Pastor Joel from Right Response Ministries answers whether Christians are obligated to have several children with a qualified "yes," citing Psalm 127:3-5 to describe children as arrows in a warrior's quiver. He critiques feminism as a "great lie" that enslaves women to employers while undermining the husband's dominion mandate, arguing public schools hand children to "Caesar." Ultimately, he asserts Christians must raise as many children as possible righteously within the home to counter domestic enemies and preserve sound doctrine against state education. [Automatically generated summary]
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Consolidating Questions and Theology00:04:35
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Hi, this is Pastor Joel with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another episode of our show called Questions.
Today's question is as follows Are Christians obligated to have several children?
Are Christians obligated to have several children?
My answer is yes.
Thanks for tuning in.
Now, I've got a little bit more, but my answer is yes.
I have a few caveats, and I certainly want to also.
Strengthen my yes with Scripture.
So let's go ahead and start with Scripture now.
This is Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5.
Psalms 127, verses 3 through 5.
Behold, children are a heritage or a blessing or an inheritance from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.
Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.
He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5.
I want to start with a quote from Doug Wilson, and then I want to start with another quote that I've written myself as I preached on this particular text a few weeks back.
So, this is Doug Wilson.
He says, This we all love the fact that children are a blast, and nobody should mind the fact that we love it.
But this psalm is not about the patter of little feet around the house, this is not about your Christmas photo album.
The ancient world.
When they went to war, they had a clearer view of what was at stake than we do.
A kindergarten class is a packet of warrior seeds, a quiver holds arrows.
The blessed man who has children in his youth is a man who has grown children when he is still active and in the fray.
But here is the difference between faith and presumption children are not an automatic blessing.
Samuel, the prophet, would not have been more greatly blessed if he had five sons who took bribes.
Instead of two sons who did.
That's 1 Samuel 8, verse 3.
The city council of an ancient city was found in their gates.
It is where their elders sat.
It is where decisions were made and where transactions were conducted.
If a showdown were ever to occur, that is where it would occur.
So there are two things to note about this text.
The first is that a man is contending with his enemies.
In the gate, and his sons are there with him.
His sons are present in the gates when this happens, and this is important, they are on their father's side.
He has not brought up soldiers for the enemy.
The second thing is that these are not foreign enemies besieging the city from outside, but rather these are domestic adversaries belonging to the opposition.
A righteous man, together with his arrows, Stands against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The issue is righteousness, not party, not tribe, not nation.
And a blessed father brings his children along with him in their shared loyalty to truth and righteousness.
The glue that holds such families together is a shared allegiance to Christ.
This is fundamental.
Every attempt to get families or nations or churches to hold together apart from Christ, according to Colossians 1, verse 18, is idolatry.
And according to this psalm, Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5, it is also vanity.
It's vain.
Futile.
The Curse of Abiding Leadership00:06:29
It won't work.
That's a quote from Doug Wilson.
Fantastic.
Here's something that I wrote in addition to that God is the Father, and we have no other choice but to live in the Father's world.
Therefore, we are all subject to the Father's rules, whether we agree with these rules or not.
And one of these rules is that God the Father has determined to work through human fathers in this world, He has appointed fathers in the home.
That is, husbands, fathers, fathers in the church, elders, pastors, and fathers in the state, civil magistrates.
A godly woman is called to joyfully serve as a helpmate.
The great lie of feminism is that it promised women that they no longer would be relegated to the role of helping to build the house of a man.
But in a tragic sense of irony, women, liberated by feminism, stopped helping to build the house of one man.
Namely, their husband, and became enslaved to building the house of another, the man, their corporate employer.
A few more verses, and I'll tie it all together.
Genesis 2, verse 18.
It is not good that man be alone, I will make a helper fit for him.
If there are any married women listening to this episode, your husband is not your helpmate, you are his helpmate.
The Bible is very clear.
And it's not just a mutual helpmate.
Yes, your husband will help you with things, but it's not an egalitarian, mutual, helping relationship.
It is not that Adam is the helpmate of Eve and Eve is also the helpmate of Adam.
No, Adam is given a dominion mandate, a mission, a mission that is outside of himself and outside of Eve, a mission to ultimately subdue the earth and all the creatures and to expand the garden, to work and keep.
That is to work the ground, expanding, working towards its flourishing, its increase, its advancement, that the garden would advance over the face of the earth.
Adam works the ground.
He produces, he advances, and he also keeps the ground.
That is, he defends, he protects.
He does this with the garden.
He does this even more particularly with Eve, or he was supposed to, with his family, with his wife first, and then with his children and children's children.
