Myths of Marriage, "It is essential to have your own biological child"

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church iconSilicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

8 views

0 comments

00:04
Alright, everyone. So if you haven't been to this before, we usually do a little teaching, right, about this time.
00:12
So, yeah, let's do that. Once again, my name is
00:17
Conley. I'm glad you all are here. And this is my wife, and she and I hope that you can all stay safe.
00:24
And, yeah, if you are not a member of a church currently, or you're looking for a place to worship, we'd be glad to have you over at Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church.
00:33
This is a church I can also recommend to you if you're looking for a place. So, yeah, we'd be happy to see you for worship sometime as well.
00:42
So, we've been going through, every time I give a talk, it's some myth about marriage.
00:49
Okay, so that's a series of myths about marriage. And today's myth is that it is essential to have your own biological child.
00:59
Okay, that's the myth. The fact is that adoption is an option.
01:06
And it rhymes, so it must be true, right? Now, there's a lot of reasons why people want to have their own biological offspring.
01:14
I understand it. I get it. I have a lot of kids. Some of you know I have eight kids.
01:19
I have a ninth on the way. And they're all biological offspring. I understand the desire. And it's how
01:25
God made us. God said in Genesis 1, 28, be fruitful and multiply. And that wasn't just for something before the fall.
01:33
That wasn't just for when the world was perfect. It's something that God repeated afterward, after the flood, to Noah.
01:40
And he not only repeated it at the beginning of him making promises to him, but even at the end, he said it twice in both
01:46
Genesis 9, 1 and Genesis 9, 7. He told Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply.
01:55
So it's a very good thing. And it's clear from nature, too, that pregnancy and childbirth does something to a woman and prepares her emotionally for caring for a child.
02:06
There's a lot of good things about having your own biological offspring.
02:12
However, there's something very dignified about adoption. And I think a lot of Christians don't realize what the
02:18
Bible says about adoption, how highly the Bible speaks of adoption. And I'm hoping that if you think very lowly of adoption, that going through these passages, you'll realize that it's not a secondary form of parenthood.
02:32
It is just as legitimate as biological parenthood.
02:38
So I've got a ton of examples I'd like to walk you all through. So let's get started.
02:45
In Genesis 48, 3, this is when Joseph has been reunited with his father,
02:53
Jacob. And Jacob, in observing Joseph and his children, has decided that he is going to adopt
03:01
Joseph's children. Now the reason is for terms of inheritance, not to care for them, but for the sake of inheritance.
03:07
So these first two examples I'm going to give you are going to be about how inheritance is determined by adoption.
03:13
And the Bible legitimizes it in that way. So Genesis 48, 5 says,
03:37
So Ephraim and Manasseh are raised to the level of their other brothers. If you ever wondered, why is
03:44
Ephraim a tribe? Why is Manasseh a tribe? Were they one of the sons of Jacob? They weren't, actually.
03:50
Not biologically. They were, though, by adoption. That's why they're counted as two of the tribes of Israel.
03:58
Now the next one in the Old Testament talks about inheritance and the importance of adoption for inheritance.
04:05
There's the concept of the leperate marriage. If you've never heard of this before, this is what it says in Deuteronomy 25, 5.
04:11
If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger.
04:22
Her husband's brother shall go into her and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her.
04:28
And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.
04:35
So in order that the deceased man, his name, is able to continue, and his inheritance go to his own children, rather than to some stranger, but he has no children of his own, so what is the
04:49
Bible's solution to this? It's this notion of the leperate marriage, where by adoption, the child is considered to be the son of the deceased man, so that he will inherit his possessions.
05:02
So those were about inheritances. There's a lot of other places that talk about adoption more the way that we think about it, which is childcare, right?
05:11
That's usually what we're thinking about when we're thinking about adoption. Esther 2, 7 says, he was bringing up, and this is speaking of Mordecai.
05:20
If you've read the book of Esther, Mordecai is an older Jewish man who goes around the king's palace and courtyard, and he's an important person in that story.
05:32
He was bringing up Hadassah, that is Esther, the daughter of his uncle, for she had neither father nor mother.
05:42
The young woman had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at, and when her father and her mother died,
05:47
Mordecai took her as his own daughter. So here, Mordecai is adopting Esther, right?
05:53
It is as his own daughter. It speaks in that language of a legitimate adoption. This is his daughter.
