You have how many children!?! In today’s world, eyebrows raise, and questions of wisdom and sanity follow, whenever a couple desires more than two or three kids. How can you afford more? Where will you find the time to properly teach each child? What kind of quality of life will you enjoy if you keep having babies?

In this podcast Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Bradley Pierce, look to the Bible to address the question of family size. The overall emphasis in Scripture is clear, as God directs couples to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28; 9:1), calling the fruit of the womb a “reward” (Ps. 127:3). Rather than prizing maximum comfort in the near term, couples should take the longer view by cherishing as many eternal souls God chooses to give so that they might raise a “godly offspring” (Mal. 2:15). 

Watch the Message from Bradley Pierce at the FORGE Conference.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're going to talk about the sufficiency of Scripture for having children, the heart of God, specific things that he has said about that And we have Bradley Pierce with us. Hey Bradley. Hey, it's good to be with you. Good to be with you.

Bradley is an attorney at Heritage Defense and a bunch of other things, particularly in the abortion movement. A long, long time friend. And Jason, we've really benefited from Bradley's ministry over the years. Very much so. He also happens to be a husband and a father of many, which is why he's here with us.

Right. I think we're talking about 11 right now. Are we at 11? Number 11 is in the oven due in December. So I was in your house maybe a month ago and I got to experience life in Piercedom and it was so much fun around your table.

I thought it was, I mean there were olive plants all around that table. They were happy, they were so much fun. You know there were pictures taken of that evening that probably shouldn't get to the outside world because it was just way too much fun happening being pulled around by a wagon racing, you know, children wanting to be tickled and things like that. It actually is one of the most delightful evenings that Deborah and I've had. It was so much fun.

It really was but I just want the viewer to understand what's behind that wall of books. Because behind that wall of books is a squiggly, giggly, happy, fun family. And Bradley's trying to keep ahead of the game aren't you? By the grace of God. Every day he gives us energy and grace for each day.

Yeah you don't have that many children without having a lot of challenges and joys, you know, with a large family. But hey, something's happened in our culture. It's been happening for about 70 years where families have not wanted to have many children. In fact, here's when I was in high school, I mean this had already started in the 1960s because like when I was in high school our we had three children in our family and in my high school, people would always say, wow, you have a large family. Back at that time, the birth rate was 2.2, which was, which actually represented a tremendous decline, from previous generations.

And Bradley, where are we at right now? I can't remember the exact number. I think we're in 1.8 or something like that. It's pretty low in America. Yeah, we're below replacement.

Vasectomies are way up three, four hundred percent. People don't want children. You have the child free life, all kinds of articles praising, you know, the child free life. What do you think is driving this? You know, I mean, ultimately it's, I mean, we could go back to sin, I think is a lot of it.

And I think specifically, you know, there's, there's selfishness that's behind a lot of it, that we all love our lives the way that they are. And although we were all once children ourselves and we were grateful that our parents had us, nevertheless we get to those childbearing years and we think, well I don't want to do that, or I want to postpone that, or I don't want to have as many because that's more difficult now, and then every child I have now I'm delaying my retirement years when I'm supposed to be able to kick back and just go fishing all the time or go golfing all the time or what have you. And every child I have is delaying that empty nest time. So I think a lot of it is selfishness. I think there's a lot of it as well.

That's just, we've been taught this by the generations that have gone before us, like you just talked about. I mean, I remember even my mother, you know, her, my grandmother, her mother-in-law, you know, just basically strongly told her, like, so you're only having two children, right? You know, it's pretty much an expectation. And my grandmother had five children herself. But then all of her daughters and her daughter-in-laws, she strongly encouraged them all to have two children, and every all five of them all had two children and so this isn't something really new this has been going on for a while that people have been talking about this and you know I think I'm not saying it's some of it's not necessarily selfish in the terms of I want the life that I want some of it's also You know, I think misplaced priorities that is that Well, we have children and we think well I have to be able to afford to send them to college or I have to be able to afford to take them on all these vacations or just give them this certain lifestyle and we end up promoting really put it this way we're promoting quality of life if you will above quantity of life and and really you know that that's misplaced priorities at least according to God's priorities.

When I was a young pastor in Southern California, one of my dear friends, he was a pastor friend and he led the men in his whole church to get vasectomies. And he's coming and telling me that this is what they did. And it didn't even clear my mind how totally unbiblical that was, you know, back in those days. But he really, he cast a vision to the men in his church, and the vision was this. Go get a vasectomy so that you can spend more time in ministry, and go get a vasectomy to give your wife a break.

That was his sales job. You know what? I think he did it innocently. I think he did it because he just grew up here with this mentality. And it was a tragedy, though, that he did that, even though it probably was unwitting.

