“The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I have come that you might have life, and life in all of its fullness.” John 10:10
“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.” Jeremiah 1:5
“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.” Psalm 139: 13-16
Honestly, it’s getting so you can’t even be honest about what something actually is anymore. Sexually deviant men with a host of mental disorders are now called “women” (or will be once a proper definition is sorted out), people who parachuted into a music festival before committing heinous acts of violence on 1,500 people in a single day- including children- are called “freedom fighters” instead of “terrorists”, eating processed and manufactured food is “healthy”, and the surgical dismemberment of unborn humans is labeled as a “woman’s right”, instead of “murder”.
This is just a snippet of the lunacy on display in our topsy turvy, modern world. And I’m sure you’ve thought at some point, just as I and many others have, “Sure, but that\’s just the world. It’s always been a crazy place. At least the Church can be counted on to maintain some semblance of consistency, especially when it comes to the value of human life, right?”
At one point that might have been true, but sadly things have gone another way.
“Confusion” is the word I would most aptly apply to large portions of the Church when it comes to the subject of abortion, or as I would prefer to call it, “culturally acceptable in utero infanticide”. In more progressive circles, they will exclaim, “God made you the way you are and He loves you!”, and in the same breath declare how much “God loves abortion!”. In other words: God made you and He loves that He made you, but if your mother decided she wanted you violently torn apart with a set of forceps, He would love that, too!
One prominent TikTok “minister”, Rev. Brandan Robertson, has even gone so far as to say, “The Bible is pro-choice, because it says we are made in the image of God, which means we have been granted authority over our own bodies.” Then in a debate with a pro-life advocate on the subject of when life begins, he went on to say (yes, he literally said this), “Conception is the beginnings of life but that is not where life begins.” 🤦🏻♂️
Does that not make sense to you either? No? Good. I’m glad I’m not the only one. Oh, but don’t worry, judging from that comment, they can’t make sense of it either. But that tends to be the result of shaping the Scriptures to fit your politics, as opposed to allowing your politics to be shaped by the Scriptures.
Some dissenters may ask: “But Gabe, aren’t you doing the very same thing of which you accuse these progressive Christians? After all, you’re claiming the Bible supports your political leanings. Isn’t that kind of hypocritical of you?”
True, I am a Christian who holds conservative/libertarian leanings, but notice a key difference in phrasing there: I am a Christian before labeling myself conservative and/or libertarian, whereas most with opposing political views will readily (and proudly) describe themselves as Progressive Christians. In any introductory writing course, we are taught that the noun is informed by the adjective preceding it. Therefore, when a person lists their political persuasion ahead of anything else, they’re letting you know what takes preeminence in their world view.
Such people are more concerned with being conformed to the image of the cultural zeitgeist than that of our Lord, shouting such slogans as “Love is love” (whatever that means), “God is queer/trans/gay”, or “He gets us”, as well as the aforementioned “God loves abortion”. They claim that evil is good, and any rebuke calling them toward holiness is labeled as “regressive”, “oppressive”, “patriarchal”, and [my favorite] “white supremacist”.
These, and every other ad hominem attack thrown out by pro abortion activists are little more than a cheap attempt to grandstand for their supporters, as well as gaslight and discredit their detractors, in order to distract from two things.
The first being that their arguments really aren’t that good, and almost all of the arguments used by pro-abortion activists both in and outside the church, have been outdated since the year 2000. Here are some of my personal favorites with simple rebuttals:
- “Women have the right to choose to end the pregnancy!” No woman or person, for that matter, has the right to choose whether another innocent person lives or dies. Not only does that violate the non aggression principle, but it also violates Commandment 6 of the big 10, “Thou Shall not Murder”
- “My body, my choice!” The average human doesn’t have four arms and four legs, accompanied by two sets of every organ. So that means there is a different body involved, in which case: see refutation number 1.
- “It’s just a clump of cells!” Technically speaking we’re all giant clumps of cells, but that is beside the point. If you subscribe to evolutionary biology-as many people do-please note that according to that theory, ALL life on Earth began with a single cell. And let\’s be perfectly frank, if a single bacteria cell was found on the surface of Mars, no one in the scientific community would hesitate to shout “We’ve discovered LIFE on another planet!”
The second reason is to draw attention away from what they have actually chosen to support. In the deepest part of their intellect and their souls-the parts they don’t like to talk about at parties or at coffee shops with their cool friends-there is an innate knowing; an understanding that grates on them like rough grit sandpaper. The understanding that they’ve come into agreement with a heinous and demonic stance, that spits in the face of the God they purport to worship. They’ve bought the lie that to be loving and Godly, one must go along with insane notions of what “supporting” someone means. In the case of abortion, “being loving” means giving your seal of approval to state funded infanticide.
To these misguided believers, let me pose a series of questions.
- Do you believe that God is the author of life? That in Him we live, and move, and have our being?
- Do you believe the Scriptures when they say, “He makes ALL things work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes…”? Or when circumstances are dire as in the story of Joseph, that God can take what was meant for evil and turn it for good?
- Do you believe that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made?
If the answer to any of those is Yes, and you still support abortion, then it is likely you either do not understand what you are supporting, or you don’t believe about the Lord what you’ve professed.
I will leave you with this quote from eminent author and theologian, C.S. Lewis, taken from his seminal work on Christian living, Mere Christianity. Though not dealing directly with the subject of abortion, I think it fits well:
“If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, \’If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God.\’ The Christian replies, \’Don\’t talk damned nonsense.”