06:01
The New Testament speaks of these things on several occasions as well. For example, it speaks of Moses and how he had been adopted by Pharaoh's daughter.
06:14
It says, Pharaoh's daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. And interestingly,
06:20
Hebrews 11, 25 talks about him rejecting this adoption. It says in verse 24,
06:26
By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.
06:35
Now, you might look at that example and you say, oh, well there he's rejecting adoption. So isn't that an example of adoption being bad?
06:41
The point here is that this is a real sacrifice he's making. This is a real something that he has a claim to, being the son of Pharaoh's daughter.
06:49
And so it is a real sacrifice, it is a real parenthood that he is forsaking. And then in Luke 2, 48, it speaks about Jesus.
07:04
It says, And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, Son, why have you treated us so?
07:09
Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress. Now, you know
07:14
Jesus was born by a virgin birth. He did not have an earthly father. However, his mother speaks of Joseph as being his father.
07:22
So Joseph is his father by adoption. In fact, would Jesus, even though he is descended from Mary, would he be rightly counted the king of Israel if he did not descend from David also by way of his father?
07:36
I don't think it's, it seems clear to me that he needed both of these in order to be considered the true king of the
07:45
Jews, the true son of David. And so adoption is legitimized even in Jesus' own life.
07:52
Now, you might look at the rest of that passage once again and say something like, well, he says he's supposed to be about his father's house, his father's business.
08:01
Isn't that him rejecting his parenthood of Joseph? Well, you know, later on, he says the same thing about Mary when he says,
08:08
These are my mother and my brothers. So this is not him rejecting all such notions of parenthood.
08:14
This is just him speaking of a higher truth. Right? Okay. So then there's one more
08:22
I'd like to show you. And that is in 1 Corinthians 5. In 1 Corinthians 5 it says,
08:28
It is actually recorded there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife.
08:38
Now, maybe you're wondering, how is that one related? Well, why is that, why is this situation wrong?
08:46
I think a lot of people will read this, and they imagine, and the scripture doesn't give us much detail, but they imagine that his father is still living, and he's committing adultery with his father's wife in that way, so that the father is wronged in that way.
09:01
However, if you look in the Old Testament, the laws of the end, if you look at cultures around the world, they have almost universally recognized that the legitimacy of marriage and step -parenting in adoption makes it tantamount to incest to sleep with your father's wife.
09:22
And that's something that, once again, legitimizes this notion of the step -parent being the adopted parent.
09:29
This is actually something significant in my own upbringing. My mother died when
09:35
I was young, my father remarried, and my stepmother legally adopted me, and I treat her as my mother.
09:42
I call her my mom, and it's something very important to me as well. Now, like I said, this has been recognized by many different cultures.
09:51
This is not just something that Christianity has dignified. This is something that God has even built into creation so that people recognize this legitimacy of adoption.
10:01
But there's one religion that rejects adoption, at least one. Does anyone know what
10:07
I'm thinking of? Yeah, that rejects adoption as being legitimate. Islam, that's right.
10:14
Yeah, so Islam rejects adoption. They have the notion of what's called kafala, which is where you sponsor an orphan and you care for him, but he's not counted as your son, you don't give him your name, you don't give him your inheritance.
10:29
And now why is that? Why did it come that way for Islam? Well, the answer is, you can read about this in Surah 33, which is in the
10:39
Quran. Muhammad had, well, there was a man named
10:44
Said bin Muhammad. Does anyone know what bin Muhammad means? Do you know either Hebrew or Arabic?
10:51
Yeah, son of Muhammad, right? He was the adopted son of Muhammad, and he had a beautiful wife named
10:59
Zainab. I might be way mispronouncing that. But anyway,
11:05
Muhammad was very interested in her, and, well, lo and behold,
11:11
Allah gave him revelation that said that it would be okay for her to divorce her husband, and then on top of that, that it would be okay for, that adoption is illegitimate, so you don't have to worry about this being your son's wife.
11:26
In fact, he's not your son at all, because there's no legitimacy to adoption. So, what
11:32
I would like to point out from this story is, I believe Satan's at war against adoption. It was that case in the, you know, 500s or whatever that was.
11:43
I'm not very good with history. And I think it's the case once again now that a lot of people have ceased to realize the legitimacy of adoption in the way that I've talked to people, and some people just don't seem to think it's the same thing.
