“Be Fruitful and Multiply” (Illinois Family Spotlight #087)

David Smith, the executive director of the IFI and IFA, recently sat down with Larry Jacobs, the Managing Director of World Congress of Families, and the International Organization for the Family, at a recent IOF pro-family breakfast in Rockford.

They discuss the mission of the IOF at the United Nations, the Sexual Revolution, Muslims, birth rates, and procreating, and the LORD’s command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1:28; Gen 9:1; Gen 35:11).

Dave Smith starts off with the big question for Larry Jacobs regarding his work — “why” do it? Jacobs answers: “As you know not only here in Illinois but around the world the family is just facing attack.”

“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” Believe it or not, Jacobs says, the United Nations’ said that” in their 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16(3). The IOF began “The Article 16 Initiative,” which “seeks to preserve, protect, and promote the family as society’s ‘natural and fundamental’ unit.”

“Beauty, truth, and goodness,” Jacobs explains, “even in Greek philosophy these things, virtues are about what it means to be human.” “Family, and life and the protection of unborn life — and sexuality rightly understood — all these things are intimately tied together.”

There are a lot of victims of the sexual revolution, Jacobs says, and “we need to prevent future victims.”

The next World Council of Families Conference is going to be held in Eastern Europe in September. All of Europe is facing a demographic problem — not enough babies are being born. “The continent is dying,” Jacobs says. Global population is expected to peak in 2050 and then begin to decline. “The future of society is the birth rate.” Smith and Jacobs discussed God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

https://www.profam.org/article-16/