You know, the introduction of the Westminster Confession says that some of our sins are the sins of our times. And this matter of trying to constrain the multiplication of the kingdom of God is one of those times and that we just need to be aware of the zeitgeist of the, you know, the philosophy of the day, the worldview of the moment. Yeah, I think too, this is just part of a full-orbed worldview. So there's just one slice of that full pie. And the question about the worldview is what's at the center of the worldview and what's the time horizon.

The worldview that is driving that, I'm at the center of it and the time horizon isn't very long, and so the equation that I'm solving is for the most ease and comfort in the near term. The Christian worldview is diametrically different than that. God's at the center of the worldview and the time horizon is really long, so I'm not solving for the most ease and pleasure in the next one year, two years, five years, ten years. Our time horizon is eternal. Right, and what we're trying to do is try to recover a biblical worldview, a biblical view of having children and things like that.

You know, we published this book a few years ago, Theology of the Family, and I've got a chapter on childbearing in this lot with several chapters written by hey these are you know it's just these are particularly older writers no you don't go to the 20th century to learn about family life you need to go back but here's the statement I I added in here in my introduction to this chapter. You know, why are we birth controlling our families out of childbearing? And why are we aborting? Why are we doing all these things that are totally contrary to scripture? Primarily because we've turned our back on what God says about childbearing.

This chapter calls us back to biblical thinking. And so you, hey, check out the articles there in Theology of the Family, they might be helpful. Also Bradley, you preached a sermon on this that I heard a couple years ago. We're going to try to post it if we can find the sermon. It was such a compelling, encouraging message about having children.

But at the same time, this has worked its way into the church, and even people in the church are reluctant to have children. And I'm not sure why people who have their Bibles would do that. Do you have any theories on that? You know, I think it's like a lot of things, and you're kind of coming right back to the hard admission of what you do, what you all do there. You know, we've forsaken the sufficiency of Scripture, right?

Instead of going back and saying, what does God's Word have to say about this? A lot of us, I think, we just go along with what culture says, and we just kind of assume that God's Word doesn't have something to say about this whenever this is one of the subjects that you don't have to dig very deep or go very deep below the surface it's it's pretty loud and clear what what God thinks about this children are throughout scripture you know described as being a blessing We see God right off the bat to Adam and Eve telling them, be fruitful and multiply. And it says, and God blesses them and then tells them to be fruitful and multiply. And then we have God then telling the same thing to Abraham and his sons. It says, and God blesses them, and then it tells them to be fruitful and multiply.

And then we have again whenever the nation of Israel, whenever God's speaking to Jacob, it says God blesses him and tells him to be fruitful and multiply. So we have this kind of pre-fall and post-fall and we have not just Israel, we have you know Adam and Eve and we have Noah. We have the entire human race all being told here to be fruitful and multiply and always being told that that it's a blessing. And God loved life. And go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, and with Noah he says greatly multiply, multiply greatly. You know, and people are asking, well, how many children should I have? Well, there's words like fruitful, multiply, greatly. The scripture is just really clear without any contradiction, any qualification of the heart of God. Let me throw a few on the pile.

Psalm 127, children are a blessing and a reward. So I think where we want to start is God says children are a blessing and the mandate to be fruitful and multiply is in the context of his blessing of us. It was, in God's eyes, it's not a boat anchor. Why do we think it's a boat anchor? Why do we resist this?

Are there other, you know, blessings and rewards that we are not really interested in? That's a short list. So Why do we put this on that short list? Malachi chapter 2, why does God bring a man and a woman into marriage? He seeks godly offspring.

So God wants us to have children, but just not for the sake of a population explosion, it's for the sake of having people who will know who he is and his goodness and his greatness. So it's not just offspring, it's godly offspring. That's an important point. You know, it's very interesting what God does. He puts eternal souls in it.

He wants to put lots of eternal souls under your care, and then he tells you what to do with it, to teach them diligently when you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. God wants eternal souls to love Him for all eternity, and so He puts parents in the way of their sin to try to direct them, to teach them, to bring the goodness of God to them, to show them the beauty of the kingdom. I encountered Spurgeon talking about this whole matter of teaching children how wonderful it is, and he gives this illustration of going to his grandfather's house. And at his grandfather's house, up on the mantle was a bottle with an apple inside of it. And he was a little boy at that time, and he didn't understand how that could possibly happen.

And so the next year in the spring he was walking through his grandfather's orchard and he saw that his grandfather had put saplings inside of bottles and hung them on the apple trees, and the apples would grow inside the bottles, and his grandfather, you know, would put those there to confuse everybody. And Spurgeon takes that and he says that's what parents should do. They should grow their children's appreciation for the goodness and the beauty of God so that when they finally grow up they can't get away like that apple. But you know God wants to do that in a family. He wants to create everlasting happy worshippers and so he tells you to be fruitful and multiply.

