Clough Divine institutions Lesson 11

Divine Institution #3, Building a Family – Psalm 139:13-18

We are moving through the various divine institutions, and these divine institutions we have noted, on several occasions, are absolutely necessary to the spiritual destiny of the human race. We’ve also noted that every apostate maneuver in history can be identified by its attack on one or all of these divine institutions. Satan will try to destroy these because in so destroying them he can destroy the human race. And so we have attacks against divine institution one, which was volition. We have attacks against divine institution number two, which is marriage. We have attacks against the third divine institution which is family. We’ve said that the first divine institution involved a real responsibility and not just a psychological choice. We said the second divine institution is a real fulfillment of a true sexual difference between the male and the female in the marriage relationship, and that this difference is not due to learned behavior. A lot of activity today in the fields of sociology and other areas of study are intent on proving that man behaves different from woman simply because he’s learned it. That’s nonsense. The Bible tells you that there’s an inherent difference. If you had a male and a female growing up in isolation they would be different, regardless of your learned behavior patterns; it’s not true. The Bible says there are inherent features between the male and the female.

The third divine institution, we said was a real character that mirrors God the Father and His relationship to all creation through His Son. And this too is not just a social institution that somehow evolved. This is an institution by divine design and it would not be erased, you can’t do anything to erase it; we saw last time every attempt to destroy the family winds up in the end affirming its existence. I hope I ran off all the legalists this morning because tonight we have to get into some of the areas of the divine institution of family that may offend some people and some of it is delicate material. So if you have qualms about this kind of activity I’m going to carefully follow God’s Word in all areas so you blame it on the Holy Spirit, He wrote the Scripture, I didn’t; I’m just telling you what He wrote.

So we’re going to go through the third divine institution tonight and we’re going to deal with the problem of the size of the family, the purpose of the family, and the problem of over population. This third session on the family deals first…we have to go back to the purpose of a family and we must go back to Genesis 1:28. In Genesis 1:28 we have a mandate addressed to this institution of family: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And obviously included in that is the generation of children by procreation. It’s obvious that the family must go on for several reasons. These will become evident as we go through this and if you’ll turn to Genesis 9:1 you’ll see another reinforcement of this mandate for a family. “And God blessed Noah, and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” So the original mandate of Genesis 1:28 is repeated for the postdiluvian civilization. You have the first, the antediluvian civilization, you have the flood, and then you have the postdiluvian civilization. And this postdiluvian civilization was given the same mandate; in other words, the same modus operandi for this third divine institution is operating in both the antediluvian and the postdiluvian worlds.

The reason for this is three fold. First of all, in order to produce a number of believers in history you obviously had to have people; people are produced by reproduction, therefore you must have children and you must go on. And so one role that the family has had in history is the generation of people in order to provide a base for believers, from which the believers may come. There are a certain number of believers that must be in existence by the end of the Church Age or the rapture. Theologians have speculated as to the exact number; many believe that the exact number of believers in the Church Age corresponds to the number of fallen angels, and so therefore there is an ardent number and somewhere along the line that last believer is going to receive Christ and that’s the end of the Church Age. But there’s a certain number, call it n, n number of believers in the Church Age and these believers are necessary for God to carry forward His plan.

Another reason, obviously, would be that the human race is given this mandate to subdue the earth; this involves inheritance of acquired knowledge. And it means that you have to have a history from father to son, father to son, father to son, father to son, to pass on the knowledge from one generation to another as man’s knowledge of the universe expands with time. This is another feature of history, one which God demands. Obviously, knowledge can’t be passed on from one generation to another without generations. So generations are necessary in this regard.

The third principle of the expansion of family is that there must be people in order to expand the revelation of God. Now it’s true that knowledge expands of the universe with time, but it’s also true that God, in His system of progressive revelation, reveals things in future ages that are not revealed in the previous ages. Humanity must witness this, and so we have believers existing in every age; you have a gradual accumulation of progressive revelation and this is again part of the plan of God. So that’s the purpose of the family, to bring children into the world, to prepare them for the next generation, and to keep up this process until the return of Christ. There must be a chain, an unbroken chain of humanity. And incidentally, that is one proof you have from the Bible that there will not be nuclear warfare; there may be on a small scale but you never have to worry about man blowing himself up. We have assurance that people exist at the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, therefore there can never be, under any circumstances, nuclear annihilation.

