“Abortion What Insights Can We Gather From God’s Word”
Psalm 139:13-18 Jeremiah 1:4-10 9/2/2022
In every generation, there are issues that arise in society that cause divisions among people. Both sides assume their side is the right side, and not only is it the right side, their side is God’s side. There is a race by each side to claim a label for themselves and to assign a label either directly or indirectly to the other side.
No where is this more evident than in the abortion movement. When one says I am pro-life, does that mean everyone on the other side is pro-death. When one says I am pro-choice, does that mean everyone on the other side is against all choices being made.
Only recently have people begin to use the terms pro-abortion and anti-abortion. But even those terms are not definitive. On may be pro-abortion for the first six weeks of a pregnancy- but vehemently opposed to partial birth abortions in which the abortion is completed only after part of the baby’s body has come out. One may be anti-abortion, but may feel differently if a mother’s physical life is at stake.
We live in a society in which fear is used to obliterate the truth. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade it did not outlaw abortion. It stated, the Constitution does not grant a right to an abortion. Since it is not found in the Constitution, it is a matter for each state in the union to decide for itself what laws it wants to make concerning abortion. The people in each state should decide for themselves what laws they want concerning abortion through their elected officials.
It wasn’t long before the Court’s decision was leaked that fear was used to convince people that the Court had ruled abortions were now illegal in this country, and that next the court would ban gay and interracial marriages. None of this was true, and everyone should take the time to read the Supreme Court decision for themselves, instead of getting sound bites from people with an agenda of their own.
When it comes to forming an opinion on abortion, many people want to act out of what they consider the most loving thing to do or what they think is going to be most helpful to the persons involved. Not everyone acts out of pure motives. There are some who seek to use abortion for their own financial gain or selfish purposes.
All of our opinions have been influenced by someone or something. We can either be conscious of those influences or unconscious of them, but the influence is there. Sometimes, what we have experienced ourselves or through someone close to us will impact the foundation upon which our opinions are based. Having known someone who had an abortion or having had one ourselves, will impact what we think about abortion.
We want to make good choices for ourselves, and we want to help others make good choices. So what do you do with a young girl who is a teenager that’s pregnant. The guy she’s been going with says the kid is not his. Her parents can’t seem to get the truth out of her from the story she’s telling. They are angry, hurt and upset. She’s now 13 weeks pregnant.
Her support system is collapsing around her. What advice would you give her concerning abortion? We all want what’s best for this young woman, but we are limited in our ability to always know what’s best. For if we had counseled her to get an abortion and she took our advice, we would have eliminated her son “Jesus, was coming to take away the sins of the world.”
If it were not for politics, we would allow science to inform us as to when human life begins. Human life begins at the moment of conception from a scientific perspective. Therefore we are ending a life in an abortion rather it occurs at two weeks, 20 weeks, or 36 weeks. We should at least be honest about what we are doing and the consequences of it. The reality is, there is a separate human life growing inside a woman’s womb.
The Scriptures inform us that life begins even before conception. There was a prophet by the name of Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived during a time when the people of God had rejected God’s law concerning how they were to treat other people. They had a number of unjust laws to keep the poor oppressed.. They didn’t follow God’s commandments in terms of their behavior. They pretty much lived as they pleased worshipping their own man made gods.
Jeremiah spent decades of preaching to the people and to the kings trying to get them to turn back to God. The people laughed at Jeremiah. The mocked him and his messages. They told him to shut up, they didn’t want hear about God. They beat him with rods. They put him in prison. They threw him into a well and left him there to die of starvation. Jeremiah had a hard and difficult life.
Yet God tells Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1:5 (NIV2011) 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” . In God’s eyes, God saw Jeremiah’s existence even before he was conceived.
The world’s viewpoint of the origin of life is that there was a big bang that sort of got everything going and now the universe is running on autopilot. We are told to think, the only thing going on inside the womb of a pregnant woman is what is being dictated by the baby’s DNA.
God’s view is quite different. Not only does God see Himself as the author of the universe and the author of life itself, God has reserved the right to work inside of each woman’s womb. God tells Jeremiah, that he formed Jeremiah in his mother’s womb and that even before he was born, God had assigned him to a task for God’s purposes. God knew that Jeremiah was going to have a rough life, yet He chose him inside of his mother’s womb.
