11 ¶ If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; 12 If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?
Cannot this be thought of in relation to one of our most controversial subjects of today; abortion, if you can just imagine the 40 million plus lives snuffed out before they even had a chance to see the light of day and done so wickedly in their mother’s womb, a place one would think of as safe and nurturing?
We have a parallel in the issue of slavery. Many people look at history and say, well, you can’t judge the founding fathers by our time, you must judge them by their own. However, in the many biographies of men like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and in the sermons of the day such as John Wesley’s 1774 “Thoughts on Slavery” it is clear that the “great men” of that time were uncomfortable with slavery, knew it was wrong, and wished the whole institution would disappear but they did not have the moral backbone or commitment to make it so.
Can we now, with so many millions of innocents being ripped apart, beheaded, whose helpless little bodies are cast into the trash like yesterday’s discarded pizza, think that we can sit back and say, “well, I don’t believe in abortion so I don’t plan on having one, haha”? Can Christians sit by and not petition and plead and demand that their legislators make abortion-as-birth-control removed as a constitutional right as per the Supreme Court and put severe restrictions on it, at least as severe as any medical procedure that doesn’t take a life with informed consent and a signed understanding that the mother who pursues the services of an abortionist knows she is taking the life of her child and that parents of underaged girls are fully informed of what their daughter is considering?
Or are you so wicked, evil, and full of spite and hate that you view abortion as just something a woman has a right to do with something that is no more than a tumor, a lump of tissue, a parasite? Augustine, the famous Roman Catholic theologian of the first half of the first millennium after Christ, wrote on therapeutic abortion;
“And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man's power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being. To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is possible for him to die. And if he die, wheresoever death may overtake him, I cannot discover on what principle he can be denied an interest in the resurrection of the dead.”
Abortion has been an issue for a long time, it would seem.
No German could have ever said, if he suspected something was happening to the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, mental patients, and handicapped by the Nazis in The Holocaust that he or she was innocent because they didn’t know. Because when God searches the heart He knows the truth. You said nothing. You objected not. You are guilty of the murder as well.
How many times have Christians been silent when their government did some great evil because, well, we can use the excuse of Romans 13, which is no excuse at all, for standing by and watching great evil done? I’m not advocating violence. There is no excuse for it if you trust in God through Christ. But you have a voice and that voice must be raised when people are brought to slaughter whether it be workers poisoned by their own employers through willful acts of negligence as my father learned when he was a Private Investigator for insurance companies or people with no political power being experimented on like lab animals.
It’s interesting to note what Christians had so say when it was learned that our government had experimented on poor, black men who had a venereal disease, never telling them what they had and denying them all curative medical treatment. This went on from 1932 to 1972 in what is called the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Try to find a Christian response when it was discovered and reported. You will be hard pressed to find much.
When you are aware of a wrong being committed, particularly one that involves the death and destruction of the helpless you must speak up, do something. You can’t say it’s not my responsibility. You can argue about how far you go as a Christian to fight injustice and oppression and murder but you can’t simply use the excuse that you didn’t know, if you did, because God knows.
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