11:56
You know, it's this secondary form of parenting. The Bible really does speak of it as being just as dignified a form of parenting, even if it doesn't come with some of the biological realities that you have with natural childbirth.
12:12
Now, this is not to say that adoption isn't easy or isn't very hard.
12:17
Okay, it's really hard. Just to illustrate how hard it is, for every child that needs to be adopted, guess how many families are there trying to adopt?
12:29
This is in the U .S. Just guess. I might draw a number. Nine. Nine? Higher.
12:35
20. Higher. 30. Higher. 50. 36. 36.
12:42
For every child that needs to be adopted, there are 36 families trying to adopt. Unfortunately, the regulations that exist in our country have made it really, really difficult to adopt.
12:53
Now, it's good that the government would protect children from being adopted and abused and all kinds of things that people could do.
13:01
You know, human trafficking could happen that way if you don't have some form of oversight.
13:07
However, it really is an oppressive situation that keeps a lot of people from being adopted.
13:13
So what I'm telling you is that adoption is a good thing.
13:18
I'm not telling you it's going to be easy if you decide to adopt. It is difficult. People are trying to adopt.
13:24
They're not able to. And it's getting more and more expensive because of all these regulations. In 2008, to do an international adoption, it cost, on average, about $6 ,000.
13:35
In 2018, it cost way, way more. And I'm blanking on the number, but it was either $20 ,000 or $30 ,000.
13:43
That's cheaper than IVF. That's true. It's cheaper.
13:49
Right. So yeah, there's a lot of expense to it. And then today, it's just increasingly difficult to do international adoption too, just culturally, because people, depending on your skin color, label you as a colonizer or a racist.
14:09
If you've ever read books on anti -racism, they consider someone from one culture adopting someone from another culture to be wrong, to be racist.
14:18
And to be an anti -racist, you have to segregate. So yeah, those categories, if you've never heard of them before.
14:26
So the whole point of anti -racism is not just to be against racism. There's racism.
14:34
There's integrationism, is what the label they would use for if you think that there shouldn't be segregation. And then there's anti -racism, where you embrace segregation as a way of,
14:43
I don't know, elevating certain cultures or making sure that they're not, what's the word
14:51
I'm looking for, like submerged into another culture, too mixed with another culture. Yeah, so anyway, it's really difficult.
15:00
So there's that. Now, there's all kinds of methods of adoption beyond international adoption.
15:07
There's snowflake adoption. Has anybody heard of that? So that's where you take one of the embryos that's used either for someone trying to do
15:19
IDF or something else. If there's a spare embryo and it's just sitting there on ice and no one wants it anymore because the parents accomplished what they were trying to accomplish or the scientists, whatever the case may be, you can adopt through snowflake adoption and actually bear the child yourself.
15:35
Now, that's difficult because it leads to, yeah, medical difficulties.
15:43
You know, it doesn't always implant correctly and that can be very hard to deal with for a woman. And one of the other ways, there's foster parenting.
15:52
Foster parenting is real difficult, too. I've had some friends do it. I think it's a real noble thing to do, but basically you have a situation where you're trying to parent a child without the authority to parent the child in all the ways that you would need to.
16:05
You know, the Bible speaks of the importance of physical discipline and you can't do that in a fostering situation.
16:13
Yeah, then there's private adoption, but that's not really accessible because you have to find someone to do the private adoption with.
16:19
So anyway, this is all very difficult, but once again, my point here being that I think
16:27
Satan's at war against the good thing that adoption is. And don't let any of that discourage you, rather let it encourage you and realize that there's a battle to be fought here.
16:37
And it can be very rewarding. It can be very rewarding. My sister is actually adopted. And the story about her adoption, my parents had a difficult time trying to adopt her.
16:49
It took a very long time. It took two years. They didn't know why it was taking so long to figure this out.
16:54
My sister, when she was adopted, was only one and a half, or maybe she was even younger than that.
17:00
So in other words, she was not even born when they had started the process. So if it had happened faster, they wouldn't have adopted her, right?
17:08
They would have adopted another child. A few, I don't know if it was weeks or months, after they got back from the orphanage and picked her up, they got a letter from the orphanage that the orphanage had burned down and the fire had started in her room.
17:25
So it's really a providential sign that God had his reasons for delaying what my parents wanted.
17:34
And even though it's hard, it's very rewarding. There's a good thing that happens through adoption.