This is why, if Christians would apply this doctrine it would be a most useful political tactic, because in the end the communist has no assurance that man cannot blow himself up. So in the eyeball to eyeball confrontation we Christians hold the trump card. We are the ones that can always go one inch further than the communists; when it comes down to a confrontation where the finger is right on the button, right on the button to press, we can dare them to do it and we can go all the way because we know by God’s Word and prophecy that it could never happen, and therefore we pit the sovereignty of God against the expediency of the situation. And we can always come out winners. We can always dare the communists to go one… you may say this is an illegitimate use of prophecy. I don’t think so, as we will find in the fourth divine institution when we study conscientious objectors and doctrine of war. So when we get there you will see that this is not an illegitimate application of sovereignty into a political situation. We could dare any communist or anybody in the world down to a nuclear dual, in which the stakes are the globe, and we would always come out on top; always, because we have the absolute assurance it could never happen. So this assurance could act, if Christians would get hold of it, it would neutralize any fear of nuclear warfare, and it could be used against communism and other forces that are out to destroy the United States. But we have very few people that are willing to take doctrine to its logical conclusion.

So the purpose of the family is to perpetuate a line of father/sons, down to the return of Jesus Christ. Now we obviously run into a second problem. We’ve dealt with the purpose of the family in history, now we come to the most obvious thing in our day, the problem of overpopulation. We might define the problem of overpopulation as the tension between the number of people versus space, food and materials. So we have, apparently, in our own day threat of an imbalance between the number of people versus space, food and materials so therefore the problem of overpopulation raises its head. There are several considerations a Biblical Christian makes that would respond to this situation.

The first response would be that overpopulation is not new to the 20^th century; overpopulation has always plagued the human race because remember, it does not deal with the absolute number of people; it deals with a relative number of people versus the raw materials at hand. So this problem has always been one…always been one!

The second thing to remember is that much of it is due to man’s failure to carry out the mandate of Genesis 1:28-30. That mandate said subdue the earth, and that includes scientific progress. And it’s very interesting that much of the world’s starvation and much of the horrible conditions in which men live because of overpopulation are due not to the overpopulation, but are due, first of all to poor scientific progress; the poor utilization of resources that are already available. For example, we have enough deserts in the world today to support the entire population of the world and yet these deserts cannot be used. Why? Because we have not yet developed a system of getting fresh water out of salt water. We’ve got enough water in the oceans to water all the continents many, many thousands of feet deep. So we have the water resources to develop an agriculture on a fantastic basis. So one of the tensions in food supply is simply lack of technological progress.

A second one brought out by Rushdoony in his book, The Myth of Overpopulation, is the poor social organization. We have governments, socialistic governments and welfare states who are not using the resources to the utmost; they are wasting resources and so we have a tremendous inefficiency between the time the materials get down to the people because of poor government, poor organization which is always a bureaucratic centralized form of government. These are the worst kinds of government, they are the kinds that breed inefficiency, breed laziness, and breed a very remarkable misuse of natural resources.

The third problem that we have is not only technological lack of advancement, not only poor governmental organization but we have religion. In India there are enough cows running around in the streets to serve them steak every night. And yet people are starving to death because they don’t want to kill the poor things. Why? Because of a human viewpoint religion, and they are starving to death because of their own stupid religion. And I don’t feel at all guilty about the Indians starving to death; if they starve to death it’s their own choice. They are not starving to death because they’re not getting grain from American; they’re not starving to death because we’re not feeding them. They’re starving to death because they’re a bunch of idiots when it comes to religion, and therefore I don’t at all feel guilty about starving people in India. It’s their own fault, if they didn’t believe that the bull and the cow are sacred they wouldn’t have the problem so they brought it on themselves. So we have a religious problem. So a lot of these so-called problems of overpopulation are due to these causes and these causes alone.

But there is obvious that eventually there will come a saturation point, obviously. Obviously there can’t be more people than you have square feet on the surface of the sphere of the globe. So you have a problem of a total saturation point which the earth cannot support life. Now to understand how this works and operates in history we go back to the antediluvian population. Go back to the time before the flood to Genesis 5:1; here we had, apparently another problem of overpopulation. And this little notation will give us a hint that is not explicit in Scripture, it’s kind of there underneath but I think it’s something that we Christians living in our day ought to give heed to. Is the problem of overpopulation, as it presses in upon us, not a prophetic sign of the forthcoming judgment of God? Look at the first great civilization in earth’s history.

