Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - Abortion; a Christian Woman's View
Parental pride appears numerous times through the course of your child's life. There is the pride you feel at their birth, the first step they take, the first word they say and at hundreds of other "milestones" we place throughout the course of their lives.
Linda and I have always told out children there are two major decisions they will make in life:
1) The decision to put on Jesus Christ through baptism. 2) The decision of who they will marry.
Both of those decisions go a long way in shaping the course your child's life will take and you take pride when the decisions they reach are made based on their relationship with God. Another point of pride is taken from the way your child lives their life once they leave the "nest." You often worry about whether the faith they have in their life is theirs or just an extension of yours. If they don't build their own faith in God, then the chances of them remaining faithful are not good.
I have written several times about my daughter in this column and the challenges she has faced being a Christian in the liberal world of academics. She has stood her ground and, even though it was often unpopular, she has professed her belief in God, Jesus Christ and fact we need to be obedient to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures. Her faith is her own and it is very strong. She is also one of the most caring people I have ever known and she aches for those who have lives affected by tragedy and misfortune. It goes without saying that when the subject of abortion is discussed, her heart is with those poor innocent souls who are stripped of any chance at life by murderous means.I decided to devote this week’s column to an article she wrote about this horrendous practice that has become second nature in our country.
The Result of a World without the Life, Light, and Word
Six million. The number of people killed in the Holocaust. People all over the world shudder to think that this could have happened without being stopped by anyone. But what if I told you that there is a bigger problem, caused because there is a lack of faith in God in people’s lives? What if I said that in the US, someone is killed every twenty-three seconds, yet none of these deaths are reported as murders? And what if I told you that all of those people…were children? Since abortion was legalized in the US in 1973, over 50 million babies have been killed before they even had a chance at life, and worldwide, about one in five pregnancies ends in abortion[1]. In a world without the Life, without the Light, without the Word, the epidemic of abortion reigns and grows stronger every day.
God is the creator of all life. Since the dawn of the current scientific era, man has been trying to discover a way to create life, to no avail. That power rests solely with the Lord. And not only is He the creator, He knows every soul before it is born according to Jeremiah 1:5, which reads “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you.” In Psalm 139: 13-16, David details how the Lord not only knew him before he was born but even before the creation of the world, saying “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.” People do not seem to understand that the One who creates life is the only one who has the right to take it away. All the people who are in favor of abortion, who incidentally have already been born themselves, do not seem to understand that, as stated in Psalm 127:3, “Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb in a reward.” In our world, where the sanctity of human life is being continually diminished, people fail to see that the children they are getting rid of would have been a vital part of this world.
Children are also innocent until the age of accountability, and multiple verses, including Genesis 9:6, Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 7:25, and Proverbs 6:16-17, condemn the shedding of innocent blood. In Exodus 23:7 the Word instructs to “Keep yourself far from a false matter; do not kill the innocent and righteous. For I will not justify the wicked,” clearing showing that God adamantly reviles abortion. Supporters of abortion cannot comprehend that by snuffing out the life of these innocent children, they are condemning themselves to a life without the Son, Jesus. And as it says in I John 5:12, “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Consider this: according to Abortionfacts.com, on the day of conception, “of the 200,000,000 sperm that try to penetrate the mother’s egg cell, only one succeeds. At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed. All of the inherited features of this new person [not fetus] are already set – whether it’s a boy or girl, the color of the eyes, the color of the hair, the dimples of the cheeks and the cleft of the chin. He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become[2].”Everyone deserves a chance at human life, and mankind has no right to take that away.
The goal of being a Christian is to let the Lord’s light shine in your life. The Lord says in John 8:12 “Then Jesus spoke to them again saying, ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” But when abortion is in your life, it creates a darkness that hangs over your head and keeps the light out. The popular television show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager deals with the issue of abortion at the beginning of the series when the main character, Amy finds out she is pregnant at fifteen years of age. She decides she wants an abortion because the baby would get too much in the way of her having a normal life and makes it all the way to a room at an abortion clinic before she finally realizes that having an abortion would be harder on her than actually having the baby. This same storyline is repeated later in the show when another girl, Adrian, who has always said she will have an abortion if she accidentally became pregnant, also ends up in a room waiting to begin the abortion procedure, but backs out at the last minute. As both of these girls realized, the emotional trauma and guilt that come with taking a life are so incredibly strong that there is very little one can do to overcome it, even after a very long time. An individual I know was asked for rent money by his best friend, which he loaned without question. A few months later, he found out the money had not been used for rent; it had been used by his best friend so this man’s girlfriend could have an abortion performed. Twenty-five years later, this man, who has always been adamantly against abortion, is still haunted by having had any part in the taking of a baby’s life.
Over twenty-five percent of all adults have been involved in at least one abortion, yet only ten percent will admit to it. Why not? David says in Psalm 27:1 “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” If abortion were perfectly acceptable, why would people be so afraid and ashamed to admit to it? Abortion causes extreme emotional trauma, guilt, and a darkness that keeps out the light of the Lord that should be there.
The Word is the most important aspect to consider because it clearly lays out the only set of instructions people should follow. John 1:1 says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” There can be no better guide than the instructions that have been with God since the beginning of time. And this Divine Author recognizes no material difference between a born and an unborn child; they are both people. In the Old Testament, the Greek word “yeled” was used in Exodus 21:22-25 to speak of an unborn child, saying “If men fight and hurt a woman with child (yeled), so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” Yet in other verses in the Old Testament, the same word is used to mean youth or teenager. In the New Testament, the Greek word “brephos” is used in three separate instances to describe three different stages of a child’s life. First in Luke 1:44, when Elizabeth meets Mary the mother of Jesus before Jesus is born, she says “For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe (brephos) leaped in my womb for joy,” which also shows the alertness of the mind of the child in the womb. Next, in Luke 2:12, the same word is used when the angel is speaking to the wise men about finding the newborn baby Jesus and says “And this will be the sign to you: You will find a babe (brephos) wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.” This word “brephos” is used again in Luke 18:15, which says “Then they also brought infants (brephos) to Him that He might touch them.” All of these three verses use the word “brephos” in different ways, one referring to an unborn child, one referring to a newborn, and one referring to small children. Yet the same word is used, showing that there is no difference between them, in regards to being “real” people.
Abortion is clearly a picture of the world without the Life, the Light, and the Word offered through Christ. Why are we more concerned about soldiers being killed by our enemies when more babies than that die in the US everyday at the hands of their own mothers? The ratio of daily Abortions to Iraqi deaths is two thousand, two hundred to one[3]. Why is the number of American people lost during the 8-year American Revolution devastating when almost that many children are killed per day in the US now? Four thousand, four hundred thirty-five people were killed over eight years during the revolution; three thousand, three hundred are killed every day now[4]. Why, in thirty-seven states, is someone who kills a mother and her unborn child charged with two counts of murder, yet if the woman had been on her way to an abortion clinic to do the exact same things, she would have received no legal punishment whatsoever[5]? Consider the words of George Santayana in William L. Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, that “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Are we willing to continue this holocaust, sacrificing the lives of millions of innocent babies every year for the sake of convenience? But most importantly, take the time to contemplate this question: how has our country, which was founded on God and God’s principles, gotten to this point, and what are you willing to do to fix it?
[1] Guttmacher Institute: Facts on Induced Abortion Worldwide http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.html
[2] AbortionFacts.com: Milestones of Early Life http://abortionfacts.com/literature/literature_9438MS.asp