17:40
And what's the alternative? The alternative is, one, despair. There are so many couples that just despair year after year that they can't have a child.
17:50
And I look at that sometimes and I wonder, do you not realize the good thing that adoption is?
17:58
And are you despairing just because you don't know? Because you don't know what the Bible says?
18:03
Now, people's choices are their own. Like I said, I only have biological children, but man, if you're making the decision because you don't know what a good thing adoption is,
18:13
I would hate to be ignorant like that. Have you ever seen a child cry because they want a red
18:19
M &M and there's only brown M &Ms? You know, that's what it feels like. You know that the child would enjoy the brown
18:28
M &M just as much. They taste exactly the same as the red M &Ms, they just look different. And that's kind of what's going on here with parenting.
18:35
These are both valid forms of parenting, they're just different in how God works through them.
18:43
Now, the other option is people can go to their own means. You know, someone mentioned
18:49
IVF. There's all kinds of things that you can do that can be very dangerous. Because a lot of these methods you end up creating multiple embryos in the process and then they get discarded.
19:00
I just wanted to say something. At first my ex had a pro -liminic and they don't discard any embryos.
19:06
And there's ways in which people can be a little bit more cognizant about how they create embryos and how many that they discard.
19:14
I think especially if you're younger you can always raise extra embryos for a sibling or something like that.
19:20
Right. Yeah, so there's ways of mitigating the issue but then there's still the risk that because it's not happening in the natural way it's less likely to go all the way to childbirth.
19:31
Isn't that correct? Well, I mean, usually you create multiple embryos and then maybe not all of them.
19:39
Like sometimes you might implant two and then only one will be a baby or something.
19:46
But it's not an exact science. She passed her uncle out here. Every time a woman has a cycle that's a baby that's lost to her.
19:54
Yeah, if you don't understand how the sperm and the egg have to come together. It's a possible baby.
20:01
Yeah, I don't know. So Ecclesiastes 9 .15
20:07
says, as you do not know the way the spirit comes into the bones in the womb of the woman with the child, so you do not know how the way the
20:15
God works who makes all things. We don't understand exactly how the child is imbued with life and that's why it's so important not to tamper with and to say, oh well this one's a baby, this one's not a baby, let's discard these.
20:28
No, no, you don't discard them. You can still use all your embryos because the patient is the person that chooses whether or not to use the embryos or to discard them.
20:40
But I think it depends. You have to get good advice because some people just tell you to create a ton of embryos and then you have extras.
20:47
But you don't have to do that. Right, but you're still creating more than will actually bear children, right?
20:54
No, no. Well, you create more because not all of them are going to go to term.
21:01
Because the thing is, you fertilize the egg but then it doesn't always become an embryo and the ones that do, you can always implant all of them to use or if you can't implant them all at once, there's options.
21:13
My understanding though is that there's still increased risk with these methods. Increased risk with what?
21:20
That the embryo will not come to full term. If you believe it's important.
21:26
Maybe we'll probably have to save this for later. Yeah, I think we're going to have to have it. I have to go anyways.
21:34
Okay, sure. Call me or maybe I'll call you later. Okay, sounds good. You know, a good analogy for this is
21:41
Abraham, he really wanted a child. He decided to come up with his own way of doing this and God did not smile upon that method.
21:50
So we should not take these things into our own hands. God has offered legitimate ways and we should use those ways.
22:00
Let's see, I was getting to something else. I was talking about the reward that adoption is.
22:09
Let me mention something else here, which is what the
22:15
Bible says about adoption in regards to our salvation. Now, maybe you've already thought about this as we've been talking, but the
22:22
Bible legitimizes adoption not just by historical examples of adoption, but by it being a core concept in our own salvation.
22:33
Romans 8, 15 says, For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry,
22:42
Abba, Father. The spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs.
22:49
Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
22:55
Okay, so it's describing how we are saved by adoption, so that we inherit things with Christ, we have the spirit that cries out.
23:03
It's not just a legal status. God really fully adopts us. And then it says in Galatians 4, 4,
23:12
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
23:22
And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
23:29
So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. You know, this core concept of salvation.
23:38
One more. Ephesians 1, verse 5. He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.
23:49
So our whole salvation is tied up in this concept of adoption. Now each of those, it says, through Jesus Christ.