In Genesis 5:1 it says, “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness so God made He him; [2] Male and female created He them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. [3] And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth. [4] And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begot sons and daughters.” Now verses 3 and 4 are a literary formula that you must master in order to work through the rest of this chapter. The formula works this way: you have a man, we call him, say, Patriarch one; Patriarch one, the name in this case is Adam. There is a statement that he lived X number of years. Patriarch one lived X number of years; after X number of years he had a son, S, who becomes Patriarch number two. Then after he lives, he lives Y years, the total life is X + Y, that is the total number of years that this patriarch lives. He lives X years up to the birth of this particular son that becomes the next in the line. However, beware of something. P two or S in that chart is not his firstborn son, because by the very formula in verses 3 and 4 we know Adam had many sons and daughters before this man. The man who is mentioned, S or P two, is the one in the Messianic line. So he is the Messianic seed, but he is not necessarily the firstborn. And this is important when you study chronology and so on. But you can get the sum total of a man’s life by adding those two numbers, X plus Y, that’s why I do not believe there are gaps in the genealogy before the flood. Why would people be so precise as to put X plus Y and put these things in a perfect order if it weren’t meant to be taken literally. So we have then this feature.

Now we know there were at least 13 generations, probably; we don’t know absolutely, there are only ten listed between Adam and Noah, but in Noah’s case he lived 500 years, if you look, for example, in Genesis 5:30, “And Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begot sons and daughters, [31] And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died. [32] And Noah was five hundred years old; and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” So Noah here goes on quite a while without begetting, except these children. Now some have asked, are these days literal? Yes they are; the reason why we know they are is because you can take a piece of graph paper for yourself, map it out, all you have to do is take the X axis and the Y axis and you take this graph paper and list the number of names out here, start out with Adam and go on down the line to Noah, or go on down the line, past even in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 and you’ll get down to Abraham. And you plot all your points, make Y the age at death; and you plot your points out here and you’ll get a graph of best fit that looks like this, and this is the flood, right there. And this curve, those of you who work in scientific fields, happens to be an exponential decay curve, and it’s not without its significance, it shows you it’s a real curve and it reflects real data. This is not something the rabbis sat down in 500 BC with their slide rules to deliberately invent an E curve; this curve is a result of genuine data. And these are real ages, it’s not a calendar switch or something, calendar switches would not show up like that.

So we have these real ages these people lived in this antediluvian climate and so on, various reasons why they lived that long. And Noah, the last one lived exceptionally long before he begat the son or the sons who would become heirs of the new world. Now we take, therefore, him to be an exception. The average generation, if we take the Messianic son to be born, just as an average length from the time of the man’s birth on to the birth of the son we get an average figure of about 117 years; so that’s your average generation length. And there are 13 of these generations minimum. You start out and you say well how many children were in each family? Well, the only two families given that we have data for are Adam’s and Noah’s. Noah’s had three sons and Adam has three sons, obviously they had an equal number of girls so six minimum, at least in their families. We know the others had at least four because they begat sons (plural) and daughters (plural). Now obviously they had large families; we know this from other material and other intimations in Scripture. However, all we need say here is just suppose we limited it down to six children per family. After thirteen generations you would have a minimum world population of 4,782,869, which is about a sizeable world population after thirteen generations and it’s a sizeable world population probably as far as their technology went in that day. So I would suggest that even at a very minimum, working with the antediluvian world, they suffered a similar situation.

We have another hint to this in Genesis 6:11, where a strange expression is used using the same kind of Hebrew expression that was used back in the original mandate of Genesis 1. “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled” mala, “filled with violence,” and the word for violence is human activity. And thus we come to the conclusion that the world of that day reached almost the saturation point as far as population was concerned.

Now we have a hint about this problem in Matthew 24:37 where the Lord Jesus is saying the signs that precede His return; “But as the days of Noah were, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be; [38] For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, [39] And knew not until the flood came and took them all away.” And you have the emphasis here on marriage and giving in marriage and it’s not just accidental that it happens to be in there, “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage,” which actually is a euphemism for the fact of mass procreation. And so one of the great signs is apparently, we can’t be totally dogmatic on this, but apparently the world reached a population problem in the days of Noah, just before the judgment of God fell on that particular generation.

So similarly in our day; it is also interesting to note if you study the book of Revelation carefully and you deal with the prophetic period called the Tribulation, between the rapture of the Church, the seven years plus that go between the rapture and Christ’s Second Advent, between this period of time, seven plus years, you have a series of judgments upon the earth. It’s interesting if you read these bloody, gory, judgments that come in the Tribulation, natural catastrophes, everything, that one of their roles is to reduce the population of the world, for it says in many of these judgments, one-third of the world’s population is destroyed. Now wars and diseases have usually been credited with keeping and controlling population. That is not true. We have had more wars and we have had serious plagues in the 20^th century, but has it controlled the population. No; our population is growing so fast that natural catastrophes or wars do not hinder the growth of the population that significantly. The great wars of Europe did practically nothing to control Europe’s population; practically nothing, it just bothered one or two generations, that’s all. But the growth curve kept on going. And so wars and diseases, as they are known classically, have little effect on population.