And Eve is given to Adam as his helpmate in this particular mission.
Certainly, Adam is a blessing to his wife as well and will help her with various things.
But fundamentally, the woman is given to man as his helpmate.
And that is not the curse.
Hear me.
That's not the curse of sin.
That is the good and righteous design of God.
That's not the curse.
The curse is that women wouldn't like this design.
When God gives the curse to the woman specifically in Genesis chapter 3, he says, Your desire will be for your husband.
But he will rule over you.
And an unruly woman might think at this point, see, there's the curse.
He will rule over you.
No, that's not the curse.
The curse is the first half.
Your desire will be for your husband.
And you might think, well, what's wrong with that?
My desire would be for my husband, that I would love my husband and be romantic toward my husband.
That's not what the language means in that context.
It's actually just like the language a little later on that we see in the case of God's words to Cain.
God says to Cain when he is bitter and angry, right after God had accepted his brother Abel's offering but had rejected Cain's offering, Cain is angry.
He's bitter towards his brother and ultimately bitter towards God.
And God addresses Cain and says, Sin is crouching at the door, it desires to have you.
It's the same language as Genesis chapter 3 Your desire will be for your husband.
Sin desires to have you.
It wants to have you, is what God says to Cain, but you must master it.
Ultimately, what God is saying to Cain is this sin desires to have you, meaning sin desires to rule you, sin desires to dominate you, to master you.
But instead of allowing sin to master you, you must rule over, you must master sin.
That's the exact same sentiment, the exact same language used in the curse.
Given by God to the woman, namely Eve in Genesis chapter 3.
Your desire will be for your husband, meaning romantic affection toward it.
No, not in this context.
Your desire will be for your husband, aka you'll want to rule over him.
That's the curse.
You will want to rule your husband.
The design, but he will rule over you.
Now, certainly because of the curse of sin, men can abuse this rulership.
I would argue in our context today, in our culture today, 90% of the time, if not even more, the primary way that men abuse their design, their call by God to rule, is by abdicating responsibility.
Most men today, the way that they fail in the leadership that God has assigned them is not by abuse, but by apathy.
Most men today, the problem in their marriages, the problem in their parenting, the problem in their lives is not that they are overly dominating, taking advantage of the leadership that God has assigned to them, the headship that God has assigned to them, but rather they are actually abdicating their responsibility and apathetic and complacent, leaving a vacuum in their homes, leaving a vacuum in their vocation,
Building the Home Within Ruth00:15:43
leaving a vacuum in evangelical churches.
That feminist women are all too happy to fill.
So, Genesis 2 18, it is not good that the man be alone.
I will make a helper fit for him.
So, that's first.
The woman is the helpmate of the man, not the other way around.
Now, what does a woman do to help this man?
Well, the quote that I already read from myself, we'll go back to the Doug Wilson one here in a moment, but the one that I wrote regarding feminism is that one of the great lies of really third wave feminism and even second wave feminism in some regard was that it was going to liberate women from the man at home, the shackles of a domestic life in the home.
But what it ironically and tragically did was it shackled them to not.
A man, namely their husband, at home, but the man, namely the corporate man, at work.
And now, today, a few decades later, I know hundreds of women that I've heard their testimony.
And some of them aren't even Christians, saying, I wish I could stay home with my kids, but we can't afford to live on a single income.
Well, why is that?
There's a number of reasons why our economy no longer can sustain in most.
Cases a single income family where a wife stays home and they have multiple children, and the husband alone works outside of the home and brings home the bacon.
That is incredibly rare for that to work these days.
Number of economic reasons as to why, but one big reason is feminism.
You know who loves feminism?
Not women.
It destroys women.
The people who love feminism are wicked men, perverted men love feminism.
Because all feminism does is it allows them to sleep with multiple women.
It allows them to go Dutch on the date and not have to pay for her meal, not have to commit, not have to raise any children, where they can support her choice to murder a child if she is impregnated.
Wicked, perverted men love feminism.
Now, that's on the sexual side of things.
But on the economic side of things, in terms of financial wealth, wicked men once again love feminism.
Because feminism allows them now to employ two people for the price of one.
If a husband goes to his employer and says, Look, I feel like I'm doing great work, but I have a wife and four kids at home, and I need to own property and not just rent and build someone else's wealth for the rest of my life.
So I want to own a home.
This is what the interest rates are, this is what the principles are, this is what a mortgage would be.
We want to save for our children and their future, whether it be college or whether it be starting a business, these kinds of things.
This is my budget, this is my pay.
It's not cutting it.
I need a raise.