I mean you know Rebecca's brothers say, may you be the mother of thousands of ten thousands, and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate them. So, you know, not just for eternal souls, but for temporal means that God would have on the ground people who love him who would stand at the gates and contradict the bad guys. So there are these wonderful purposes. Some of those purposes are temporal and some of them are eternal. I think people can't imagine how taxing additional children will be.

So they're imagining a life that squeezes the joy out of life. They know what their life is with one or two children, so they think, well, if I have three and four, it'll be double of everything, double the expense, double the time, half the fun. The truth of it is when my wife and I got married, none of this was on our radar at all. We never even talked about it before marriage. My guess is she had one sibling, I had one sibling, my guess is we thought we would probably have two children like everyone else has, you know.

And then we started being exposed to some of these things and going to Scripture and became convinced, and we ended up having six children before Janet was out of her childbearing years. Now that you look at the family that you have, we can't imagine life without a single one of them. We can't imagine a dome family with just five children or four or three. The joy has been multiplied as well as the expense in the work. That part is true, but there's the good side to it, too.

There are sweetnesses that come with all of it. It's like it's a blessing, like God says. Yeah, that's right. Well, and it's, you know, every one of them is a joy and every one of them is a blessing, you know, But at the same time, yeah, each one of them is also a sinner, just like I was when I was conceived and born into my parents' home. And so it's like, we're bringing more sin into our homes with every single child.

Bringing more sin. But, you know, it's, but they're worth it. You know, that's really what... And more grace. Yes.

And God also gives more grace to go along with that, you know, but every child is worth it and you know no matter what what you're dealing with with them God has put them into your home for you to disciple them for you to be an example for them for you to lead them and you know what it's not just a one-way street It's not just you discipling and teaching them, but it's also God using them to teach you more about yourself and to teach you more about Him. And His love, you know, when the children, you know, disobey, you know, do the same thing over and over and over and over and you think, are you ever going to learn this lesson? You know, it makes you stop and just say, how often am I like that? You know, and I fall into the same thing and yet God is merciful to discipline me but and yet to pick me back up and to hug me and to remind me that I am his son and I think that's what God does with our children as well. I think that's one of the big objections people have is the difficulty.

It does bring a lot of difficulty into your life. It alters your lifestyle tremendously. Because having children is not easy, and the more you have the less easy it gets. And it's really interesting. I remember going way back, even when I was in high school, you know people would say well I don't want to bring any kids into this world.

You know this was the days of the Vietnam War and the gas crisis and all this kind of stuff, you know, demonstrations, you know, the Soviet Union was going to blow up the United States. I don't want to bring children into that world, this world. You still hear people say that, but you know we're having a conference in October called Build Dwell Plant which is based on Jeremiah 29 where God tells the captives hey don't rebel against this government, Build houses, dwell in them, plant gardens, eat their fruit, take wives, begat sons and daughters, get your children married, and increase there in the land. Well, that's what we should be doing. Well, whatever the world does, I don't know, but we know what we're supposed to do in our captivity.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, and from the beginning, it's been that way from the beginning. We've always lived in a world, you know, from the time we had to leave the garden, we've always lived in a world that we've had to say, you know, do I really want to bring children into this world, into this world of death? And God says yes. And in fact, the very first time God told mankind, be fruitful, multiply, guess who the very first child was going to be?

It was going to be Cain who would end up murdering the second child, his own brother. And yet God nevertheless said, be fruitful, multiply, knowing yes, there's heartaches that come with that. You know, there's difficulties. And yet God still says, be fruitful, multiply. And, you know, I think it's really about, I think Jason really hit it that it's kind of short term thinking versus long term thinking.

And I think Americans and really a lot of people in the world today are extremely short sighted in our thinking. And we're willing to do hard things. We're willing to do hard things. There are plenty of people who are not who are you know just frittering their lives away but there's a lot of people who are willing to do very hard things in order to accomplish very big things and very good things. What we don't, what a lot of people don't do though is they, you know, I think a lot of people would agree that a lot of the best things in life are the hardest things, right?

Building a business, building an organization, building a house, building whatever it is, it requires a lot of hard work and people are willing to put that in, but when it comes to children, people don't think the same way. That is, yes, it's something very, it can be very difficult, but the best things in life come out of the hardest things in life, and that's definitely true with children, that the difficulty leads to tremendous blessings, and in the short term, yes, it's a lot of hard work, but in the long term, you know, in the longest term, right, these children have eternal souls that will live forever, and these children will more than likely outlive me, And these children more than likely will have children who will have children who will have children who will have children. And so the impact of them and their lives upon you know today, tomorrow, you know the rest of the world and even into eternity, how can you really measure that? And to me that's where we have to be looking is having God's perspective and the long-term view. I think one of the things we want to say to our brethren is adopt God's view of children.

