Scripture assures us that those who hate God love death. This is a puzzling truth, but even a quick look at the modern God-despising culture will confirm it. The twentieth century, enlightened as it was, gave rise to unimaginable levels of genocide—untold millions died unnatural deaths in the trenches of France, the death camps of Germany, the gulags of Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia, the jungles of Rwanda, the family planning clinics of America.
But what exactly is the connection between hating God and loving death? Pagans certainly take no pleasure in the prospect of their own death, and it isn’t likely that the deaths I mentioned above were inflicted for the sheer fun of it. But if we think of death as the absence of life, the connection becomes clearer. Moderns are driven by the calculated pursuit of personal peace and affluence—and life can be awfully inconvenient. As some sage once said, life is what happens when we were making other plans. And when something dares interfere with the plans of a modern, it must be eliminated.
A farmer sows, waters, weeds, and reaps, but it is God and only God that gives the growth. As a result, a wise farmer understands that from a human perspective life is unruly, unpredictable, and unmanageable, because it is not under his control but God’s control—and God’s purposes for life are far beyond our understanding. And so he does not try to wrest control from God, to improve on what God has ordained; instead he tries to be a faithful and grateful steward of those blessings which God has chosen to bestow.
A wise parent has a similar understanding. God chooses to bestow children on us, and assures us in Scripture that they will be a blessing to us. And we often must cling to that assurance, because our children are unruly, unpredictable, and unmanageable—that is, they are brimming with life. Being Christians surrounded by a life-despising culture and vulnerable to its lies, it is a good thing that God has told us flat out that when inconvenient life clashes with our carefully laid plans, we are to choose life.
Last night we recorded what was probably my favorite of the thirty Basement Tapes we’ve done so far. Not necessarily the best, but my favorite, because of its topic—babies. The St. Peter community embraces the truth that children are a blessing from the Lord, and its enthusiasm for conceiving and rearing covenant children is a large part of the reason Debbie and I decided to move ourselves and our three carefully spaced children to Bristol. That was three years ago, and now we learn that God has blessed us with another child—our sixth.
During last night’s conversation we mentioned a recent article from the New York Times, one which reported on the increasing popularity of testing unborn babies for medical conditions. It described the thinking of a number of women who had deliberately conceived a child but, after medical tests revealed that the child had unusual characteristics, had decided that an abortion was called for.
Some of the reasons given for abortions: the child had Down’s syndrome; the child had a disease that would probably kill them by age 35; the child was missing a limb; the child had a deformed limb; the child had an extra finger (which could have been removed surgically). One woman knew that her husband would not respond well to a child that would suffer. Another woman wanted a son, rather than a fourth daughter.
These women clearly love death, but not in the sense that they take some sort of sadistic pleasure in exterminating the life of a child; in fact, all of them claimed to be troubled by what they had done. No, what they love about death is that it is a powerful tool in their hands, one that they can use to improve on their God-given circumstances, to shape their situation so it conforms to their own superior plans.
Christians will rightly recoil from such thinking, and wonder about the severity of the judgment God will pass on those who embrace it. But should we view such thinking as totally foreign to our own, or as just an extreme version of the family planning mentality that is just as pervasive in the American church as it is in the culture at large?
Around St. Peter, the liturgy with respect to family planning is to ask two questions: Do you think that children are a blessing from God? and, Do you think you should be in the business of scheduling God’s blessings for you? The modern secular culture can barely comprehend the first question, and the answer to the second is an emphatic “Yes!” Christians, of course, have historically answered “Yes!” to the first and “No!” to the second.
Most Christians today will admit, though often hesitantly and reluctantly, that children are a blessing from God, but are quick to parse the second question so that the answer moves from “No!” to “Maybe ….” They may protest that blessings are optional, or blessings aren’t blessings when you don’t want them, or it is sometimes good stewardship to delay or reject a blessing, or that some are called to circumstances in which the usual blessing would be a curse (circumstances that God, who thought He was sending a blessing, apparently didn’t know about). As a result, the modern American landscape is speckled with churches that have no room for a certain kind of new believer, churches which ask God to look elsewhere for homes in which to place His covenant children, because they are all full up.
May we have the courage to reject death and embrace life, to trust in God and not in our own understanding, to open our hearts and homes to as many covenant children as God is gracious enough to entrust us with