This is why, incidentally, we believe that the human race is only thousands of years old. If the human race really is billions of years old we’d expect people to be piled up about 20 feet deep by now, unless there were some very serious catastrophes, and obviously we don’t know how these catastrophes operate but it seems strange that growth, small growth, and we know world population, incidentally, has been growing at a pretty steady rate. Do you know how you can test it? You can go back to 2,000 BC and you know that the Jews started out with twelve people; measure their population today and that gives you a growth percent that is very parallel to other countries growth percent. And so we seem to have a stability of growth rate over an extended period of time. Well, if this is really true, and this growth rate really did exist for millions and millions of years, how come we don’t have more people than we do now? The only way to control this was massive catastrophes at some point, if you want to believe man was around for several million years you’ve got to postulate somewhere along the line there were terrific, terrific catastrophes that reduced the human race practically down to zero.

So population is a very interesting study and we suggest from this that overpopulation is a real problem but it apparently has eschatological overtones, that God allows it to go so far, and he is allowing it to go so far in our time and He did with the antediluvian period, versus our own civilization.

Now we come, obviously, to the problem of how, starting out a family with divine institution three, what do you do about the size of that family. We have on the one hand the obvious principle of Genesis 1:28 and following, the principle that the family exists to bring children into the world to live in the next generation. This is the reason for family. But at the same time we have the obvious problem of overpopulation; we can’t measure this exactly, we have to leave that to specialists in the field, the ecologists and men who are experts at estimating growth rates versus natural resources, pollution problems and so on; these people, these are the ones that have to give us some facts and figures. But we have the tension between these two, and let’s face it, that we live between these two tensions.

So therefore the problem of the size of the family comes out as a concern over balancing these two principles. The size of the family does not have to do with our selfish concern, but a loving concern toward the next generation. Our thrust in the third divine institution is provision, after all, for the next generation, not for ours, the next one. And therefore the size of the family should be controlled as unto the Lord with the object being love for the next generation; not for a selfish thing because I don’t like brats and I’m not going to have them around or something but because I am concerned about the next generation. Now that is a legitimate concern from the principles of history.

Now we come back to analyzing, then, the means of birth control that God Scriptures authorize. In the Old Testament there were five methods available of birth control of some sort in the ancient near east. For the resources on this article I am drawing from Professor B. K. Waltke’s paper in Christianity Today, November 8, 1968. I do not want to misrepresent Professor Waltke, some of the applications I make were not in his favor but the basic material was, so I’d like to give him the credit here for digging out much of this material.

Five methods were traditionally opened to the human race, certainly true during the times of the Old Testament. These were: (1) abortion; (2) sterilization; (3) infanticide; (4) continence; and (5) contraception. So we have five things open to the people of the Old Testament. Now we can study back through the Old Testament and find principles that would deal with these five methods. They are again: abortion, sterilization, infanticide, continence and contraception; these five methods.

Now what can we say about these methods? First, let’s take abortion. Let’s take abortion and find out whether God’s Word authorizes it or does not authorize it. Abortion, obviously, is the killing…we’ve got to define this because we’ve got the problem today of a peculiar application of abortion that a lot of people haven’t seen. Abortion means during the nine month pregnancy the removal any time, from the point of conception to the point of birth, the termination of the fetus. That’s what abortion as I am using the word means; anytime between the point of conception and the time of physical birth.

Well, we have various principles that God’s Word does give us for this. One of them comes out by comparing Moses Law to the laws of all the other lands at that time. Now we know that Moses Law was far more strict when it came to sex and these other things than the Gentile law codes. It is peculiar, therefore to note that the other nations, that surrounded Israel all had, without exception that we know of, anti-abortion laws except Israel. Nowhere in the Mosaic Law is abortion ever punished; nowhere in the Mosaic Law is it ever used. In other words, we have to infer it; it is not mentioned for or against, but it is not prohibited. Now this is remarkable in the light of the fact that the other nations, nine times out of ten, were more strict than the Old Testament, yet it’s interesting that in this area the Old Testament is wide open, very liberal…very liberal compared to the nations round about.

For example, in Assyria, one Assyrian law code, if a person would procure an abortion they would be stoned to death by torture, this is how concerned…now there’s a political reason for this, it wasn’t that they valued the life of the fetus so much, these empires needed bodies to run their armies with and so therefore abortion laws were there to promote the armies and so on in the systems of the time. So this is one feature we note.

