Will your marriage suffer if you have too many kids?

And did he not make one? ...And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Malachi 2:15

It seems to me that this objection can only be raised by those who do not have a truly Biblical understanding of marriage. The church has been infiltrated by many of the world's ideas about what marriage is, and should be, for.

It is true that raising children takes a considerable amount of time and energy, but it does not necessarily follow that that energy would otherwise be devoted to one's spouse. The key to a lifetime of joyful, fulfilling, married life is not freedom from children but commitment to the Biblical directives for marriage. The first and most important thing to realize is that our marriage does not exist to satisfy our personal needs and desires. The primary purpose of marriage is to glorify God. Marriage is not a human invention, but a sacred and divinely ordained covenant.

To understand God's purposes for marriage, it is necessary to look to the account of creation in Genesis 1:27-28 and 2:20-24. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply... And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Adam needed a suitable help meet for his calling of dominion -- specifically, he needed a wife in order to be fruitful and multiply, to have children! We can understand from these passages that a primary purpose of marriage is the bearing and raising of children for God's kingdom. Of course, there are many other ways in which a wife can help and build up her husband, but in no area is she quite so indispensable as in fulfilling God's command to be fruitful and multiply.

We would argue that a Biblical understanding of marriage cannot separate marriage and children. Of course, some couples are Providentially barren, but this does not change the general principal that children are a normal and desireable fruit of marriage. How then could "too many children" cause a marriage to "suffer"?

Of course, a fruitful couple may still have a poor marriage if they neglect the rest of what the Bible says about how a man and wife are to live together. Each Christian couple must strive to make their marriage a truthful picture of Christ's relationship to His church. Husbands are to love and care for their wives sacrificially. Wives are to respect, honour, and submit to their husbands. Aside from your own study of the Bible's words on husbands, wives, and marriage, some of our favorite resources are Steve Schlissel's sermon tapes Husbands, Love Your Wives and R-E-S-P-E-C-T (available from Covenant Media Foundation) and Doug Wilson's book, Reforming Marriage (available from Canon Press.)