Note: this is part five in a series of essays examining the issue of abortion biblically. Click here for part one, here for part two, here for part three, and here for part four.
Dead Justice, Different Justice
Justice looks like something. After first diligently undertaking the task to understand what justice is, it must then be enacted. This is a principle that runs through all the virtues of life. Virtues are not deeds, but no man or woman can claim to possess them without tangibly embodying those virtues, for the virtues themselves rightfully apprehended compel their possessors to action. Faith is something separate from works, yet without works it is dead (James 2:17). The apostle John asks: “Whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17). The implication is that an abiding love would have tangibly met the brother’s needs. This John affirms in the next verse when he says: “Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18). Love is not just something we claim to have with our lips, it is something we express in our hands and feet.
So it is with justice. Our love for God manifests in obeying his commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, and part of loving our neighbor means rescuing them from oppression and seeking recompense for injustices done to them, just as we also would want to be rescued and have someone fighting on our behalf. Justice, as a derivation of love, is not something merely desired but something done. Like faith, justice without works is dead. And so the time has come for us, as regards the fight against the systemic injustice of abortion, to begin to sketch out what “boots on the ground” look like. But before we do that, we best take a moment to remind ourselves as to what justice really is and briefly examine some of the current dilemmas and pitfalls Christians face in the pursuit of justice in our present culture.
Ultimately, as we have taken pains to delineate, justice is most truly a glory of God issue; it is about God being revered and honored as God. Done rightly, the pursuit of justice is a form of worship. It declares that God is worthy of the sacrifices made in its pursuit. This God-centered motivation of justice must be iterated with utmost judiciousness, perhaps to the point of what some might be tempted to claim as theological ad nauseam. The great danger for all Christians wishing to obey God’s command at the present moment to, “let justice roll down like many waters,” is to take the advice of our godless culture on how to do it. Our present society brattles about with wide-ranging claims of what is just and unjust; ours is a culture that has never been so inundated with discourse on justice while simultaneously residing in a spiritual and intellectual drought of understanding as to what justice is. Talks of justice are everywhere; the loudest and far-reaching voices speak of a justice that is inherently man-centered, self-exalting, and self-interested; and unless God’s people are vigilant, our pursuit of justice will mirror the world’s pursuit of justice, which will not be a true pursuit of justice at all.
There is also the compounded threat of those in the Church who wish to follow the dictates of the culture and will co-opt the biblical language of justice to disguise their allegiance to godlessness and to trick other believers into going astray with them. To counteract this, we must be as clear and persistent in our articulation of justice as the world is. If the culture is shouting with confidence and constancy in the ears of the saints, we must endeavor to have God’s word manifest as the overpowering thunder that it really is (Psalm 29:3); a voice so loud and penetrating it reduces the shouts of the world into unheeded whispers.
This essay series has been a humble attempt to be part of that clear articulation, detailing some of the more general and particular contours of biblical justice. While we do not have time to recall all that has been said, what this series has in part attempted to show, and what the Bible self-evidently shows, is that God’s justice and the world’s justice are different. From this principle, we can derive two others that for our present purposes are key to understand. The first is that this difference is a source of revilement from the world, as much as it may become an object of admiration to them. The proverbs tell us that “An unjust man is abominable to the righteous, and he who is upright in the way is abominable to the wicked” (Proverbs 29:17). John tells us: “the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The fallen world is not predisposed to love what comes from God but rather to reject and loathe it; and this is no less true of God’s justice. The second, as already noted, is that a Christian’s pursuit of justice will not look the same as the world’s pursuit of it. Taken together, what we have this: a Christian’s pursuit of justice will be noticeably different from the world’s, and the world won’t very much like what they see.
Beware dear Christian of pursuing a justice that the world conveniently finds to be vogue. As G.K. Chesterton put it: “Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities.” Even at its moral best, the world is never in full lock-step with the tenets and Spirit of our faith, and in a society like ours that has wrenched itself free of much Judeo-Christian thought, the culture will increasingly be given to fashions more aptly described as severe insanities. To be Christian is to be to some extent, larger or lesser, countercultural, and if we are swimming gaily down the culture’s river we can be sure we are relating to the water wrong. We are to be in the world but not of it; in the river, but swimming upstream against its natural tide.
