Ethical Dilemmas Surround Going Around God’s Plans

It isn’t very long into reading the historical books of the Bible that we find people trying to go around God’s plans:

• Eve decides she knows better than God, and chooses to eat the fruit.
• Adam decides he knows better than God, and chooses to eat the fruit his wife offers him.
• Cain decides he knows better than God, and offers fruit instead of a lamb.
• Man in general decides it knows better than God and lives to self, ends up underwater.
• Man decides not to spread over the Earth—see how well that worked out for them.
• Sarai decides she knows better than God and offers Hagar to her husband Abram because she hasn’t been able to have children yet.

That last one is interesting, as today we’re still doing much the same thing, only instead of offering handmaids or male servants to the spouse that can’t bear a child, we’re taking donations from males and females and creating children around God’s wishes (as it is He that gives the blessing of children).  Just like the items listed above, this activity also is showing negative consequences.

A Desire for Children

While there are some that prefer to live single and childless, most people want to have children.  Whether it’s the love that a child brings, the feeling of accomplishment and pride, or the fact that others that have gone before them have had children, there’s a primal desire to see the next generation come to be in most people.

This desire only intensifies when someone is unable to have children.  Whether it’s because of infertility, disease, or other health issues, nothing is such an acute pain as wanting to have children and knowing that science or medicine says that you can’t.  This is a sad and tragic time, and with how difficult this knowledge is today, it was only magnified in the ancient past where people didn’t fully understand medicine and everything rested on bringing forth a healthy heir.

Science Replaces Multiple Marriages

While in the past, this desire for children paved the way for the multiple marriages and concubines of the Israelite Patriarchs, today we have taken the physical aspect of having to get someone else to help have a baby and simply taken that which makes the baby to try to make one with one or neither partner involved.

While one could understand the pain felt by the barren who want a child going to whatever extent, that extent has permitted all sorts of results that were not in the original creation.  Partners of the same sex can now have children where before they would not have been able to save adoption as a result.  We have cheapened children into a item of our own creation, and between this and birth control, we have ceased to look at children as blessings from God and started to consider them as accessories to our lifestyle.

Children Not Knowing Their Parents

But it gets worse.  Whereas in adoption children were born to two people engaged in the reproductive act, and therefore had to register as the parents at birth, there are children today that are the product of a donor and a mother—some of whom took a very long time to find out this fact.

In the article from the Daily Mail entitled How would YOU feel to find you are a sperm donor’s child? These women say it shattered their lives, the women here were shattered.  Common refrains are not knowing a whole set of relatives, wondering medical conditions and issues with the fact that they look nothing like the parents they grew up with.  There is something internal with children, whether adopted or donated, where children want to know who their biological parents are, even if they truly love and care for the ones that they grew up with.

This, to me, is just another consequence of our society seeking to go its own way.  We have perverted the original and told God we know better.  The consequences are lived out in people lives.  We are playing God, and just as Adam and Eve found out, there results are not pretty.

Image: PSU Lunch Carts Wed Feb 15, 2012 131 by Parker Knight