Psalms 11 & 130, Leviticus 18:21-30, 1 John 3:1-3, Matt. 18:1-7, 10-14
Abortion: Where from here?
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision known as Roe verses Wade, the decision that declared that our national constitution contained within it an entitlement for any woman in our land to kill a human being if it were so unfortunate to reside in her womb. The judges didn’t put it quite that way, of course; they were careful to speak of fetuses, not babies, and they insisted every so gravely that no one was agreed as to the personhood of an infant while it was still confined in its mother’s body. But, with succeeding litigation over the past 30 years, including additional Supreme Court decisions, the law of the land is simply this: so long as any part of the baby’s body is inside its mother’s body, it is perfectly legal to kill it. So-called partial birth abortion is the legal equivalent to a morning after pill. As John Piper recently observed, “In the United States today, you can be fined $5000 and imprisoned for up to a year for breaking an eagle’s egg, you can be imprisoned and fined for stealing a sea turtle egg, and yet our babies are being killed daily with little outcry.”
Today, nationwide twenty-four out of every one hundred conceptions is aborted. In some places, such as New York City, that figure is forty out of every one hundred conceptions
(http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/15248/). The total number of deaths in America alone stands somewhere above 45 million at this time. And, yet, it’s hard to be certain, because reporting of abortions is often masked in otherwise anonymous gynecological treatment. Nor does that 45 million deaths include all those children aborted by misnamed contraceptive devices, which do not prevent conception, but rather generate a spontaneous miscarriage whenever there is a conception. The death toll is chilling – so chilling, I think, that it is only with great determination that we can even contemplate it.
And, yet, in the past three months, as we have followed the confirmation hearings of two Supreme Court Justices – John Roberts, and now Samuel Alito – hearings broadcast across the country and written up on newspapers and blogs, hearings in which senators pressed both judges to affirm that a woman’s right to kill a baby in her womb is settled law in the United States of America.
In view of the fact that abortion is – in the minds of so many – settled law, in view of the death toll that continues to rise by multiple millions each year in this country, what are Christians supposed to think? What are they supposed to do? Where do we go from here? On this 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I want to share some thoughts about where we go from here.
In order to know where we go from here, it is critical that we understand where we are. The Old Testament lesson for today shows us where our nation is today, at least as far as how God views this issue. The Old Testament lesson in the introduction to a section of that book which details a list of practices which God finds abominable, abominable to the point that he is moved to utterly destroy the nations which practice them. The first abomination mentioned in that list sounds rather antiseptic in version we heard read to us – do not let your descendants pass through the fire to Molech. What it refers to is the sacrificing of children, particularly infants, to a pagan god named Molech. His image was a hollow statue, inside of which a roaring fire was built, which make the entire image glow red hot, including its outstretched arms, onto which the living child was placed, there to be burned to ashes. Sounds barbaric and hideous beyond belief. But is it so very different from scraping a living baby out of a womb with a long-handled razor blade? Or ripping a baby’s body into shreds with a high-powered vacuum hose?
It was for things like this that God ordered the complete and utter destruction of the people who inhabited Canaan at the time Israel was delivered out of Egypt. And, these were not the only nations which God has removed from history. The Bible recounts many such instances, and history outside the Bible shows us similar things – nations which rise up, powerful and strong, nations which practice the things which God tells us pollutes the land, so that eventually the land itself vomits out its inhabitants. If God has done this so many times in the pages of Holy Writ, and if there are so many additional parallels to this in the annals of human history, why do we suppose that America today is not standing in that same polluted stream which flows to perdition?
I know that within a few years of Roe v. Wade, I heard many voices of gloom and doom, but here we are, 33 years later, and where is God’s judgment? If there had been some prophet preaching against Molech worship back in Canaan, he would likely have faced the same question. What we must not overlook is that God revealed his decision to destroy those nations, and he did so four hundred years before the destruction came upon them. In speaking to Abraham in Genesis 15, God explained why the judgment was not coming upon Canaan in Abraham’s day. God told Abraham he was delaying the judgment “because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.” Just because God defers his judgment against a wicked nation, this does not mean judgment will not come. It may mean that God is waiting for that nation’s sin to ripen to its fullest, so that when the judgment comes, no one will protest that the judgment is not good and right.
Meanwhile, the plague of abortion is already exacting its own inevitable effects on nations in the world where it is practiced. The birth rate in America today is just barely sufficient to maintain a stable population. In every other country where abortion is more frequent than the United States, the populations are shrinking so fast that there it is now a virtual certainty that many of them will begin to disintegrate through social, political, financial, and racial upheaval in the lifetimes of our children. The recent riots in France are simply straws in the wind that will blow through Western Europe in the next fifty years as two more generations of secularized Europeans die off without replacing themselves, and two more generations of Islamic North Africans double their own populations by birth rates far beyond what is needed to replace themselves.