It should be no wonder then the grave injustice of abortion is not sought by the world as something to be counteracted and abolished. On the contrary, it is celebrated; and those who seek to end its murderous scourge are slandered as being unjust. Obeying God’s command to rescue those who are doomed to death (Proverbs 24:11) in this way will not ingratiate a Christian to the world; no accolades from the culture’s gatekeepers await the Christian who fights against the injustice of abortion, and thus little to no acclaim from unbelieving peers awaits him or her either. Social media posts on this injustice will not ratchet up a flurry of likes, affirming comments, or re-tweets; disparagement and hostility await, as well as the dearth of likes that come from fellow Christians who agree but are too scared of the reproach that comes from giving their pollical sign of agreement.
And this is why many Christians shrink from fighting it, instead adopting a cause that is more likely to generate favorable feelings from the world and their worldly-minded peers in and outside of the church. It is, unfortunately, the reason why many Christians claim to care about racial justice, particularly in blue states or regions of the country, a combination of cowardice and thirst for human approval rather than genuine biblically inspired concern for racism driving their efforts. Isn’t it supremely convenient when we happen to care and be most vocal about precisely the same things the culture is giving their attention and voice to? Racism is indeed a problem and will only be more so in the days ahead, and it must be challenged by a Church equipped to effectively confront it. But in that arena of justice as well, true Christians will find that the solutions needed to bring healing and recompense will be countercultural, unmet with favor by the activists and influencers who claim to be working towards its erasure. Being a true champion in the fight against racism (that is, one who understands what racism is and how to fight it through a biblical lens) will not make you many friends either.
The true battle against racism will have to be chronicled at another time, but we must understand that many people who have postured themselves as anti-racists have done so out of pretense, in social conformity and because it fashionable, and likewise many Christians have turned a blind eye and deafened themselves to the heart of God on the issue of abortion precisely because it is not.
We will soon offer up some biblically-informed suggestions as to what tangible action against the injustice of abortion can entail for the believer, how he or she may put the virtue of justice into practice and combat the murder of the unborn through deeds—and through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit be mightily effective in it. But before commencing do so it is important for every disciple of Christ to realize what this justice will look like to much of the world, that is, how it will be received in their eyes, and to make up their minds beforehand to care infinitely more what it looks like in the eyes of God than in the eyes of men. If we launch into the fight against abortion hankering for the world’s acclaim, we will be sorely disappointed. The ways of God are foolishness to the natural man (1 Corinthians 2:14) and what is highly esteemed by humanity is detestable in the sight of God ( Luke 16:15). We must expect the world’s reproach and lack of comprehension to what we do, but if effectiveness is our aim we will find the world’s confusion and anger to be no detriment; believing the world is flat does stop a ship traversing the globe from going round and round, and one’s faulty opinion does not vanquish the efficacy of truth. God’s ways done in God’s power always emerge triumphant and unbeatable when the dust settles.
Lastly, it is important to note that those who lift their wetted finger to the winds of culture to determine what society will favor them for fighting against never truly become heroes whose actions endure the crucible of history. Heroes are concerned with rescuing the oppressed and down-trodden of society; their ears are attuned to the cries of the helpless, not the praises of people. They well know their efforts to rescue the oppressed will be met with indifference or hostility—if society broadly approved of a hero’s rescue efforts they would not be oppressing the very people the hero is attempting to deliver. Heroes do what is righteous, not what is expedient. They stand against a tide of menacing evils the culture is allowing themselves to get carried along with. They stand alone or in the company of the few. They confront darkness most cannot see or are else too afraid to stand up to. That is what makes them a hero. While their journey is arduous and often lonely, by the brightness of their courage and fortitude others are drawn to their cause, turning men and women into souls that become stones on the scales of justice, accumulating force and weight that eventually tip the scales in favor of righteousness within a society. Some heroes live to see that tipping in their day, others do not, but they know with confidence that their lives given as weight for justice will not be in vain. With these truths in mind, let us now attend to how to practically combat abortion.
