“You shall not have strange gods before Me,” reads Exodus 20:3 and Leviticus 5:7. This is the first of 10 Commandments God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.
The applications of this First, and most important Commandment are far-reaching. This is no better exemplified than in the area of human sexuality. Disobeying God’s Sixth and Ninth Commandments forbidding adultery and lust obviously pertain most directly to human sexuality. But violations of the First Commandment remain the most serious offenses against God.
Specifically, using contraception breaches the First Commandment. Why is this? Let a saint explain.
What you will see is that using contraception places one’s self and his or her own pleasures ahead of God’s will. Using it is in fact an intrinsic evil. Contraception allows men and women to play God, as Pope Saint John Paul II illuminates below.
“At the origin of every human person there is a creative act of God. No man comes into existence by chance; he is always the object of God’s creative love.
“From this fundamental truth of faith and reason it follows that the procreative capacity, inscribed in human sexuality, is—in its deepest truth—a cooperation with God’s creative power. And it also follows that man and woman are not the arbiters, are not the masters of this same capacity, called as they are, in it and through it, to be participants in God’s creative decision.
“When, therefore through contraception, married couples remove from the exercise of their conjugal sexuality its potential procreative capacity, they claim a power which belongs solely to God: the power to decide in a final analysis the coming into existence of a human person.
“They assume the qualification not of being cooperators in God’s creative power, but the ultimate depositaries of the source of human life. In this perspective, contraception is to be judged objectively so profoundly unlawful as never to be, for any reason, justified.
“To think or to say the contrary is equal to maintaining that in human life situations may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God” (An Address to Seminar Participants September 17, 1983, cf. “L’Osservatore Romano”, ed. English, 10th October 1983, p. 7, all emphasis my own).
YOUR TURN
Could the Vicar of Christ explain the matter any more clearly?
Do you see how using birth control violates the First Commandment, “You Shall Not Have Strange Gods Before Me?”
How can anyone keep using contraception, if they know it not only violate natural law but divine law as well?
Please weigh in with your thoughts below!