This phenomenon is nothing new. Thirty years ago, Amaury de Reincourt, in his careful study entitled Sex and Power in History, surveyed the evolution of sexual ethics in the Roman Empire, an evolution which closely parallels ours today – the departure of women from the home for the workplace, the devaluation of marriage, the acceptance of homosexuality as just another mode of sexual expression, wide-spread use of contraception and wide-spread abortion. Here is how de Reincourt summarizes the end of that Empire:
The triumph of the first full-fledged feminist movement known to history had, as ultimate consequence, led to the crippling of Rome’s family structure and largely destroyed family loyalty and solidarity. … Meanwhile, corroded by shrinking vitality and depravity, the total population of Italy began to shrink alarmingly. … modern Roman women looked down on childbearing as unworthy of their talents. … It had all started with the feminist movement in the upper classes; with the progress of democratic equality under the Caesarian Empire, it had spread downward and outward, to reach the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry. Infanticide was widespread, and sexual lewdness undoubtedly lowered men and women’s fertility; marriage was frequently deferred or avoided altogether. At the tail of this evolution, the western Roman Empire was rapidly becoming, in population terms, an empty shell. The Romans actually committed ethnic suicide. [Sex and Power in History, (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 126-127]
What to do? It would be easy to despair, to suppose that there is, at this point, nothing that can be done. The forces arrayed against us seem so pervasive, so powerful, so rich, so influential. Here we sit, in a small parish, in a smallish town. What are we against to massive a tide of evil?
Well, the answer to that question is easy. We are nothing. But, the Apostle John, writing to people very much like us, said that “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” And, the Apostle Paul, when writing to Christians in Ephesus, beset by the tide of Roman paganism, said this: “10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:10-12)
What we do, therefore, before all else is to pray. Pray for God’s mercy on our land, pray for the power of God’s Spirit to restrain the forces of evil that pollute our nations schools, and courts, and economy, and government. And, pray most of all for yourself and other Christians, that all of us may repent of the things which so easily persuade women to kill their children – fear of the future, or a positive lust for personal peace and prosperity. If some women abort their babies for these reasons, are we any better than they because we commit smaller sins for exactly the same reasons?
And, that is the second thing we do – we renew submit ourselves to God and live by the power of his grace toward us. How will any woman – fearful of a pregnancy which she thinks she has no resources to manage, irritated and frustrated by the way this new life has overturned her own – how will can turn away from her own fears or her own self-centeredness if she has no Christians in their vicinity to model these things for her? Jesus said we are to be the light of the world. So, we must be light in this dark, dark world that so easily kills its children. If any who are lost in that darkness are ever to find their way out, they must have light to see how to escape. Christians who are light are their only hope.
Third, we can match our prayers with deeds. We can contribute our time, our money, and our energies toward tangible ministries to encourage and enable women to carry their children to full term. Right here in Waxahachie, we have Christian ministries which do this. If you want some clear, concrete, and tangible things you can do – even small things – ask Donna. She will be able to tell you. And, if what she tells you is not enough, she can find others who can tell you more.
Fourth, we can apply ourselves to speaking the truth fearlessly to a generation of Americans who so profoundly deceived about the nature and value of human life. Imagine, if you will, for a moment, a political forum where abortion is being debated. It is very possible that you might find someone in favor of abortion saying something like this:
"Look, no one’s for abortion. Surely both sides of this controversy can acknowledge that abortion is always a tragic decision. But can’t we work together to eliminate the root causes of abortion? Can’t we still acknowledge that abortion is sometimes a necessity, and ought not to face a legal penalty?"
Sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it? I’ll bet you’ve heard, or read something very much like this before. But, let’s go back in our nation’s history a mere 150 years, and put see how this idea sounds. Instead a reasonable plea for abortion, how about a reasonable plea for lynching a black man. Here’s how the argument would sound then:
“Look, no one’s for lynching a black man. Surely both sides of this controversy can acknowledge that lynching a black man is always a tragic decision. But, can’t we work together to eliminate the root causes of lynching black men? Can’t we still acknowledge that lynching a black man is sometimes a necessity, and ought not to face a legal penalty?” [huge hat tip to Russell Moore, at http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/01/safe_legal_and_.html].
There is a wonderful scene in one of Lewis’s Narnia books, The Silver Chair. In this scene, the green witch has bewitched Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, with an enchantment which makes them drowsy and confused. But, the spell is broken when Puddleglum puts his bare foot into a fire, which produces a tremendous stink of burning Marshwiggle, so stinky that it wakes everybody up.
Christians should repent of their own sins of fear and lust, and Christians should pray fervently for God’s grace on our land. Christians should match their prayers with deeds of mercy that assist women to bring their unwanted children into the world. And, just like puddleglum, Christians should also create a stink. And pointing out the obvious parallels between lynching black men 150 years ago and slaughtering innocent babies today – that creates a kind of stink that just may wake some people up.
The so-called arguments for abortion are an enchantment, and the only thing that will break it is a powerful and probably stinky dose of common sense, coupled with Christian faith that is visible in the actions of the Christians who profess that faith. Christians, above all people, should be willing to put their own feet in the fire to create that kind of stink.
This parallel between the evils of slavery 150 years ago and the evils of abortion today ought to give us some hope that by the grace of God and the perseverance of faithful Christians, there might yet emerge in our land a consensus in favor of life. We look back at many of our ancestors 150 years ago with embarrassment and dismay. Might it not be possible – if we persevere in prayer, righteous deeds, and a bold witness to the truth – might it not be possible after all, that at the end of the 21st Century our grandchildren could look back at this time with embarrassment and dismay at the holocaust of innocent life that has so befouled our national character?
To see that day will take much in the way of repentance, beginning with the household of God. It will take much in the way of righteousness, practical and tangible righteousness, beginning with the household of God. Thousands of years ago a wise man’s words were recorded in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 24. Listen to those words now:
If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, "Behold, we did not know this," does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your souls know it, and will he not requite man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:10-12)
God grant us grace to be lights in this present darkness, to find strength from God’s Spirit to rescue those who are perishing. May he who keeps watch over our souls strengthen us to do what is right, so that when he repays us according to our work, we may rejoice in the day of the Lord Jesus.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
