Jesus Loves The Little Children Series

The passage I read this morning is intriguing. The story is recorded here in Luke as well as in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. And what I find interesting is that there’s this contrast between the views of the disciples… and Jesus.

There’s this group of parents who are bringing “infants” to Jesus for Him to bless them and the disciples are annoyed. How dare these parents bother Jesus this way, don’t they know that He’s a busy man? He has more important things to do than to be bothered by children. And so they rebuke the parents and essentially say “go away, and take their brats somewhere else.”

And you can almost hear Jesus say: “What is the deal? Why are sending these children away?” “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

There’s an old Gospel hymn that says “Jesus loves the little children… all the little children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

That’s how God thinks. He loves children!

But now there’s always been a contrast between the views of man and views of God when it comes to children. In much of world history, children have been seen as having little value. They were even seen as being “disposable” by various cultures.

For example: the pagan nations around the nation of Israel worshipped a god named Molech. He was an EVIL god who demanded the sacrifice of children to appease him. And that’s what 1000s of these pagans would. They would even offer their children as “foundation sacrifices” for their new homes – after offering them up to their god they would embed the child in the walls to “bring them luck.”

This is one of the major reasons God told Israel He was driving the Canaanites out…

In Deuteronomy 12:29-31 God told Israel “When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? — that I also may do the same.’ “You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way… they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.”

And in Leviticus 20:2 God hammered it home: “Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones.”

And the pagans of Canaan weren’t the only ones who did this. About 840 B.C. the ancient city of Carthage was founded on the NE tip of Africa. It began as a humble village and grew until it was a major rival to Rome. Their famous general, Hannibal, nearly destroyed the Roman Empire at one point. Several years ago, archeologists dug up a “graveyard” which held sacrifices Carthage had made to their gods. The graves were a mixture of animals... AND CHILDREN. Now the folks, who discovered this were secular archeologists and they expected Carthaginian religion had “evolved” from a barbaric system - where initially children were sacrificed on their altars– into a more CIVILIZED culture - where they just offered up animals. But these experts were surprised to find that it was the other way around. Animals first… then children. Based on that finding, they speculated that, when Carthage was first founded, animals were plentiful and children more precious, and so they’d sacrifice animals. But as the city grew, animals became more valuable, and their children were more expendable… and the children were sacrificed rather than animals. Their animals became more precious than their children. (“Biblical Archeological Review” 10:1, January/February 1984; “Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?”)

I could go on and on about this… but the point is: Mankind has often viewed children as being expendable. And it would appear not much has changed in several 1000 years.

Last year, the Supreme Court declared that the Federal Government had no business setting abortion policy. That should have been left to the states. So they struck down Roe v. Wade that had been decided law for nearly 50 years. But let’s be clear: The Supreme Court didn’t OUTLAW abortion, they simply said – Roe v. Wade was not well written law, and the decisions needed to be returned to the states.