Be Fruitful & Multiply

We often are met with strange stares in public places when we come traipsing with our four kids in tow. To be sure, some have many more than four, but four seems to be "above average" here in SLO city. I sometimes strangely stare myself.

Since Sunday is Mother's Day and also our 75th Anniversary Children's Weekend, I thought these artcles from World Mag would get us thinking about the Creation Mandate in Genesis 1:28. . . .

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

(What does that passage have to do with Mother's Day? What does this passage have to do with our creation stewardship and how we view and treat the environment?)

So here's those articles. . .

The first is called Multiplier Effect: how big families are good for nations and good for the environment and here's an excerpt. . . .

We normally speak of the need to be born again to attain eternal life in heaven, and that is true. But cultures that have been Christian and are now losing population need to be born again through a new Reformation that would once again emphasize God's command to be fruitful and multiplying gardeners. A nation that is not born again will eventually die, and its environment will revert from garden to wilderness."

The second is called The New Baby Boom and here's an exerpt. . . .

In an article in the newest issue of Foreign Policy, Phillip Longman suggests that leaving ideology aside and focusing only on demographics, conservatives are destined to inherit the earth.

The statistics simply don't lie. Mr. Longman says that 'nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children'—and that such a proportion is nearly twice what it was a generation earlier. This 'greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy.' The children they might have influenced, Mr. Longman says candidly, were never born." . . . .

Conservatives, meanwhile—typically including lots of evangelical Christians—have gone right on having babies. In doing so, they may be profoundly increasing their influence in the world at large.

Reactions?

So, go ahead and fufill the Creation Mandate. . .