Shamed by the Blood of Innocents

The recent news stories have been hard to ignore: the Groningen Academic Hospital in the Netherlands permits doctors to euthanize terminally ill or long-suffering children under the age of 12. In this program, the patients are administered a lethal dosage of sedatives and parental consent is not necessary. Wesley J. Smith reported in The Weekly Standard that "Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years." A British study found that 31% of Dutch pediatricians admitted to performing medically sanctioned infanticide. And Belgium is now considering a similar program in a bill before its Parliament.

These physicians, unfortunately, are the product of a Western society that celebrates death over life, pragmatism over conviction, and man's moral and ethical permutations over God's immutable will. The sheer audacity of child euthanasia is greeted with apathy in nations where souls are dulled by decades of quotidian materialism and a godless humanism that reduces man to the status of a mere animal.

King David wrote in Psalm 9 (KJV):

¹² When He [God] maketh inquisition for blood, He remembereth them: He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.

At no time in human history has the taking of innocent life been of a greater magnitude or pervasiveness than it is today. From child euthanasia in Western Europe to the over 40 million babies legally aborted in the United States the past 30 years to widespread female infanticide in India and communist China, the systematic and socially condoned slaughter of innocents in our modern times is chilling. Believers must face this unsettling conclusion: the nations of the world face a terrible reckoning for these sins. "These . . things doth the LORD hate: . . a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood." (Proverbs 6:16-17, KJV)

The same individuals who condone abortion and eugenic pragmatism are the same ones who triumphantly declare the progress of mankind. Their rational clarity is sacrificed at the altar of relativism. The genocide of millions of babies generates barely a whisper among the humanists who raise a hue and cry over wars waged against brutal dictators and murdering terrorist organizations. In covering the Iraq war, the Western media has bent over backwards to cover civilian casualties. They have been far less dogged in reporting the daily murder of innocents in their own countries.

While no individual is spiritually innocent before God, Scripture asserts the existence of earthly innocence. Children, infants, and, yes, the unborn fall into this category. (Even the conscience of natural man, untainted by peer-induced solipsism, recognizes this fact.) God does not make prenatal life a special case as contemporary thinking would have us believe. In Psalm 139:13, David describes the Lord's involvement in his life -- from conception. "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." This point is even more unequivocal in Jeremiah 1:5 when the Lord says to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart."

Last year, both houses of the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban partial birth abortions, which are abortions performed in the second or third trimester. Since President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on November 5, 2003, there have been several judicial injunctions on the ban. Among the judges who've strayed from their Constitutional jurisdiction are U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton, Federal District Judge Richard Casey, and U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf. The litigators have, naturally, included the usual suspects: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the National Abortion Federation. Even the most egregious of medical procedures are not enough to bend the will of humanists who view personal and social freedom as something best defined by the very few, i.e. an oligarchy.

From Psalm 94:

²¹ They band together against the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.

On April 25th this past spring, hundreds of thousands of abortion rights supporters marched through Washington D.C. to rally their cause. The parade of secular and Christian humanists revealed the irrational and shameless depths of their relativist moral stew. Their view of the human body as property subverts the Biblical concept of stewardship, that life is a gift from God -- it is His to give and to take away. When man regards the body as property, personal or otherwise, he can conclude that it's subject to convenience and pragmatism, no spiritual strings attached. Abortion, euthanasia, and eugenics follow. And yet the defiance on display at the abortion rights march was very spiritual indeed; that is, no amount of profane shouting can quell Godly judgment on the human heart. C.S. Lewis once wrote that noise was the sound of Hell: "Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile -- Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires." For it is in the quiet that God's voice can be heard. When you shout loud enough, you can't hear your own conscience. Legalized abortion is the terminal symptom of a sick society, a convenience to sop, at any cost, the selfishness of its people.

Just this week, the Bush administration declared that over $1 trillion will be needed to resuscitate Social Security. The plan will be buttressed by extensive government borrowing; in order words, by ballooning the national debt. Financial observers have mentioned the direct effect that abortion has had on the stability of Social Security -- the fact that tens of millions of potential workers now do not exist to support what was already an unstable system, a system lauded by those who also celebrate the genocide that is killing it.

Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:5) Think of all the aborted babies who haven't even been given the opportunity to fulfill God's earthly purpose for them! The millions of innocent lives lost call out for justice -- not man's imperfect and sometimes self-defeating sense of justice, but God's justice. For believers, it is His righteousness, not graphic abortion photos, that should open our eyes and our souls. New Testament-only Christians unwisely ignore the inexorable nature of Divine Judgment. Society as a whole is responsible for abortion's terrible legacy, just as it is for the corruption of innocence. We've often heard the phrase, "the punishment fits the crime." And one day there will be an answer for today's mass slaughter of innocents, a crime whose scope far surpasses the comparable atrocities of ancient Rome and Greece and antediluvian civilization. Speaking of the end of the age, Jesus said the following in Matthew Chapter 24 (KJV):

²¹ For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.