Birth Control: In Light of the “Appointed Time”

“Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” – Gen 18:14
Almost any time the topic of birth control comes up amongst Christian couples it is often centered around the proper timing of pregnancy. In fact, the [...]

The Straw-man of “Maximizing Children” in the Contraception Debate

“If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.” - (Ecc 6:3)

A “straw-man argument” is a logical fallacy [...]

Diluted Blessings: Our Deceptive Flesh and the Practice of “Family Planning”

“The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” – Proverbs 10:22
It does not take a fancy hermeneutic, nor a PhD in Biblical Ethics to understand this truth. Solomon teaches us in this verse that the blessings of the LORD are undiluted. What God calls a blessing is just that [...]

The Complementarian Irony: How the Pill Burdens Women

Interestingly enough, if you marked the resurgence of the “natural family” among American Christians, I’m certain you would see it linked quite closely with a belief in complementarianism, which (as the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womenhood notes) is basically “that men and women are equal in the image of God, but maintain complementary differences [...]

God’s Reign in Our Families: Does Family Planning Have a Place in the Kingdom of God?

In his work entitled, The Gospel of the Kingdom, George Eldon Ladd wrote, “..the righteousness which God demands of us, He must give to us, or we are lost. The only life which can be made pure is the life which knows the power of God’s Kingdom, His rule.” It is no secret in Scripture [...]

Birth Control In Light of the Cross: A Christian Reference in Considering Contraception

That Jesus Christ was crucified and rose from the dead to seek and save those that were lost are two truths that should shake the very foundations of Christian living, and dying. That the Son of God was made to be sin for “our sake”, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 notes, lays upon us a very [...]

“The Kingdom of God is hostile to nothing but sin alone…”

Combating the ideal that “the gospel is hostile to culture” and in a deeper sense, hostile to the created purposes of Creation, Herman Bavinck writes, “The Christian is the true man, on every front and in every domain. Christianity is not opposed to nature, but to sin. Christ came, not to destroy the works of [...]

Evangelicalism’s (Self-)Terminal Generation: Preaching to Those Who First Spring From the Womb

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that [...]

What the Doctrine of Creation Tells us about Contraception

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 [...]

The Temptation to Teach Abstinence (of Children): Making a Bad Father out of a Good God

“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and [...]