23:56
What does that mean to be adopted through Jesus Christ? Well, Jesus, the Bible says, is the only begotten
24:01
Son of God, so how can there be other children of God? Well, the answer is that we in him, you know, if you think of him being our head, you know, and we are the body, or he is our clothing, and we are within him in some sense, he is the one who is the true
24:20
Son of God. We in him are counted as sons of God, inheriting and receiving all the blessings through Jesus Christ.
24:28
And so, what does that include? Well, it includes not only the inheritance, it includes the name of God, God calling us by his own name, his children.
24:36
It includes the blessing of the Holy Spirit so that we can cry out to God as Father, and even we embrace him as Father.
24:45
It includes family. You know, I call you all my brothers and sisters because of this adoption. This is a central thing.
24:53
And there are many blessings that the Bible speaks of that are not for this life, right? Like a lot of churches and preachers will err in telling people that they can be, that God wants them to be healthy and wealthy in this life where there is no such guarantee, right?
25:08
But, one thing the Bible does guarantee, it says, and he said to them, truly
25:15
I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life.
25:28
Many times more of what? Many times more of family. That is a blessing that you have now.
25:33
It's not one that you have to wait for. You have brothers and sisters right now through the wonderful thing that adoption is.
25:38
God has legitimized adoption by building it into the whole fabric of our salvation.
25:47
Jesus told a parable in Matthew 18. In this parable he described a servant who had been forgiven a great debt.
25:57
A great debt. And someone else owed him money and he didn't forgive it. And he beat the servant and he treated him poorly.
26:07
And the master came back and said, you know, why did you treat that man that way? If I had forgiven you so much, shouldn't you be able to forgive others?
26:15
Shouldn't your heart be filled with gratitude? The answer is yes. Well, think about this.
26:20
Let me retell that parable but in different terms. You know, a man was adopted. He was an orphan.
26:27
He had no money. He had no home. No family. He's adopted. And when he grows older and he's considering whether or not adoption is a legitimate option for him as he's struggling, as he and his wife are struggling to have a child.
26:40
And he despises the notion of adoption and says, no, that's not good.
26:45
It never works out well. There's no reason why that would be reasonable to do. Let's instead despair over this current situation we're in and not consider any other alternatives.
26:58
Is this not so similar? If this man had been adopted as an orphan and was raised up to have a wonderful life and a family of his own, how is it not true that he should at least in his consideration of the notion of adoption think of it very highly?
27:19
Likewise, we are a people who each one of us, if you are in Christ, you have been adopted by God and Jesus Christ through the power of the
27:27
Spirit. And if that's the case, if your whole life, not just here on this earth, but eternally has been blessed by adoption, how could you look lowly on adoption?
27:38
How could you treat that as a second class form of parenting?
27:44
You know, it is the way that God is your Father and is a beautiful form of parenting. Let me go ahead and pray for us before we switch to the discussion questions.
27:54
Dear Heavenly Father, once again, thank you for those people here. And thank you for adoption. Thank you that you have adopted us as sons and daughters in your kingdom in Jesus Christ.
28:02
We thank you for your Holy Spirit. And we ask that you would help us to think rightly about how your goodness is reflected even in creation, even in the way you have created societies.
28:15
I pray that this would inform our thoughts and our actions. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Alright, so we've got...
28:23
I appreciate this is a very important topic and most of us actually think about this often.
28:29
And I appreciate you taking this on and why it's a difficult topic to talk about.
28:35
Oh yeah, you're welcome. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm happy to. Even if it ruffles a few feathers. Alright.
28:43
Yeah, we've got some questions for you all to discuss. Yeah, just basic things about adoption.
28:50
And then, you know, after you all have a chance to discuss for a while, we'll do some Q &A too. Does anybody need to sign up for the email list or can you name tag me?
29:09
Is that anything I've forgotten? Okay. Your name is
29:16
Jen? Yeah. Alright, Jen. I guess
29:22
I'm not a person who thinks that biological intercourse...
29:30
I mean, I guess some people don't really want that.
29:37
I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I volunteered at a crisis pregnancy place and it seems like it's harder for people to give up their child for adoption, but I think there's, like you said, more people who want to adopt and less children available.
30:14
I know someone who just found out as an adult that he was adopted and I think his parents are no longer alive.
30:21
No, no. But he thought it was kind of cool. He wasn't too upset. No. I guess back in the day...