Our second feature that we note out of the Old Testament concerning abortion, turn to Leviticus 24:17. Please keep in mind as I take you to some of these passages tonight, I didn’t write them, the Holy Spirit wrote them, and they were read to a mixed congregation. So if you’re prissy about these matters I’m sorry but your prissy standards re not in the Word of God, they come from society around you, but you can’t blame the Word of God for your prissiness. Leviticus 24:17, “And he that kills any man shall surely be put to death.” Now here is the absolute rule underlying all of the Old Testament, a nephesh for a nephesh, a life for a life. In other words, if you took a life you must pay with a life. This is the way it is, always; capital punishment. Why? Because they didn’t like people? No, because they loved them and they recognized the principle that life cannot be paid for by jailing or a fine.

Now maybe you haven’t thought this through but do you realize that capital punishment is one of the most humane processes of justice. The reason for it is that it values the life of the one who has been murdered. Anytime you go over to a system of our modern courts that are knocking out capital punishment and so on, you are essentially saying in effect the life of the victim is worthless. And essentially you’re just saying that I can go out here and kill anybody and it doesn’t matter. That life is worth nothing, or the life is worth $500, however much it costs to keep the person in the jail for a year so he can take axe out next Christmas and do it again. So we have a valuation put on life that is less than what the Bible puts on it. And the thinking behind capital punishment in the Bible is not vengeance. Please note, this is not a vengeance system; this is a justice system by which the value of the victim is elevated and made to be really worth something.

Keeping that principle in mind, turn to Exodus 21:22, in Exodus 21:22 we have a law given to Israel that fortunately we can compare with Syrian codes. If you want to do this yourself I advise you to go over to Texas Tech library, get out Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern text and you will find it in there under the Assyrian codes. But in Exodus 21:22 we have this: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child,” that is a pregnant woman, they strive and they injure a pregnant woman “so that her fruit depart from her,” that’s the fetus, “and yet no mischief follows;” that means a permanent injury to the woman, she’s injured enough to lose her fetus but she has no permanent injury, “he” the man who struck her, “shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. [23] “If any mischief follows,” this means injury to the woman that’s permanent in the body, “then thou shalt give life for life, [24] Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,” etc. compensatory justice.

Notice, the woman who loses the fetus due to injury is not considered to be, the fetus is not considered to be nephesh here; nephesh is only mentioned in connection with the mother’s life. The fetus here is not considered to be nephesh, according to the Mosaic Law. Now this is a crucial observation because when we go over to the Assyrian law codes if this happened the man would be punished by capital punishment; he would be executed because the Gentile nations considered the unborn fetus to be alive and nephesh, a life for a life. And if you struck a woman who was pregnant and caused her to abort, then that was a killing, taking of a life. The fetus, then, during the nine months of pregnancy was considered to be life but not in the Mosaic Law. Moses did not consider the fetus to be nephesh. He considered it to be less than nephesh, because the person who struck the woman was not forced to pay for it with his life.

Therefore we deduce the principle out of God’s Word that at no time between the point of conception and the time of physical birth is the fetus actually considered a living soul in God’s Word. It is not considered a living soul, therefore abortion cannot be said to be wrong on the basis of murder. This is the traditional Catholic position that we do not hold abortion because it is taking a life. But the Old Testament says the fetus isn’t life, therefore abortion cannot be wrong as murder. That is a wrong statement; you cannot eliminate abortion on the basis of the fact that it is murder; people who do so do not know and understand Exodus 21. So the unborn child, between conception and birth, during the nine months of pregnancy is not considered to be nephesh according to the very strict Law of Moses. Yet the Gentiles, with their human viewpoint systems said he was, always contrasted now, this is a crucial observation to see here.

Now we come to a third point and that is Psalm 139:13-18. Often it is said that on the basis of Psalm 139:13-18 the fetus must be nephesh; it must be nephesh because of what is said in this Psalm. “For thou hast possessed my kidneys [inward parts],” this is David talking, while he was in the womb of his mother, [thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.”] He’s thinking back, and he poetically pictures his development in the womb of his mother, and he says when “thou possessed my kidneys, when thou wove me together in my mother’s womb. [14] I will praise thee; for I have been made,” literally, “distinct,” and so on, “Marvelous are Thy works, [and that my soul knoweth right well.]” Verse 15, “My substance,” that is the embryo, “was not hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, and embroidered in the lowest parts of the earth,” that’s an idiom for the mother’s womb. [16] “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect,” in other words, the unformed embryo, “and in thy book,” and I took the time when I went through Psalm 139 to exegete this, we have a tape on the Psalms where I show this reading, “and in thy book all the preordained days were written.” Now he’s talking about during those nine months the Jews, though they did not consider it nephesh, did consider these nine months very important. And the woman was to take special care of herself during those nine months because during those nine months God was working this unformed embryo into human form, and He was, you might say, determining certain sense about his life. Verse 18, how God’s attitude was toward this.