The Power of Prayer
The first response of any Christian to systemic injustice is prayer. The famous maxim of A.J. Gordon applies here to combating abortion: “You can do more than pray after you have prayed; but you can never do more than pray until you have prayed.” To do the work of God requires grace, and God gives grace to the humble, and prayer by its nature is an act of humility. It is a demonstration of need, a recognition that help is required. It starts the undertaking of justice on the right foot: not the foot of pride (Psalm 36:11)—a trust in one’s strength or abilities—but a trust and a need for the strength of God. Every tangible manifestation of battling abortion must first be bathed in prayer—and then sustained by it. Prayer enables the work undertaken to be supplied with divine power, in so far as the work is truly submitted to God and carried out with righteous motives (one cannot use prayer as a sanctifying gloss to cover over works done with fleshly motives or in disobedience to God), and constant prayer ensures the work remains supplied with divine power. Many workers, having begun energized in the Spirit, tire themselves out by resorting to the arm of the flesh. Some never start in the Spirit at all, mistaking their nascent and untested zeal for the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. But those who wish to be successful over the long term in their efforts and last as long as the battle may require will not long neglect the place of prayer.
But prayer is not only a prerequisite to acts of justice against abortion, it is an act of justice against abortion. In Luke 18, Jesus gives his disciples an important lesson in this regard.
Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart, 2 saying, “In a certain city there was a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man. 3 There was a widow in that city, and she kept coming to him, saying, ‘Give me legal protection from my opponent.’ 4 For a while he was unwilling; but afterward he said to himself, ‘Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out.’” 6 And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge *said; 7 now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? 8 I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”
(Luke 18:1-8)*
Christ’s point is clear: if justice can be extracted from earthly, unrighteous judges through an individual’s persistence, how much more can the sons and daughters of the king whose very throne is founded on justice not fail to receive it through constant asking? Just as the judge has power to grant the widow protection from her enemy with a word from his mouth, so does God have the power to end oppression and wickedness with a decree from his lips. In the same way a prosecutor goes to the court to pursue justice for the victimized, so do we as God’s people go to the heavenly court to petition the judge of all the earth for justice against particular abominations. And Christ promises that when we do so persistently our efforts will pay off and justice will be served—with haste (Luke 18:8). The principle here is that persistent prayer brings speedy justice. Many political battles in state legislatures and in the courts have been and are currently being fought over the legality of abortion. These battles are important and necessary. But the most important place to seek justice is at the throne of God, and only prayer brings us there. Those who wish to see justice in the realm of abortion must thus give themselves to constant prayer.
Prayer is also a weapon wielded in the realm of the spirit. Every Christian is a soldier in a war waged, “not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). What these forces in heavenly places are, we are given little concrete information. We know Satan is the “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and that he took a third of the angels with him in his rebellion (Revelation 12:4), and that angels war in the heavens for the destinies of nations (Daniel 10:13, 20). We know that there are “unclean spirits” which love to torment and afflict humans and work towards their death (Matt 17:15, Luke 9:39). Furthermore, we know that the murdering of infants is something undertaken to honor demons (Psalm 106:37-38), and that the prerogative of Satan is to kill, steal and destroy (John 10:10) and that Satan has been a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). A biblical understanding of abortion, therefore, recognizes that the embeddedness of abortion in our society is something satanically enforced and inspired; it cannot be rooted out of society through appeals to rationality or tireless political activism alone. It must be confronted on a spiritual level in the arena of prayer and fasting where the saints wrestle with cosmic deities.
