Note to readers: I know I've hit this topic pretty hard recently. Of course, that's because it has been in the news so much. I hope, however, that you'll be able to use some of this information. If the Supreme Court actually reverses Roe v Wade, you can count on it to get messy. You can expect to be "targeted" in some sense as believers, as people with biblical principles that violate the world's sense of right and wrong. You'll be blamed for this, and it will be because you're a hater or a supremacist of some kind or as many other reasons the god of this world -- the father of lies -- can come up with. So I'm hoping that I've provided you some answers, some armament, in preparation. You know, "ready to make a defense" (1 Peter 3:15). Because, ultimately, it isn't about you. It isn't even about women or choice. It's about the image of God, something the prince of the power of the air cannot tolerate."You religious nutcases seem to miss the point that the Bible teaches that life begins at first breath." Have you ever heard that? I expect you have. Where is that? Well, quite clearly, in (the mythical) Genesis 2:7 we read, "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Well, thank you very much for playing. You silly Bible people can go home now. But ... can we?
The text explains what happened when God made Adam. He formed him from dust and breathed life into him and he became a living creature. The Bible says that about no one ever again. In a parallel story God put Adam to sleep, took a rib from him, and made Eve (Gen 2:21-22). Shall we conclude, then, that women are always and henceforth made by making a man go to sleep and making her from a rib? Of course not. Genesis 2 describes events that we don't see anymore. It does not provide a definition of "life." It's a description of the first man.
So what does the Bible say about life before birth? Well, in Jeremiah God told Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jer 1:5). God, then, formed a non-human, consecrated the fetus, and appointed it to be a prophet, right? That, of course, makes little sense. Clearly God considered Jeremiah to be a person in the womb. David makes the same sort of claim.
For You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Psa 139:13-16)All of that text is "preborn." God knitted and formed and wove together and wrote up the life of this "preborn" human. And we all know the story of Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, visiting her cousin, Elizabeth. When Elizabeth saw Mary, "the baby leaped in her womb" (Luke 1:41). Elizabeth claimed, "When the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy" (Luke 1:44). A tissue blob does not experience "joy," does it? And, of course, there is the passage in Exodus, often used to excuse abortion, that actually argues that killing a baby before it is born is the same as murder (Exo 21:22-25).
There are lots of voices out there that don't much care what the Bible says, so this stuff won't matter to them. To their immediate peril they discard the biblical claim that we are made in the image of God (Gen 9:6) and carefully hold to a baseless claim that humans are of greater worth than other beings. They value "my choice" over all other concerns right up until it infringes on "my choice" and enable a line of reasoning that cannot help but end in the termination of life outside of the womb. (It's not a slippery slope fallacy when it is actually already happening.) I don't expect this to sway the minds of unbelievers. But you -- those who believe God and His Word -- should be able to see that Scripture opposes the killing of humans and that humans are human from conception. You, who believe that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, should certainly be concerned for the welfare of the most innocent and defenseless human beings on the planet. So maybe this will bolster your confidence. The Bible agrees.
4 comments:
But I'm told that God never says anywhere in Scripture that a fetus is equal to a fully formed person outside the womb and you can't prove that He did, even though the person who told me this can't prove that God anywhere makes a distinction between a man who's born and that same man before he was born. I'm so confused.
That person is right. God never uses the modern term "person" in the sense that we started to use it in the past 50 years where it does not refer to a human being, but only those human beings that we deem to be "persons." "So, how do we define that?" you might ask. We don't. Used to be from womb to tomb. Then it became from viability to tomb. Then it became "Whether the mother wants it or not" to tomb. And, as we've seen, society has moved that line to after birth. But God never refers to the use of nuclear weapons, so I suppose that they're okay, too, right?
Actually, it seems as though the "to the tomb" part of person hood is under attack as well. Most of the arguments used to deprive the pre-born child of person hood also apply to those who suffer dementia, are comatose, and then some. It's interesting that one of the arguments for slavery in the US was that the slaves weren't worthy of person hood. Of course we saw how the NAZI's framed it, that Jews, those with birth defects, gypsies, etc were "subhuman" or "untermenschen". I suspect that pointing out those similarities is probably not a good thing.
Yes, Craig, I think that has to be the trend. "No, that baby in the womb doesn't have the right to life." "Well, okay, logically, I suppose it makes sense, if 'right to life' is not merely a human right, then we should be willing to eliminate old folks." "Following the logic, why not terminate babies post partum?" And so it goes. So sad that they pull their hair and cry for the school kids killed and angrily demand they should be allowed to do the same to the unborn babies.
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