I feel like I've been faithful.
I'm doing good work.
I need to be paid a livable wage to have a family.
Now, the employer may never say this, but if we could strap him down and give him a little bit of truth serum to hear what he actually thought, he would say something along these lines What in the world has made you so entitled as to think that your wife could have the luxury of staying at home?
What makes you Conservative Christian man, so entitled to think that you should be able to provide for a family off of a single income.
That's what employers think today.
How did that come about?
Women leaving the home and joining the workforce was a big part of it.
So women have been liberated from being the helpmate of one man, namely their husband at home, and now have been shackled to being, ironically, still.
A helpmate of another man, namely the CEO of that company.
But in both cases, notice what a woman is always doing, what is inescapable because of God's design, is that a woman is always helping a man to build a house.
Whether it be a domestic house or a corporate house, whether it be a man who loves her and has made vows to her, namely her husband, or whether it be a man who just wants to exploit her in the working world and doesn't care at all.
But in either case, a woman is a helpmate.
To a man building his house.
That's Genesis 2 18.
Proverbs 14 1 says this The wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.
See, according to the Proverbs, a wise woman builds her own house.
And when I say her own house, I mean the house that she lives in with her husband, her husband's house.
But her husband's house is also her house because her husband.
Cares for her and loves her.
Whatever she builds for him is, in a very real sense, something she is building for herself because the two are one.
But that relationship of the two becoming one, two made one flesh, this covenant relationship of building your husband's house and all the benefits that you're bringing to him, you get to experience and receive all those benefits yourself.
That is unique to the relationship, the covenant that exists in marriage.
That is not what occurs when you build the house of another man who is not your husband.
Who is simply a pimp or a corporate employer, then no.
When you build his house, you are not building your house.
But Proverbs 14, 1 says, the wisest of women builds her house.
And that doesn't mean independent woman, no one can tie me down, I'm not bound to any man, I'm going to remain single lifelong.
No.
The implication from Proverbs 14, 1 is that this woman, this wise woman, is married.
And so she is ultimately building her husband's house.
But by virtue of building her husband's house, it is, of course, the building of her own house, because all that is her husband's is hers as well.
But folly, with her own hands, tears it down.
A foolish woman, a rebellious woman, a feminist, we might say, tears down her own house and ironically builds up another man's house, all while saying, I am woman.
Hear me roar.
Continuing, Ruth.
So, how does a woman build her own house, namely her husband's house, a man, her husband, and not the man, her corporate employer?
How does she do this?
Ruth, chapter 4, verse 11 and 12.
Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, We are witnesses.
May the Lord make the woman, namely Ruth, who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel, that is Jacob.
And may your house be like the house of Perez, who Tamor bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman.
The you being Boaz, the husband of Ruth.
Essentially, what's being said in the book of Ruth, chapter 4, verse 11 through 12, is that the whole village is gathered together in the gate, right?
The place where decisions are made, where there are witnesses that Ruth is being given to Boaz and that her closest.
Of kin has forfeited his rights, and Boaz is now going to have the right to marry her and to make her his bride.
That the people are gathered in the gates, the decision is being made, they are witnesses, and they are giving their encouragement and celebratory remarks to Boaz and to Ruth, saying, May the Lord make this woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Jacob.
So, how does a godly woman build up her house?
Which is also her husband's house.
Well, the same way Ruth did, which is the same way that Rachel and Leah did, which is what?
Bearing children.
Now, I'm perfectly aware that some women cannot bear children.
But what we do is we look to the exception and we make it the norm.
It's not the norm.
For those who cannot bear children, the Lord has something to say to you as well.
You still have value, you still have purpose.
The Lord loves you and cares for you so long as you have faith.
In Christ.
But the reality is that many women can have children and don't want to.
But having children is the way, one of the primary ways, not the only way, but it is one of the primary ways that you can be a helpmate to your husband and build up his house.
Now, sadly, a lot of men aren't on board with this.
A lot of men want their wife to build up their house by getting a job and working out of the home and providing a second income.
But according to scripture, God gives a wife to a man as his helpmate to build up his and her house together, not by working out of the home, but ultimately by bearing children and rearing them, training them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord within the home.
All of these things are biblical and right.
So, taking that all the way back to the quote from Doug Wilson that children are a blessing, right?
Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5.
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord.
Fruit of the womb, a reward, they are a blessing.
But the blessing being spoken of in Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5, is not primarily the sweet blessing of the pitter patter of little feet on the tile floor in the kitchen in the morning.
No, the blessing in view of Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5, is arrows in the hand of a warrior, are the children of one's youth, and blessed is the man whose quiver is full.
