Image Of God & The Abortion Question

Image of God & The Abortion Question

Text: Psalm 139; Gen 1:26; 1 Cor 6:

Subject: How does God see human life?

Complement: made in his image

Idea: All human beings – born and in womb are made in God image.

Preaching idea: “made in God’s image & likeness” (Fearfully and wonderfully made)

Introduction - Abortion Is In The News...

USA supreme court leak...

Court is ready to overturn 1973 decision.

Such a leak is unprecedented – and undermines the integrity of the court.

Furthermore, in today’s so called left-right world even supreme court justices have been labelled – fairly or unfairly – conservative or liberal.

This undermines the prospect of justice – and the very essential role of a judge to accurately interpret the law and render rulings.

2. Legal experts tell us “Roe v. Wade” (1973) was a legally flawed decision from the start.

See article in CT.

(the) Roe v Wade decision of 1973, ...(quote) is an offense against America’s democratic order, a renegade ruling utterly untethered from the text, logic, structure, or history of the Constitution it purports to enforce. Supporters and opponents of abortion ought to find it equally indefensible.

Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion discovered a phantom “right to privacy” lurking in the darkest recesses of the 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause—a zone of autonomy said to encompass a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.

Even liberal legal scholars who cheer the outcome scratch their heads at the Court’s reasoning.

Take Yale and Harvard Law School’s John Hart Ely, who opined that Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

Or Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, who remarked, “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”

** the 1973 ruling – once rendered ... permits an abortion during all 9 months of the pregnancy up until delivery of the baby.”

Commenting on the recently leaked draft decision of the US Supreme Court...Ed Whelan, distinguished senior fellow and Antonin Scalia Chair in constitutional studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the version of the draft opinion leaked Monday “powerful and meticulous” and “a systematic dismantling of the illegitimate Roe/Casey regime.”

In the document, Alito described Roe as “exceptionally weak” and said ...,

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”

Canada, has no legislation limiting or restricting abortion whatsoever– so, it is possible to abort a baby in Canada during all 9 months of a pregnancy.

3. Abortion – has been cast as being “Pro-Choice” – you can see the rhetorical strategy in the choice of these words...

Abortion represents a cultural collision with the gospel.

o An extremely strong political lobby has formed

o Abortion has been equated with women’s rights – at the expense of the unborn.

o This is a framing of the issue that is incomplete and one that devalues the child and the male partner.

• I sympathize with the problem of “woman as victim” – I recognize that a man can (and does) “run away” from an unwanted pregnancy and the woman cannot.

***That cultural collisions occur between biblical values and our modern world should not surprise us.

o The bible talks about the “world” and it's ways... “do not love the world...” (1 John 2:15-17)

Worldliness has long been a point of mis-application in “holiness” circles... sometimes we have focussed on trivial matters at the expense of substantive matters.

**If we have zero cultural collisions we have capitulated to the surrounding culture!

That doesn’t mean we should look for a fight – but it does mean we should expect opposition to gospel values.

4. A snapshot of Our (POST) Modern World/Culture:

• Canada is a “Liberal democracy”

• Product of The Enlightenment – which created human autonomy – in place of divine accountability.

• 17 and 18th centuries

The Enlightenment has its roots in a European intellectual and scholarly movement known as Renaissance humanism and was also preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes

the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism, communism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.[6]

In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church.

Accountability to God was lost.

Individual autonomy was advanced.

• While a Christian understands Christ is our King - Canada (where we hold citizenship) is not a “theocracy” – nor a Christian state.