Faith and Big Families

I will establish your line for ever . . . 

 - Psalm 89

In the Old Testament, God definitely places a high premium on people building up large families. Listen . . . he truly, clearly, wishes for people to have very large families. 

It is considered a very high blessing, indeed, if God says he will give you a line of descendants that will go on forever. Think about it.

As of about 1940, or thereabouts, the last living member of Abraham Lincoln's family died, leaving no descendants of our greatest President. 

George Washington died, having never had any of his own children.

Now, these two cases really do not impact any of us personally. But chances are, discovering these facts about Lincoln and our second greatest President has most people thinking, "Hmmm, that's kind of too bad!"

One of my grandfathers had a great-grandfather that had something like 85 grandchildren. It takes a little over a century for a family growing at that rate, to reach a thousand. And if you could get those thousand to truly care for one another . . . well, that's one group that wouldn't need welfare, student loans, healthcare, or any of the critical social problems plaguing our generation.

When you have a lot of children, if you raise them lovingly and correctly, you would never have to worry about Social Security. Yes, think about it.

But what about overpopulation? We love to make fun of people with, like, more than five children. "Someone needs to tell them what causes that! Hahahah!!" 

But I would put it to you, there is no greater act of faith than having children. As your resources get extended, you know that God will take care of things. Your growing family becomes ever more creative, ever more resourceful. And this would be true of the human population. If we had faith, we could count on the Lord to bring with our multiplying population, the resources to solve the attendant problems. (Perhaps the people that can mitigate the effects of overpopulation - through expansion of other resources, or space travel, or even by starting a powerful abstinence movement - keep getting blocked from birth, in one way or another).

But these are all just musings from an over-active mind. Let's leave it at this:

 - God intends for us to have large families. At the very least . . . can we celebrate, and not mock, those that do?