So, the original question, which you probably forgot by this point, I will refresh your memory now.
Are Christians obligated to have several children?
Children are not just blessings, children are artillery, children are weapons, children are arrows, and blesses the man whose quiver is full.
So, we want to have many children, but Samuel the prophet would not have benefited by having five sons who took bribes rather than two.
Having ten arrows instead of three.
And yet, these 10 arrows being bent and dull does not benefit a man.
The whole point of children being arrows, as the text says, Psalm 127, 3 through 5, like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.
Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.
He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
There will always be enemies in the gate.
Not just outside of the gate, not just foreign enemies coming and trying to storm the castle, but enemies within.
There are enemies within the church, within evangelicalism.
There are enemies within our nation, within America.
There are enemies within every major institution in our society and culture today.
And the last two years, if they've taught us anything, it's that these enemies are not far off out there, but they are much closer to home than we would like to admit.
And we need, if we're going to face them, if we're going to expose them, if we're going to win and fight against these enemies.
Within, not just the enemies without, but the enemies in the gates, the domestic enemies.
If we're going to win, we need people on our side.
And the best teammates a man will ever have, according to this verse, is his grown sons.
Bless is the man who has children in his youth.
Why?
Because the idea is that by the time his children are grown and able to fight for the same cause that he did, This man, if he had those children in his youth, he won't be on his deathbed.
His children will be grown and able to fight, and he'll still be in the fray himself.
He'll still be able to fight with his sons.
But the other implication, what's assumed, is that his sons, they're not just able to fight, but they're able to fight and willing to fight on their father's side, not against him.
The reason why this father is blessed, this man who has many arrows, his quiver is full of arrows, is because what's assumed.
Is that these arrows are his arrows.
They will fly where he aims them.
They will do what he sends them out to do.
These are not boomerangs, these are arrows.
Meaning, when a man sends an arrow flying, it doesn't come back and actually pierce him, which is what so many arrows, namely our grown children, the grown children of evangelical Christians, have done today.
Much of the fight that we're currently fighting within evangelicalism.
Is this new crop, this new generation, which is the children of believers, all going apostate, leaving the faith, and some of them staying in the faith in terms of their label, in terms of a profession, but not with their hearts.
So they're within the gates, domestic enemies within, but they're ultimately against us.
They're against orthodox doctrine.
They're against fidelity to the scripture and the sufficiency of scripture, introducing new ideologies, new opinions, and laws.
Ideas, different doctrines that ultimately contradict sound doctrine and the Word of God as it's been passed down to us.
What I'm saying is this evangelicals, past generations, having lots of children has not served us well because these children have turned out just to be arrows not for their fathers but arrows for the enemy.
And they're within our gates by virtue of being our children.
It's not a positive thing.
It has not been helpful.
A big part of this is because evangelicals, previous generation, sent their children to Rome for their education.
Quantity Versus Quality in Children00:03:08
They handed them over to Caesar.
And now we're shocked when they come back as Romans, as Vodi Bakum once said.
AKA, we use public schools.
State schools.
We bought into the lie that there was such a thing as moral neutrality and that education could be neutral.
So, in bringing it home, my answer to the question are Christians obligated to have several children?
Yes.
But you should only have as many children as you can have and still maintain biblical, righteous quality.
Quantity is in the text.
Blessed is the man whose quiver is full.
That speaks to quantity.
We want to have as many children as we possibly can.
But we only want to have as many children as we can while those children are righteous.
It does us no good to have families with eight children who go off ultimately and play for the other team.
These children are only a blessing insofar as they are with their father in the gates.
And not against their father in the gates.
So, quantity, yes, have many children, but only as many children as you can raise in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
And there are many things to consider when making that decision.
How many children can I, as a dad, as a man, raise in the fear and admonition of the Lord?
How many children can I homeschool?
Or, how many children can I send to a classical Christian school and afford the tuition?
How many children can I have with, yes, it'll be hard the more children I have.
There will be certain difficulties and challenges, but how many children can I have and maintain righteousness and the fruit of the Spirit and not constantly be losing my temper or constantly stressed out?
How many children can I shape and mold as arrows that ultimately, ultimately will be on my side?
It does me no good to have eight kids if half of them play for the other team.
Might as well have had zero kids.
It's a wash at that point.
Four for the kingdom of God and four for hell.
Now, we want to have kids who love the Lord.
So we want to have as many as we can, but we better be working for quality and not just quantity.
Have a lot of kids, but raise them well.
And don't you dare think about handing them over to Caesar to raise them for you.
Thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you next time.
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