Psalm 139 also gives this same picture of God working inside of a mother’s womb for God’s own purposes. We see in verse 13-16 Psalm 139:1-24 (NIV2011)
1
13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Once again we find the Biblical theme of the foreknowledge of us by God before we are born. God’s plan for us take place before and while we are in the womb. Rebekah is a woman of God in Genesis 24 who was having a very difficult pregnancy. She asked God, “what’s wrong and why is this happening to me.”
God was very specific saying that two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other and the older will serve the younger.” God not only saw the future of the twins inside of Rachel’s womb, he saw the future of nations. Can we honestly say we know what the future holds for a child who is scheduled to arrive at an inconvenient time in a person’s life?
Abortion had its roots in claiming that a human embryo in its early stages was no different than any other animal embryo. If your understanding of creation is that of an evolution of all life coming from a single animal billions of years ago, then maybe human life could be considered the same as any other life form. Yet deep down inside we don’t believe that. We know that shooting your neighbor’s dog is a different kind of a crime than shooting your neighbor.
If your understanding of creation is that God uniquely created human beings in God’s image and that God placed within us a living soul then we look at abortion from a slightly different perspective. Abortion now involves the eternal purposes of God because a soul is also involved.
In the book of Luke, which was written by a physician, Luke tells us about the pregnancy of Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a woman who had conceived her first child late in life. Before Elizabeth got pregnant, an angel appeared to her husband and told him, your wife is going to have a son, you will name him John, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. He will prepare people to turn back to God.
Once again, we find God has a plan for a life before conception, that will continue after conception and after birth. We see that the Holy Spirit is going to be at work in a child in his mother’s womb. When Elizabeth was about 24 weeks pregnant. Mary who was just a few weeks pregnant with Jesus came to see her. Luke writes Luke 1:41 (NIV2011)
41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. If God were not at work in the baby John how would he have known anything about Mary and what was taking place in her life. Not only does he have knowledge poured into him, even in the womb at 24 weeks he experiences emotions. Elizabeth said the baby in my womb leaped for joy. In Elizabeth we find the emotion of joy and in Rebekkah we saw the emotion of anger between the two unborn children.
We recognize even among our own children, that no to two come out with the same spirit and the same disposition. Something has been at work in them before they have made their entrance into the world. That something is God. At what point should we have the right to take away a life that God is giving to us.
We say we want to be loving? Love shouldn’t be just a feeling for the moment. We are given a definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (NIV2011)
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails
Have you ever thought about what it means to love a woman who is experiencing an unwanted pregnancy? What is it suppose to cost you to love her? It probably goes beyond showing up at a protest march. Is she your neighbor in the way Jesus spoke of when he said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Have you ever thought about what it means to love a child, who is in the womb of a mother who does not want the child? What is that love suppose to cost you. Again it probably goes beyond showing up at a protest march. Is that child one of the least of these, that Jesus spoke of when he said, “whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done it to me.
Have you ever thought about what it means to love the boy or man who caused the unwanted pregnancy? What is that love suppose to cost you? What is your responsibility to him if any?
Abortion is an issue that we can try to hide behind by being in one camp or the other. But Jesus is calling us to strip off our labels and to genuinely decide to love all of His creation. He wants us to love the mother, he wants us to love the child, and he wants us to love the father. Our love for each is going to look very differently depending on who we are and what our situation is.
I don’t think God wants us trying to play God based on our limited knowledge of what we think the future may bring. Our faith is to be rooted in the word of God and in trusting that God is able to do more than we might ask or think in a given situation.
When Jesus Christ came into this world, he came to save sinners. All of us are in need of his salvation. We will be tempted to do things in our moments of crisis and fear that we would not do otherwise. Jesus clearly told us that the enemy came to kill, steal, and destroy, but that he has come to give us life and to give it more abundantly.
We should be honest with God and with ourselves, that abortion is the taking of the life of an unborn child. It is ending whatever future God may have had for that child. For it we don’t admit the truth, we can’t confess it and repent of it. It will only lead us further away from the Lord.
But we have the promise from God’s word, if we confess our sins, “He’s faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. When God asks us, “what did we do about abortion?”, God’s not going to be asking the numbers of protests or rallies we participated in, or the number of conferences, we attended, but rather “how did we love the mother and what did we do to love the child and did we consider loving the father.” Our call is to be faithful to Jesus Christ in loving our neighbors.
It is good to work for laws to protect the unborn, but we do not need laws to begin doing what God has granted us permission to do which is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s the foundation upon which we should look at abortion.
This sermon looks at abortion from a biblical framework of what takes place in the womb.