Such notions no doubt strike many western ears as foolish, but Christians understand that humans neglect the realm of the spirit to their own peril. The unseen realm is, true to its designation, unseen; but it is very much real. This is not a call to superstition or fruitless speculation of things we barely understand. It is a call, however, to acknowledge plainly what the scriptures tell us and the ways to which the materialism and empiricism of the West may dispose us to treat these portions of scripture less seriously than we ought and to engage these mysteries in a spirit of humility and Christian duty. These spiritual enemies are real and we must war with them. Make no mistake: as a murderer from the beginning, the cultural, legal, and economic apparatus of abortion is of Satan’s kingdom. Victories gained in this arena are territories taken from him. It is by the Spirit of God and not man’s wisdom or might that Satan’s kingdom is expelled and the kingdom of Christ advances (Matthew 12:28), and it is by prayer the Spirit’s power is both accessed and wielded (Eph. 6:18, Rom. 8:26).
No Christian with the most rudimentary understanding that they have become soldiers in Christ will neglect the weapon of prayer. To do so is to not be engaged in the fight. And certainly no Christian who has been gripped by the grief and zealousness in the heart of God as concerns the litany of the world’s injustices will do so either. To at once both truly behold the horror of an injustice like abortion and to hear the promised power of prayer against it and then do nothing to apprehend its sure-given victories is unconscionable and unthinkable. In a world as dark as ours and as those who have received the lofty promises of prayer’s effect, to not engage in the activity of intercession is to be as derelict as the soldier who deserts comrade and commander at the battle line, as callous as the mother who does not feed a starving infant from her milk-filled breast. Real believers, when confronted with injustice, get on their knees and pray.
Individualized Compassion (Stopping for the One)
In ancient Rome, unwanted infants were discarded by members of society who found them burdensome or undesirable, left to die in the woods from exposure or the ravaging of wild beasts, or else to be snatched up by those who would rear them to be slaves or prostitutes.1 Girls in particular were likely to be victims of infant abandonment, as they were considered to be less profitable in bringing economic support to the families that bore them.2 In defiance of this low regard for human life, Roman Christians, recognizing the preciousness of those made in the image of God and of God’s zeal for the defenseless and the orphan, rescued these unwanted children from garbage heaps and other common sites of abandonment, adopting them as their own.3
Rather than being met with acclaim or even indifference for their acts of compassion, so wayward was Roman society that it remonstrated the Christians for such deeds, many of its denizens finding the Christians’ rescue efforts as odious to the point that saving infants was actually made illegal for a period.4 Such attitudes make for an elucidating parallel to our own times where pro-life advocates are often viewed with the same contempt. Ours is a society not merely indifferent to slaughtering children, but hostile to those who wish to stop or abate the bloodshed. From the early Church’s rescuing of infants, the present-day Church inherits a long-standing pedigree of care for the marginalized and oppressed, as well as an acute understanding that Christ-like compassion has long been countercultural and we should not be surprised to find society at odds with our attempts to care for the vulnerable.
The early Church, confronted with an embedded inhumanity in its culture, and without the promise of aid from institutions or state, rushed in to fill a great void of care and need. While, as we shall later see, the Church did not neglect to make use of its power to solve infanticide on a macro-level when such opportunities arose,5 they did not let immanent inability of producing systemic change prevent them from administering as much justice and compassion as they could to needy children. They took to heart seriously their Master’s injunction to love their neighbor as their self, treating each tossed away infant like the Good Samaritan did the victim of bandits left bleeding on the side of the road. In doing so, they witnessed to the eternal fact that the LORD is a God who cares for the individual; his destitute cries reach his ears and her miseries and mistreatments are observed by his eyes with care and zealous concern.