But some people would say well doesn’t this argue for conscious life in the womb? Doesn’t this argue for the presence of nephesh during pregnancy? The answer is it does not because if you compare this passage with Jeremiah 1:5 you’ll see the sense in which it was meant. In Jeremiah 1:5 God is speaking of Jeremiah; but notice, He’s speaking of Jeremiah before his conception. Here are the nine months, here’s physical birth, this is before Jeremiah’s conception, and God says, “Before I formed thee in the belly [womb] I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” Notice, “before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; before thou camest forth from the womb,” these two terms are synonymous; this is poetic parallelism, and so therefore this shows you the way Psalm 139 should be interpreted. It is not to be interpreted as though proving conscious life in the womb, any more than it’s obvious that it wasn’t conscious life before conception, was it? No conscious life then! Well, then there’s no conscious life in the womb because these two expressions are parallel here in Jeremiah 1:5. Therefore there is no such thing as conscious life up until the time of birth as far as God’s Word is concerned.

Therefore we come to the conclusion that abortion is not wrong as murder, and we would then wait for our final judgment on abortion to consider the problem of contraception. If contraception is legitimate, then abortion is, for the reason of Jeremiah 1:5. If you tie the parallelism of verse 5 together you come out with this: one says before conception, the other says before birth. They are used in parallel; if you’re going to stop one or halt the process before conception qualitative you’re doing nothing else than holding up the process before birth, as far as God’s Word is concerned in this passage. So we now have the principle that there is a certain parallelism qualitatively; abortion is not different from contraception, qualitatively; quantitatively it is obviously because you’ve got a problem, if after conception you begin to work out in history, in real physical life the details. But please notice in Jeremiah 1:5 God considers that He knew Jeremiah before his conception. If you are going to argue on the basis of Psalm 139 that Psalm 139 teaches conscious life and it’s a sin to interrupt it, then to be consistent you must also say, according to Jeremiah 1:5 that it’s also a sin to stop it back here before conception.

So therefore at this point in the discussion we’ll leave abortion and hold onto the problem until we get back down and analyze the problem of contraception. If contraception is legitimate, then abortion is legitimate.

Now we’ll come to the second problem, the second mechanism that was used in the ancient world, that of sterilization. Turn to Deuteronomy 23:1; [“He who is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.”] this is talking about a eunuch; a eunuch was used in the ancient world to care for the girlfriends of the king. This is how he was used and why… and frankly, the word “eunuch” came to be a trusted man. Now obviously a man who is sterilized is obviously safe around the king’s harem, so therefore they used eunuchs to guard the king’s girlfriends. And this is how the eunuch came down later on in the ancient world to mean almost a synonym for “he is my trusted man,” and the word “eunuch” carries over, sometimes a figurative meaning; not even literal, a figurative meaning of a trusted one.

In this case we have a strange phrase that he is eliminated from the congregation of the Lord. In other words, Israel would not permit a man who had been sterilized to be a member of the congregation of Israel. This is the only physical deformity that disqualified a man from membership in the nation Israel; this is the only one. A man could be lame, a man could be blind, a man could even have leprosy, and he could still be a member of the nation Israel. But he was not allowed to be if he had been sterilized. Now, does this mean that it’s something affecting his salvation? Does this mean the man who is sterilized can’t be saved? No. Turn to Isaiah 56:4. This will show you that has nothing spiritual intended here. “For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep My Sabbaths, and choose the things that please Me, and take hold of My covenant. [5] Even unto them will I give in Mine house and within My walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters’ and I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.” And here God is promising all these sterilized males a place in the millennial kingdom, which therefore proves that Deuteronomy 23 cannot be interpreted as eliminating these men from salvation. It was eliminating them from the physical group of the nation Israel. Why? Because, as I went through Deuteronomy at this point I noted that there’s a problem of the sterility as a sign against the fruitfulness of the nation Israel.

