Why family planning is very bad

I offer readers today, the abridged text of a talk I gave two years ago to a group of young Christian men and women on the evil of family planning.There was no family planning in those days. Men FEARED God’s categorical command to multiply and fill the earth. They also TRUSTED God for his provision, […]

I offer readers today, the abridged text of a talk I gave two years ago to a group of young Christian men and women on the evil of family planning.
There was no family planning in those days. Men FEARED God’s categorical command to multiply and fill the earth. They also TRUSTED God for his provision, protection and promotion to take care of the precious gifts of kids he gave them. Out of that reverential fear and faithful trust, they did not do anything to prevent the conception or delivery of any number of babies God put in the wombs of their wife or wives. And so it was that Jacob, the father of the Israeli nation, had 12 sons from two wives and two concubines. If Jacob had embarked upon family planning and decided to limit the number of his children to say three, as many parents now do today, he would not have produced the fourth son, Judah, who became the father of kings of Israel. He also would have missed Joseph, ‘’The Righteous’’ the eleventh born son, who had such a colourful and absolutely fascinating life, rising from a favoured child with a coat of many colours to being a victim of attempted murder by being thrown into a pit full of poisonous reptiles by his jealous brothers; being rescued from the pit and sold into slavery; being unjustly imprisoned and eventually becoming the powerful ruler of the greatest empire of the ancient world.
  If there was family planning, Moses the Liberator, the Lord Jesus Christ himself and a long list of other very powerful, influential and history-making spiritual, political, industrial, community, business and administrative leaders in human history would not have been born. And the world would have been the loser for it because it would have been denied the tremendous benefits such individuals turned to bestow on mankind.
Biblical story says that when that notorious Pharaoh Amenhotep decreed that the midwives should kill male Jewish children, Amram, the father of Moses who was head of the Sanhedrin at that time, decided to separate from Jechoval his wife. What was the point in being together and begetting children some of whom will be killed by Pharaoh’s evil decree? Amram thought to himself. Taking a cue from their leader, Amram, other Jewish men also separated from their wives.
 Miriam, an older sister of Moses who was possessed of prophetic gift, realised that her father, Amram, and her mother, Jechoval, were destined to produce the liberator of the Jews in the person of Moses who was yet to be begotten. And with the decision that Amram had taken, there was no way that Moses will ever show forth his face on earth to fulfil his mission. Filled with prophetic courage and daring, Miriam approached her father and told him that his own decree is worse than that of Pharaoh’s.  She said: ‘’Pharaoh decreed the death of male children but you have decreed the death of all’’.
Touched, Amram reunited with his wife in a colourful ceremony and other men who had copied his wrong example did the same. Moses was born thereafter and as they say, the rest is history. What is the moral of my simple biblical story? If there was family planning in those days, Amram and other men of biblical Israel would have adopted it and someone like Moses, one of the greatest prophets that ever lived and other history-changing personalities would not have been born.
What of the story of the Lord Jesus Christ himself? It is clear that from the moment Satan fell and a curse was pronounced on him that the seed of the woman will bruise his head, he was determined that Jesus will not be born. God had ordained that the Lord Jesus would be descended from the family line of the fourth son of Jacob called Judah. Judah took to wife a woman named Shuah who gave him three sons: Er, Onan and Shelah. He married a beautiful woman called Tamar for his son Er. The Devil entered into Er who felt he will not ‘despoil’ the tremendously beautiful form (what we in these times call ’figure 8’) of his wife through child birth. He therefore refused to have conjugal relations with his wife Tamar, an action God considered wickedness and slew Er.
In line with the customs and tradition of levirate marriage of the Jews, Judah urged his second son Onan to marry Tamar and produce children by her to continue his late brother’s family name. Out of jealousy and perhaps because Satan had also entered into Onan, Onan determined not to have children by Tamar to answer his brother’s name. While meeting with Tamar, he will engage in one family planning system we in our times call ‘withdrawal system’; he will spill his seeds on the floor to prevent conception. Like his wicked older brother Er, God also smote him.
Shelah was next in line to inherit Tamar and produce children by her through one of whom the Messiah will come. But Judah feared that the fate that befell his first two sons will also befall Shelah and was determined not to allow Shelah when he came of age to marry Tamar. God had to personally intervene in the matter so that his designs must be fulfilled. He filled Judah with the spirit of lust and so when Tamar his daughter-in-law disguised herself as a prostitute, he was compelled to go into her; thereupon she conceived and bore a set of twins from one of whom, Pharez, Jesus was descended.
From these stories, we can see clearly that children are not products of accidental discharges. They are programmed by God for each couple on earth. If you fail to bring forth your allotted portions to the earth, you would be offending God himself. According to Sara Esther Crispe, a chabad columnist, ‘’we need to view each other and ourselves not just as a person, but as an entire world. Judaism teaches us how each and every soul is precious and was brought into existence by our Creator for a specific mission and purpose. No one is here accidentally. And each and every person has something that only he or she can accomplish. When we view each other as invaluable, when we recognize that we have a reason for being here, it helps combat the feelings of being useless or having nothing to offer in life’’.
When at a certain point in my life I was going through what we Pentecostal Christians call ‘’wilderness experience’’, some do-gooding friends came to us one day and said that in view of the enormous hardship we were going through at the time, they had come to advise us to abort the pregnancy that my wife was carrying at the time in order to spare us and the child and our other children any further suffering. I stoutly resisted their evil and wicked counsel. Today, when I take a look at that child and the greatness I am certain he will attain to in his life, I give thanks to God for giving me the grace to insist that he should be allowed to live.
As I have pointed out in many of my articles condemning family planning or the prevention or pre-emptive or actual killing of children, family planning brings enormous pains to women who engage in it. Apart from the withdrawal system, all other family planning methods bring one kind of pain or discomfort or even death upon women.