The early Church’s deeds also testify to the biblical reality that injustice is an individualized experience, as much it may also be a systemic one; systemic injustices exist because and only because individuals are being oppressed, and thus justice is something fought for on behalf of individuals. Where systemic injustice truly exists, it is not being meted out to some amorphous, abstracted, and indiscernible body of people, but to individual souls with singular lives, names, and faces. In today’s milieu, much emphasis (and not entirely wrong in so doing) is placed on systemic solutions to the malaises of society, but as followers of Christ we must never forget that justice and compassion starts with the individual in front of you, with the soul in your neighborhood that needs rescuing, and the sacrifices made to help that soul are infinitely precious to God and eminently valuable in performing regardless of whether such actions appear to produce nothing more than most minuscule of tears in the fabric of injustice. When the electricity goes out in a city on a cold winter’s night, we do not let the fact that we are unable to restore power to the entire city grid prevent us from going door to door with blankets and hand-warmers and flashlights and such—we do what we can to alleviate the suffering of individuals, recognizing the inherent dignity of doing so. In short, we do not let an inability to make a systemic difference prevent us from making an individual one.
Such must be the Church’s attitude with abortion. While—and let this be abundantly clear—we must strive to bring a systemic end to abortion, we must never let the absence of a possible and imminent solution prevent us from rescuing as many victims of the system as we can. That “many” might not look like much. It may look like convincing one mother out of hundreds entering abortion clinics to not terminate their child. It may entail a family pledging to raise two children who were given up for adoption instead of aborted by their biological mothers. The devil in such circumstances would whisper in our ears that such actions are pitiful when considered to scale. What good is standing outside an abortion clinic two hours a week for ten years for a cumulative amount of over a thousand hours of one’s life and only rescuing a dozen babies, when thousands more were killed in that same duration? What good does one little adoption do (especially with all sacrifices of time and finances) when millions of children will be killed in the same span of years it takes to raise that child? The devil always tries to boast of his numbers in order to get us to despair of our own.
But we must remember that every Christian act of rescuing a child from abortion is a manifestation of the saving power of God; it is a revealing of the heart of the Everlasting Father. How can one put a price tag on something like that? If every child is made in God’s image, then the worth of our rescue is not calculated by numbers. Let us contrast two examples of the crime of arson to cement our understanding of this. If an arsonist sets fire to a paper factory, the brave attempts of an individual to rush in and save reams of paper would seem only absurd. Whether he recovered twenty reams out of ten thousand or two, his rescues would be insignificant to the total amount of loss and the company would not be celebrating the measly amount of paper he saved from the flames but rather lamenting the staggering financial losses they incurred. Moreover, the act itself would not be admirable—why bother risking your life for a handful of reams? If the individual had been able to put out the fire entirely and save the factory, that act may have been worthy of some esteem. But in the absence of such ability, being brave for a few reams of paper is both foolish and frivolous.
But what if an arsonist sets fire to a world-renowned museum? And, in the panic of rising flames, a curator rushes in and comes back out of the smoke with one single Monet? The terrible fact that most of the priceless holdings of the museum—world-renowned masterpieces—were destroyed in the fire would certainly cause great grief. But rescuing that sole painting would not be disparaged in any way but rather celebrated, and cherished all the more bittersweetly because it alone escaped the fire. No one would think that the Monet was not worthy of being rescued simply because all the other paintings were consigned to the flames.
The devil is like the museum arsonist. The greatest Artist of all existence has made millions of self-portraits, each in its own right a masterpiece. Many may be lost by the murderous fire of abortion, but everyone rescued is a cause for great joy, and the value of their rescue is independent of how many others are lost or saved. This truth is a great bulwark to the lies and discouragement of the enemy. A single child saved is infinitely valuable to God, as are our efforts to save one. Our God is a God who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the one. His dwelling place is inhabited with those who strike up the band and uncork the champagne at the repentance of a single sinner—how infinitely precious is a single soul to God! We must never let the magnitude of lives left untouched by our efforts obscure the unfathomable magnitude of touching one individual life for the glory of God.
Furthermore, we must realize that small-scale acts of compassion are never as small as they seem. The repercussions of justice done to one individual can have far-reaching consequences beyond imagining. The word of God itself testifies of this. Moses was one child, bravely rescued from the systemic injustice of Egyptian infanticide (Exodus. 2:2). This one act, this small protest, this seemingly tiny rebellion against a towering malevolence led to the shaking of Egypt. It was the tiny crack in the dam leading to a deluge of pent-up justice that liberated the oppressed masses and the vanquishing of tyrannical forces. Likewise, one child saved from the murderous spree of Athaliah led to both a dethroning of wickedness and a renewed period of national justice and peace (2 Kings 11:2, 17-21, 12:1-3).