You see, from Jacob on down to Jesus Christ you had to have a continuity in history physically. If you allowed sterilization among the males, you would gradually eliminate many of these lines, and these lines would be extinct by the time you came to Messiah. And so therefore, in the nation Israel, for the physical typology of the nation sterilization was wrong, not for spiritual reasons. It was wrong to help destroy the physical topology; it was a physical problem. Just like their diet. We in the Church Age can eat a pretty liberal diet versus the Old Testament. Now why is it the people in the Old Testament couldn’t eat certain things. Did you ever eat ham? You’d get axed in the Old Testament for eating ham. But if you do eat ham you’ve violated Old Testament Law. Well, what has this got to do with nutrition? It’s not just because of trichinosis so you can forget that illustration. There was another reason why they had a special diet in the Old Testament, and that special diet again reflected the physical qualities of the nation. In the Church Age it is not applicable, therefore we say on the basis of this analogy that sterilization is not necessarily wrong, you would have to consider this as unto the Lord, as a family matter. So the second process, we’ve dealt with abortion but we’ve held up judgment on with contraception, we’ll get to that. The second method used in the ancient world was sterilization but we say that was prohibited for the nation Israel and is not repeated again in the New Testament nor can it be deduced as valid for the Church Age. Again we would say that you would have to look at it in light of the third divine institution, the family; it can be used but it must be used within the family, not in defiance of God’s will to produce children but for other reasons, the limit the size of the family and so on. So sterilization has not been prohibited in God’s Word.

Now we come to the third method, infanticide. Obviously infanticide is murder, infanticide is condemned in the ancient world though it was used probably more than any other system of birth control in the ancient near east, was infanticide. Unwanted babies were dumped in the field, and that’s what Ezekiel 16, the analogy there is the Lord came along and picked Israel up because she had been a rejected child out in the field. We gather from that that it was a common practice in Ezekiel’s time to dump unwanted children out in the fields to let them die of exposure, and this is one way they had of controlling the population. So the third method in the ancient near east, infanticide, is obviously wrong and murder, so that is eliminated definitely on the basis of the Word of God.

The fourth method was continence or absence from sexual intercourse. And we have various controls on this in God’s Word. To go back to this we would refer you to Exodus 19:15. There are three reasons for continence in Scripture. Two of these have to do with the women and one of them has to do with the men and the women. One of them, which we’re going to start here, has to do with both male and female. The second one, we haven’t got time to go into all of them but the second one is women at childbirth, Leviticus 12:1-8, we’re not to engage in sex for a limited time, obviously healing and so on. Women during menstruation, Leviticus 15:19-28, and that was ceremonial uncleanness, again that does not pertain to the Church Age. The third reason, however, is the important one, and this does apply to the Church Age, where continence is condoned in Scripture. Exodus 19:15 is one principle; “And he said unto the people, Be ready on the third day: that means take preparation for three days, “and come not at your wives.” There is abstinence; it’s also mentioned in 1 Samuel 21:4.

If you turn to 1 Corinthians 7:5, here is where continence is condoned, but watch the limitations. “Defraud ye not one another, except it be with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.” Now there’s the two authorizations that we have, this male and female, both male and female may engage in continence in God’s Word only for prayer and religious activity, such as taking in the Word of God, Bible doctrine, such as certain problems involved in transportation, evangelism and so on, when due to the religious activities at hand it becomes a necessity. But notice the context, “Defraud ye not one another” and this is a strong command in the Greek. That’s what gets me so irritated about these people that identify Christianity with Victorian prudery. They have no business doing it; this is a strong command in the Greek and it’s so strong that it really hits you. When you learn Greek and begin translating, 1 Corinthians 7 just clobbers you to read this because what Paul is saying is, that the husband and the wife have a legal debt to one another in this area, and it becomes…the word “defraud” means to steal from. So continence is not condoned in the Word of God as a method of birth control except when it is used for prayer and religion, not birth control, and only for a limited time. So now we’ve had the fourth method.

We’ve had abortion, we said we’d postpone it, it can’t be eliminated on the basis of murder; we’ve had the problem of sterilization, that is not prohibited in God’s Word if it is used according to other principles of the third divine institution; infanticide, the third method available is condemned because it is murder. The fourth method used in the ancient world, continence, which we know if you read, for example, some Sumerian literature you find this was a common practice of birth control in Sumeria and in the Mesopotamian valley…continence. God’s Word says no, continence is not a valid form of birth control, the reason for it being the legal debt the husband and wife owe each other, according to 1 Corinthians 7:5. So that’s eliminated.

