it out of its cage.” And so it is. One such doctrinal-lion that far too many of us leave caged is the truth of Genesis 1 and 2. In asking how things “should” be, we rarely take a closer look at how things “were”, and therefore we miss the truth of their created “good(ness)”.  Like children looking at a broken computer, we know something is wrong, but we’re not even sure what “right” would look like.

Unfortunately for our generation, the temptation to turn first to science for these answers is almost automatic. All our “problems”, from depression to anxiety to sickness and health are given “scientific explanations”, and therefore are forcibly placed under the authority of secular science.  But, as a G.K. Chesterton scholar explains,

“[T]he problem with the man of modern science is not that he is trying to know what he does not know, but that he is pretending not to know what he does know. And what is it that he pretends not to know? Well, it has something to do with those three words, “In the beginning…” “

Though science may claim the luxury of rejecting the truth of Creation, Christians can make no such claim and have no such luxury. All that we are stands and falls with God’s creative work “in the beginning”. If it is true that God created, and that “by [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him (Col 1:16)”, then we have a stake in such truths that cannot not be overstated. If God created things “good”, it behooves us to figure out what, why, and how. And such a search is particularly important in the presently controversial doctrine of procreation.

Anyone claiming to have an opinion, or more precisely a “biblical” opinion, on the contraception issue cannot but wrestle with the looming truths of the first chapters of Genesis. There we see a handful of conscience shattering demonstrations of God’s created intentions towards men, women, and the marital union — and we see it all in the absence of sin.

We read in Genesis 1:26-28,

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” “

Clearly we see that God made mankind “in his image”, he made them “male and female”, and he said to them “be fruitful, multiply, subdue the earth, and have dominion”.  What were his purposes for the distinctions in the sexes? Well, we get a glaring clue in Genesis 2:24 when God says that “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Take a good historical and chronological note here: neither Adam nor Eve had a mother or father. Interesting, don’t you think? God was speaking to them and instructing them in family affairs when as yet they had not experienced them. God does something like that again in Genesis 3 when he curses Eve with “pain in childbirth”, when as yet, no woman (of which Eve was the sole example) had ever experienced childbirth. Either God forgot that procreation wasn’t integral to the “one flesh union” or He didn’t — and he was teaching his children from the very beginning that love is, by its very nature, a fruit bearing and pro-creative act.

Few theologians (if any) deny the fact that God created man and woman to be able to procreate. And Scripture doesn’t allow for anyone to say He didn’t bless his image-bearers with the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” (and Martin Luther goes ever farther, calling Genesis 1:28 the first command of the Bible!).  But the contemporary debate tends to center around the issue of “totality” — asking, does it follow then that we must be “totally” open to having children, or can we be cognitively open towards procreation, while actively pursuing means to prohibit it? at least for a time or a season?

Well, given what we’ve just read from the context of Genesis 1 and 2 let’s ask a couple of similar questions. Must we “always” seek to subdue the earth and have dominion over it? Is it ever wrong for a husband to leave his mother and father and cleave to his husband? Is it really that important for husband and wife to have a one-flesh union, if they could be as fulfilled just being intellectually united? Is being “fruitful” and “multipl[ing]” always “very good” in the sight of God?

The point is this: what God has brought together, let no man put asunder. It was God, the Creator God, the Alpha and Omega of our salvation, the Author and Finisher of our faith — it was this God who created sex and the sexes to be procreative. He is the One who looked upon it and called it “very good”. Not only that, the very mode in which this God chose to save his fallen creation was through the “seed of the woman” that  would crush the serpent’s head. Now isn’t that a testimony to the grace of God in children? And yet, the modern man of science has convinced us that the procreative purposes of sex are merely secondary, and optional; while he exalts the relational aspect of sex as the crowning jewel of the one-flesh union. That my friends is neither logical, nor biblical. Apart from procreation, no scientist would be around to convince you that procreation is a hindrance and a burden — and no preacher would be around to convince you otherwise.

Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD:

(Psa 102:18)

“Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD...” - (Psa 102:18)

‘BH

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Tags: Birth Control, blessing, Children, Christ, Christian, Church, Contraception, Father, female, God, Gospel, Love, male, mother, Procreation, Sex