Vol. XVI • 1994 http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v16n2p05.htm
Disobeying God’s First Creation
Order
to Man: "Be Fruitful and
Multiply"
Ellen Myers
Disobeying God’s First Creation
Order
to Man: "Be Fruitful and
Multiply"
Ellen Myers
Immediately after God created man in his own image and likeness, "God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28). This blessing and order were repeated after the Flood; "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth"' (Genesis 9:1). We read that "Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them" (Psalm 127:3-5), and that "Blessed are all who fear the LORD, who walk in his ways. You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table. Thus is the man blessed who fears the LORD" (Psalm 128:1-4). It is the burden of this paper that most people in the so-called Christian West have disobeyed God's first creation order to man, have despised His promised blessing attached to it, and will therefore be stripped of dominion and prosperity in favor of other people who have obeyed God's first creation order to man.
Factual and statistical information substantiating this charge comes from the well researched article "The Cost of Wholesale Contraception" by James A. Miller' Miller reports that on May 9, 1960 the U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill as safe for contraceptive or birth control use. At about the same time the Pill also began to be taken by Western European women. This marked the end of the baby boom and beginning of the disastrous Sixties. At first the Pill's effect was slow, but births began to decline from an all-time high of 4.3 million in 1957 by more than 16 percent in 1964. By 1965 the American birth rate had declined to 19.4, a level barely above the rate of the Great Depression. Birth rates kept declining till an all-time low of 14.6 in 1975. This decline took place, amazingly, amidst mounting propaganda for "zero population growth" spearheaded by Dr Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb.
The first to feel the consequences of this demographic development were the maternity wards of hospitals, and next, the manufacturers of baby food such as the Gerber Products Company, which suffered a decline in sales for the first time in its history in 1973 and whose earnings fell 50% between 1973 and 1974. Other baby food companies and maternity shops likewise declined or even went out of business. Developments in other Western nations were similar.
On May 9, 1968, exactly eight years since the Pill was approved, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists promulgated a new policy asking that "social and economic factors" be considered in allowing abortions. In 1970 the American Medical Association adopted a similar policy. Public demand for legalized abortion also arose due to a contraceptive failure." Abortions in the U.S.A. now number an estimated one and a half million annually and may rise substantially as the Clinton Administration removes legal barriers still left from the Reagan and Bush era. Abortions around the world number around 55 million annually
American elementary schools were hit next. From 1979 to 1982 children entering first grade were a million fewer each year. In 1985 there were nearly eight million fewer elementary school students than in 1969. This decline caused a surplus of elementary and intermediate school buildings and teachers.
Not only the Pill but sterilization, chosen increasingly as the surest and permanent means of birth prevention, took its toll. In 1965 78 percent of American husbands and wives aged 15 to 44 were able to have children; this total declined to 52.7 percent by 1982. At the same time, the share of wives or husbands who had been surgically sterilized climbed from 15.9 percent to 38.9 percent according to a study released in February 1985 by the U. S. National Center for Health Statistics.2 Next, the high schools were "reeling from the birth dearth of the late 1960s and early 1970s" (American Demographics magazine). Colleges broadened admissions, lowered their retention standards, or else recruited overseas. The highly visible presence of many third world students on American college campuses today is largely due to this development.
The economy at large began to suffer as the absence of millions of customers contracepted or aborted out of existence took effect. Consider especially the declining need for new housing, which is the pace setter for the rest of the economy. Experts predict that total new housing starts including rental apartments, which already dropped from 1.75 million units in the 1970s to 1.5 million in the 1980s, will fall to about 1.1 million by the mid-90s. This situation may continue well into the next century and be relieved only by immigration. Incidentally, housing built since the 1960s reinforces the birth death cyde by making little if any provision for large families. Today the rare Christian couples obeying God's creation order to be fruitful and multiply must almost invariably do with old, obsolescent housing in decaying neighborhoods to shelter their children.
As is becoming well known, contraception and abortion threaten the Social Security systems in the West. The ratio of workers to retired persons is expected to drop from 4-1 now to about 2-1 soon. Miller writes that "The only visible answer is young, tax-paying immigrants." As to Europe, it is slowly vanishing. In nation after nation, the number of births occurring annually has already fallen below the number of deaths. Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Great Britain and Hungary slipped into natural population decrease during much of the `80s. Some of the lowest fertility rates ever registered in all human history - about 1.3 children per woman, more than 40% below the zero-growth rate - have been registered in such "Catholic" countries as Italy and Spain. The fertility rate for Europe as a whole has been running about 1.6. Recent demographic projections have put Western Europe's population in 2050 at a hundred million fewer persons. Huge social disruptions are already occurring as millions of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East flood the emptying continent next to them. ...
The same inexorable logic applies in the U.S. and throughout the developed world. People from healthy birth-rate nations are being recruited into below-replacement nations. ... Throughout the industrialized world, xenophobia is appearing along with these: an economy going sour, families breaking, sexual diseases rampant, abortions rising ...
In what can only be called an addiction to the Pill, nation after nation is literally losing the will to reproduce and survive.