It's the best view of children. It's the right view of children. But also understand the other worldview and understand that while they don't want their own children, they definitely want ours. They don't want to have children, but they want to influence our children, and our mandate isn't to have offspring, our mandate is to have godly offspring. And so there's more than just multiplying here, there's also the investment of life to teach them, to bring them up in the training and ammunition of the Lord.

So this goes way beyond the day of birth, obviously. And you know, I hear some people come back to that and they say, well listen, if I have more children, I'm not gonna be able to disciple them. I'm not gonna have enough time to disciple them all the way that I should. And I think that's very, I think it's a very prideful view because we think that well if God gives me more children he's not going to give me enough time, right? That's one thing.

It's like well no, God's gonna give you all that you need, right? If God gives you children, He'll give you all you need to provide for them in every way. And then at the same time, we also think, Oh, well, it's on me and my time and how much time I have and their godliness and all that is dependent upon me. And I think ultimately it's all God, and if God gives you the children, then he'll give you everything that you need for each and every one of them. So here's what Charles Spurgeon says, Where he sends mouths, he sends meat.

So that's exactly what you're saying, but it's across every category. It's not just food. Will I be able to feed them? Yes. If he sent you the mouth, he'll send you the meat, but also he'll send you the ability to provide the other things in life that God has told parents to give to their children.

Brielle, I'm going to ask you a couple of tough questions here. One is, do you think there are families where you have, you know, maybe you've got, you know, parents who are indolent, who are not teaching their children, they start having a lot of children, and they're not teaching their children. They're not raising them up. I've seen families like this that have a lot of kids. Do you think there are families that shouldn't have very many children just because of their disobedience?

I don't think so. I think disobedience in one area doesn't mean that you should be you know disobedient in another area or not trusting God in another area. So I think there's certainly families that have, that are not being obedient like they should, but at the same time, you know, what others mean for evil or what they mean for laziness, God still means for good. And my own grandfather, he was number 10 in his family. And his father was not, you know, was not a great provider.

And my grandfather had a real time, real hard time talking about his grandfather, his own father. I think he wasn't a very good father. And yet, and yet, God brought redemption. And God used my grandfather. And I'm here because of that.

And so that's, yeah, I mean there are families that are not taking care of their children like they should and yet God brings beauty, can bring and does often bring beauty out of that even when others are disobedient. God still brings good things out of that. Wow, we've got a lot of illustrations of that among the pastors who preach at our conferences. A lot of them had really bad fathers and you can hear their testimonies. We've been taking the life stories of the men who preach at our conference and so many of them had abusive fathers, checked out fathers, absent fathers and God is mighty.

God reaches. He reached into those very broken situations. Here's another question. Do you think that there are ever occasions where a couple might pause having children? I think there certainly can be.

I think it's really, what is our heart, right? Is our heart to be obedient to God, to trust God, to trust his sovereignty? Then, you know, there may be times that someone may have a medical situation that, you know, for the purpose of, you know, having more children, you know, that they would pause, right? That it may be their doctors may say, listen, you need to take a break. Now at the same time, doctors can also be over protective, if you will.

And they also have the worldview, many of them, that says, hey, you shouldn't have more than two or three. And so I think that again, what is the heart there? Is the heart to protect fertility and to pause in order to protect that? Then I think that can certainly be appropriate, but I think it's something that we have to examine our hearts. Why are we doing this?

Is it because we're not trusting God? Is it because we're trying to be selfish or have the wrong priorities or is it because we really do want to be fruitful and multiply and pausing is, you know, part of that. Amen. Hey, thank you for joining us, Bradley. I really appreciate your time with us.

Hey, and we're going to try to post this message that you preached on this subject, which is so inspiring. And Jason, what a blessing it is to talk about the heart of God, which is just so clearly, so indisputably communicated. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can be with us next time. And come to our conference, Build, Dwell, Plant in St. Louis, Missouri, right at the end of October, based on Jeremiah 29.

Build houses, plant gardens, have lots of babies, and help your children have lots of babies. It's gonna be about everything, about family life. And then our national conference next year in April called Making Disciples. We've got a preaching conference, a pastors conference, it's a pre-conference to that with Steve Lawson and Alexander Strauch and Kevin Swanson and myself. Hope you can come to that as well.

Thanks for joining us and we hope to see you next time. Thanks for listening to our podcast. You can find past episodes and many more resources by visiting our website at churchandfamilylife.com