Proverbs 24:11 ¶ 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
50 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 racial 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”? Christians could not 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 have the states 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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