Even if the individuals we touch never lead to such visible and climatic change, the repercussions of our acts are still incalculable. Apart from the immediate impact on the individual shown compassion, who is to know how many other actions of compassion that single act inspired or led to, or the size and scope of them? Picture a great and renowned music composer, a progenitor of some of the world’s most beloved and timeless pieces who was instilled with love for music by his grandmother. Surely without the grandmother there would be no great composer and no sublime works of music? But what about the grandmother’s school teacher who first awakened her to the beauty of music? And that school teacher’s uncle who in turn did the same for him? The arcs of our lives, small and provincial as they may seem, are never really small or provincial, and our actions are rippling out through time generating causes only eternity will fully reveal.
To belabor this point a little longer, we would be amiss without pointing out that the force of our acts are not only measured in their individuality but by the collective force to which they belong. The systemic injustice of abortion, after all, is upheld by individuals. It remains a system because of individual secretaries scheduling individual appointments in individual abortion clinics within individual cities, to be seen by individual abortionists. Each employee of an abortion clinic knows that neither staying nor leaving their line of work is likely to change much on a macro-level, and that the upholding of abortion rights and accessibility does not rest solely on any one of their shoulders—and yet it is jointly upheld by them just the same.
So we must realize it is only our willingness to be an individual that—if it is all God allows—saves a few unborn children each year, that in turn brings about the rescuing of thousands of children; that it is in all of us humbly taking our place with hammer and chisel against the great edifice of abortion that this fortress of death will one day crumble. Our individual acts of compassion may seem a pail of water poured out on one small plot in a vast desert land, but collectively they can become the torrential rains of justice God desires the land to be inundated with—if only enough people do their seemingly small acts. Alone, our efforts may seem to be the scantest wisp of a cloud, together they can become a dark and tumid thunderhead.
There are many concrete actions Christians can take to this end. One is to volunteer some of their time at a crisis pregnancy center that provides free resources like ultrasounds so that women can see their growing baby. Ultrasounds have long been a thorn to the abortion industry—when a woman witnesses the obvious humanity of the life inside her she becomes less inclined to kill it. These centers also offer abortion-reversal pills which counteract the effects of the abortion pill mifepristone (RU-486), allowing women who have had a change of heart after taking the pill to save their unborn baby’s life.6 Many also provide free counseling services to help women navigate the emotional duress that comes from having an unplanned pregnancy (especially those in poverty or other challenging domestic circumstances) with the aim of bringing hope to women who are afraid they will be unable to handle going through with their pregnancy. One of the devil’s main devices is the power of fear which he uses to prey upon women and tempt them into killing their child. Dispelling fear from a woman’s heart often leads to the rescuing of a child’s life.
Crisis pregnancy centers are also often able to help struggling mothers get connected with social services or other non-profits to help assuage any financial difficulties a mother may have that would incline her towards an abortion; they provide diapers, formula, and other much-needed postpartum supplies. as well. Taken together, they are havens of hope that provide women with practical and emotional help and a touch of care from individuals genuinely committed not just to the safety of the unborn child but the well-being of the mother’s soul.