Miller's sobering report ends here. Add to it that in Europe many of the immigrants are Muslims who in some instances are buying unused, empty formerly Christian churches to transform them into mosques and demand that Muslim law (the Shariah) replace the law of the country in districts where they have become a majority (it has happened in England). Their leaders are well supplied with financial resources for expansion and proselyting by oil-rich Arab governments. If this development continues, it will mean a rude chastening for the vast majority of European secular materialists and severe persecution, like in most Islamic countries today, for the small Bible-believing Christian minority.
Now the Muslim people did obey God's first creation order to be fruitful and to multiply, and this is why Islam is the world's fastest growing religion today. It is estimated that Muslims will number 1.9 billion people, or 25% of all humanity, by the year 2020, a scant generation away Europeans, on the other band, including European Christians, did not even replace themselves. Thus the Muslim people may accomplish the hegemony of Europe in the twenty-first century which they failed to obtain by war five hundred years ago. As to the United States, Hispanic immigrants may well recover by sheer population pressure the American Southwest wrested from Mexico a hundred years ago.
Disobedience of God's first creation order to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth characterizes the overwhelming majority of Western Christians. Not God their Creator and Lord but the wealth and wisdom of this world is evidently first and foremost in their minds when it comes to having children. This materialistic attitude prevails in almost all churches as well. No sermons are being preached about God's first creation commandment, nor about the clear implications of Romans 12:1, which entreats Christian believers to "present your whole bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable (or spiritual) service." We are not obeying this biblical, New Testament call when we withhold our bodies' reproductive capacity from our Lord. Yes, some dear couples cannot have children or not as many as they would like, for childbearing is a gift from God's hands (Genesis 16:2; 21:1-2; 25:21; 30:2; 1 Samuel 1:19; Luke 1:25, 36-37; etc.). With others one spouse yearns for more children while the other is adamantly opposed; the Lord knows their thoughts and innermost hearts (PS. 139:1-4;. Many Christian couples, like their non-Christian contemporaries, were voluntarily sterilized in the 1970s and 1980s. Now a few of them, persuaded of the unbiblical nature of this step, obtain reversals and rejoice in more children.
All this is in stark contrast to the Russian Christians persecuted under Communism. Through most of the 1980s this writer sent letters of encouragement to hundreds of Russian Christians imprisoned in the Gulag for their faith, and to their families. Amazingly most of them had many children (five, six, seven and more were quite common). This is a shining testimony to their obedience and trust in the Lord, and it is one important reason why Christianity persevered through seventy years of merciless suppression. It is doubtless also a reason why our Lord has now rewarded them with religious liberty actually greater than in the United States! They can pray, read and be taught the Bible, and study scientific evidences against evolution and for creation in their schools, universities, and over their public television stations in supposedly Christian America we cannot.
The idea that the world is facing a population explosion threatening our environment and/or food supply has been advanced since the late 1960s when the decreasing birth rate in the West was already well under way. Numerous well-informed researchers have refuted this idea with solid facts. On the alleged population explosion, consult especially the masterful book by Princeton professor Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press), which documents the blessing and indeed necessity of population growth for the economy. Professor Simon is not a Bible believer, yet his work confirms the benefit of obedience to God's first creation command to man. Another excellent resource book is Humboldt State University professor Jacqueline Kasun's The War Against Population (Ignatius Press). An older but still most informative classic in this field is Dr. Cohn Clark's Starvation or Plenty (New York: Taplinger, 1970;, documenting that by using the agricultural methods practiced in the Netherlands in 1970 a world population of 35.1 billion (seven times the present population) could be fed at a very high living standard (pp.157-158). For recent information on alleged hurt to the environment, see the book by Dixy Lee Ray, Thashing the Planet; Ellen Myers, "Population Resources and Ecology - A Bibliographical Essay," Creation Social Science and Humanities Quarterly, VI:4 (Summer 1984); Carl F. Bruce, "Environmentalism - Lending Mankind Down the Garden Path," Creation Social Science and Humanities Quarterly, XIV:4 (Summer 1992); or contact the organization Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, P.O. Box 65722, Washington, DC 20035.
God's very first commandment to man recorded in the Bible tells us to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and have dominion over it. It came to us with God's Nessings, and children are His reward (Psalms 127 and 128). We have not fulfilled it, nor has it been superseded by the lying doomsday prophecies of God's and man's enemies ultimately inspired by Satan (Ephesians 6:12). People who will not be fruitful and multiply will sooner or later lose their dominion over the land they occupy to other people who do obey God's first creation order Last but not least, we Western Christians, unlike our persecuted brothers in the Fast, have almost wholly exchanged faithful obedience to God in the matter of having children for the materialistic wisdom, wealth and comfort of this present godless world. As God blessed our brothers in the East for their sacrificial obedience, so He will punish us for our disobedience to this, His first creation order to man.
References
1 HLI Reports. Vol.11. Nos.. 6-7, June/July 1993 (published by Human
Life International. 7845 Airpark Road, Suite E, Gaitbersburg, MI) 20879, USA.
2 "Sterilizatiun Prevalent, Study Says," Wichita Eagle-Beacon, Monday
February 11, 1985, p. 7A.
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