Now we come to the last one, contraception. The contraception involves primarily one method of withdrawal or coitus interruptus in the ancient near east, this is the only one we know of, Genesis 38:8-10 gives you the technique that they used. Now that technique in Genesis 38 by Onan, Onan is killed for utilizing birth control with his brother’s wife. However, he was not killed because he used birth control as such; he is killed because he’s committed the sin unto death. The sin unto death, this is why Onan is killed. Now Catholic theologians love to seize on Genesis 38 to prove their case. You cannot prove it because Onan, in context, refuses to raise up a seed for selfish reasons. And this does illustrate one principle. First of all, he committed the sin unto death because he did not go along with the concept of Levirate marriage and so on, his obligation to his brother’s wife was to raise up a seed so she could keep the property in her name for her son and he refused to do it. So God considered that a sin, but it wasn’t a sin because of contraception.

Now there are two other proofs in God’s Word that contraception was used in Israel. The next one comes in Leviticus 15:16-18 and here we have a passage dealing with the male outside of a sex situation; “And if any man’s seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the evening. [17] And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water,” and so on. [18] “The woman also with whom man shall lie with seed of copulation, they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening.” If there were a logical place for the prohibition of contraception in the Word of God it would have to be at this verse. There are only two points in the Law of Moses where contraception would fit in the literary context; one is at Leviticus 15:19, this is the one place where this whole subject is under discussion and yet here, at the most crucial point, if it were God’s will not to have contraception why is it that you don’t have a negative command at this crucial point? The absence of a negative command proves that contraception is acceptable to God.

In Leviticus 20:10-21 is the other logical place in the Law of Moses of having something about contraception, yet again we find nothing, absolutely nothing. Listed in verses 10 and following are a series of sexual sins; these are very strict; the Old Testament is terrificly strict, they would prohibit intermarriage of close relatives, they would prohibit remarriage of close relatives, very, very strict here. But why is it in all of this catalogue of sexual sins contraception is not mentioned? Again it shows you that contraception is acceptable before God. If it wasn’t then it would be listed as a sexual sin in these two crucial points of the Mosaic Law. The absence of anything having to do with contraception proves the point.

So therefore we come to analyze this fifth and last method used in the ancient near east for contraception. It was legitimate, but, and here’s the big but, you have to look upon this as a method. The method per se is not wrong; it, however can be misused and the sin of Onan therefore becomes an illustration where contraception can become wrong when it’s defiance of God’s will. For example, a family, a couple prays, and they consider it God’s will that they have a child and they deliberately stop this, it becomes the sin of Onan in Genesis 38. But the method of contraception itself is not a sin; it’s how you use it, whether you use it against or for the will of God. Therefore what we say, in these five methods we’ve said, it throws the burden over on the family, the mother and the father, it throws the burden over on them to plan their family as unto the Lord, seeking His will as to number, as to the number of children that they can manage and that they can bring up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, given the social situation in which we live in the 20^th century, and these other factors. These controls, then, can be used to produce this family planning.

So we have family planning as unto the Lord, however, not for selfish reasons, as unto the Lord, of the five methods we’ve eliminated two. We’ve eliminated the problem of infanticide, that was one; and we’ve eliminated continence, that was two. That leaves three methods open to the Christian couple: (1) sterilization, (2) abortion, and (3) contraception. Our argument is that abortion qualitatively is no different from contraception on the basis of Jeremiah 1:5 compared with Psalm 139:13-18. So therefore of these five methods three are valid for today’s use. Now obviously these can be misapplied outside of the marriage relationship; tonight nothing I have said applies to people outside of the marriage relationship. I am talking tonight in terms of a Christian father and a Christian mother working with their family and within the family context. So we have three out of the five methods of the ancient world can be used today in various situations.

Now some people, obviously, hate the word “abortion.” Let’s look at it; the way we defined it is this: any time between contraception and physical birth, any time during those nine months is abortion; you have in the research laboratories today in preparation contraceptives which will be used after…within 24 to 48 hours after conception. These contraceptives that are being developed are essentially scripturally no different from the physical act of abortion because they are essentially stopping the process after conception. You can’t be prissy about one and not be prissy about the other. Both, all hang together, and so when you compare Jeremiah 1:5 with Psalm 139 we come out with the answer, thought there’s a quantitative difference between abortion and contraception, there is no qualitative difference. The only way in which you can build a case against abortion en toto is to prove that life is the fetus, nephesh; you must prove that that unborn fetus is nephesh in order to make your case. My claim before you tonight is that you can’t come up with one passage of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation to prove your point, and I can come up with several passages that say that the unborn fetus is not nephesh; therefore abortion is not illegitimate in the light of God.

These methods we will expand later on as to the role of the father and the mother in the family next week as we conclude with their roles.