Another way to reach individuals with the justice of God is through sidewalk counseling. This involves standing outside or near abortion clinics to lovingly counsel women not to kill their children. Counselors come armed with the truth and a heart of compassion (not self-righteous judgment) to urgently persuade women to choose life instead. The abortion industry thrives on lies and deceit; lies about the physical and psychological health risks of getting an abortion, misinformation about the biological development of a fetus, false narratives of female independence and unborn children as career-crushers and misery-makers and detriments to the soul’s personal happiness. The abortion industry lies by saying it cares about women when in fact it only uses them for monetary gain, and most of all it lies when it tells women that what is inside them is not a human life and can be terminated with no consequence—no guilt, no residue of shame, no wrong done. Sidewalk counselors are on the frontlines of this battle against systemic murder, confronting these lies with love and truth to save children just before their mother delivers them into the jaws of death. They are literally fulfilling the command of Proverbs 24:11 to deliver those being taken to death and to hold back those staggering to slaughter. 7
Adoption is another powerful way of dismantling abortion on an individual level. Like the infanticide of Roman times, the act of abortion speaks two messages over a child: you are not wanted, and you are not valuable. And with every terminated pregnancy those words are not only spoken over that child but function as a discourse to the world at large, suggesting and inviting others to see unborn children the same way and in turn speak the same two things over them. Adoption as an action speaks the very reverse of those words. It says to a child: you are wanted, and you are valuable in the eyes of God. And it too serves as a discourse to the world about what children are and how they should be treated; it is an embodied statement proclaiming a radically different view of the worth of a child and the lengths to which we should go to not only allow an unborn child to enter the world but to welcome its entrance with gladness, care, and love.
When we agree to adopt a child that would otherwise be aborted we not only rescue the child, we powerfully refute abortion’s lie. What was one person’s “mistake” now becomes another’s cherished blessing; what was once an inconvenience to keep now becomes someone others have gladly inconvenienced themselves to keep. Abortion tells society: your own child is not even worth the cost of being kept alive. Adoption tells society: a stranger’s child is worth the cost of being raised as your cherished own.
Adoption in its truest sense is not merely a couple wanting a child someone else did not want or could not take care of; it is agreeing with the heart and mind of God over that child’s life. The child is an image-bearer that he created, one that he desires would come to know his mercy and love. It is his precious in his sight. When a husband and wife adopt a child they are not saying we decided you were valuable to us, first and foremost they are simply affirming what is already and most consequently true: you are valuable to God. If one truly values God, then he or she will value what he values; in this way, adoption becomes a form of worship to God.
The aforementioned activities are no doubt just a few of the many ways compassion can be put into action on behalf of the unborn. It should be added that in addition to the sacrifice of one’s time and bodily presence in these activities one can add their monetary support to reputable organizations and individuals actively involved in such work. The abortion apparatus is well-funded with financial support from governments, with the fundraising efforts of non-profits, with the benevolence of secular philanthropists and the super-wealthy (such as Warren Buffett), as well as the money collected from medical-insurance companies and out-of-pocket costs by abortion providers—it is a monetarily well-oiled machine of death. In contrast, many pregnancy centers must make do with lean budgets that hamper their ability to acquire full-time staff and restrict the breadth and quantity of resources provided and many willing couples are impeded from adoption by the costs of the fees involved. There is no doubt many more children could be saved if Western believers were less materialistic and more interested in using their wealth to transform lives.
It is also true that many in the Church and our consumerist society use the giving of money as a way of avoiding the more inconvenient and uncomfortable methods of seeking justice that require direct use of our time and hands. As this is too easy a trap to fall into, we must caution against any believer from too easily and hastily determining that giving money is the only way they have been called by God to bring justice to the issue of abortion. The Good Samaritan, our model for giving justice to our neighbor, included money in his response when he paid the innkeeper but he also bandaged the roadside victim and set him on his donkey to bring him to the inn; he got his money involved as well as his time and personal presence. We would do well to heed his example and be wary of straying far from it.
This is not to say everyone must give of their time and money in equal measures or amounts. The makeup of our means, circumstances, and callings are endless in variation and we must not judge or presume disobedience on the part of one person or the other because they gave little here or little there or much. We must simply be aware that all of us are called to take up our crosses and live lives of manifested sacrificial love and there is a tendency in all of us that goes against that—our flesh which kicks against discomfort and sacrifice and looks desirously at the path of ease and smallest loss.
Conclusion
There are two more indispensable and biblically-mandated ways all of us who wish to obey God’s commandment to demonstrate justice against the evil of abortion must engage in; these will be the subject of Part VI. For now, dear Christ-follower, if your heart burns to see justice unleashed in the realm of abortion, get on your knees and pray. Devote the time you were spending on that Netflix series or some other recreational endeavor instead to the mighty work of intercession; give God greater persistence than the widow gave to the judge—you have greater grounds for confidence than she did. And better yet, don’t do it alone; gather with other believers who have heeded the call to seek the Judge in the place of united prayer.
Then, go and reach out to the frightened and confused mother; intervene to rescue the life of the unborn child in front of you, angered but undeterred by the knowledge that so many others may not elude the jaws of death. Be Christ to the mother or child he has put in front of you, knowing that regardless of how few or many do likewise as your Lord he is worthy of your witness. Know well also that when enough of Christ’s Body is Christ to the person in front of them, Christ becomes who he is to untold thousands: Savior and Redeemer—rescuer from regret, from sin, from death.
Notes
1 The practice of infant exposure is well attested to in ancient literature; in historical chronicles, in works of philosophy, and in plays and legends. Oedipus, mythological King of Thebes, was left abandoned as an infant; so too were the legendary founders of Rome, Remus and Romulus—said to have survived by sucking from the nursing breasts of a female wolf. Cicero and Seneca seemed to have advocated for the practice, and both Plato and Aristotle promote some version of the practice in their works too, though in their case it can be argued to be part of a utopian or future moral vision, and may or may not cohere to the practices of their times. Suetonius and Plutarch also make mention of the practices in their historical works along with other recorded records.
2 See: Shelley, Bruce. Church History in Plain Language. 4th ed., e-book, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2012, pp. 43, 100.
3 Sometimes, Christians could do little more than give these abandoned infants a proper burial. Inscriptions of buried children in Christian catacombs revealed that some were victims of exposure and infanticide. The Christian’s belief in the imago Dei was reflected in their concerns of treating the body as something worthy of a respectable burial. The pagan emperor Julian is noted to have said that it was “the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead and the sobriety of their lifestyle” that helped advance the spread of their religion (See his letter to Arsacius).
4 See: Shelley, Bruce. Church History in Plain Language. 4th ed., e-book, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2012, pp. 100.
5 Starting with reforms made by Emperor Constantine and culminating in the outlawing of infanticide by Emperor Valentinian, Christians were eventually able to use their influence to persuade rulers to enact laws against the killing of infants and thus bring justice on a broad societal level.
6 A little less than half of all abortions given by Planned Parenthood are now medical abortions (as opposed to surgical ones), and nationwide medically induced abortions account for more than a third of all abortions performed. See: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-abortion-exclusive/exclusive-abortion-by-prescription-now-rivals-surgery-for-u-s-women-idUSKBN12V0CC And: https://www.guttmacher.org/evidence-you-can-use/medication-abortion
7 Again, these actions of compassion are not only directed at the infant, they are also directed at the mother. Abortion preys on the despondent, the confused, the fearful, the desperate and the vulnerable. Many women who get an abortion are pressured to do so, whether by their family or the man who impregnated them, and it is not uncommon to find that the woman wants to keep her baby but feels trapped in a situation where she is compelled by others to kill it. In our post-sexual revolution culture, women increasingly find themselves impregnated by men who have no intention of providing emotional and financial support for the child they have procreated; we have far too many men who shirk fatherhood at all costs and who treat women as something to be discarded after being sexually used. Raising a child alone is a daunting task even for those of ample means and the loving support of a family, and for those of little means and no one to rely on it can take on a specter of catastrophic quality. We must neither downplay nor deny the victimhood of the mother in such situations as we are there to help her too along with her child. We understand, however, that the best way to help her is not to rationalize or excuse her desire to have an abortion, but to persuade her not to make the child she is carrying a victim of her own. That will only add to her misery in the long-run, not alleviate it, as the mistreatment a person receives is never cured by mistreating another.
*Unless noted, all scripture quotations taken from the NASB. Copyright by The Lockman Foundation.
Paths of Righteousness 