My Dad had a tradition of buying and saving a copy of the local and national newspapers on the day his kids were born. Just yesterday we got out the January 23, 1985 edition of USA TODAY, printed on the day I was born. The largest headline on the front page reads “Abortion Debate Rages in America.”
The landmark case of Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, and the issue has been intensely debated ever since. In the 49 years following, up to today, approximately 63 million babies have been killed through means of abortion.
Stop and think about that for a moment. 63 million lives snuffed out before they could see the light of day. Consider that the current population of the United States is 329 million people. That means we have aborted 19% of our population in those 49 years. And it was all perfectly legal.
As I write, it is June 20, 2022. Any day now we expect the US Supreme Court to hand down its decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case. As you are no doubt aware, earlier this year a draft of the majority opinion in this case was leaked by someone with access to it, revealing that the court was likely going to overturn Roe v. Wade after 49 years. Nothing like this leak has ever happened in the history of our country’s highest court, yet many were not surprised. This forthcoming decision could very well mean the beginning of the end for legalized abortion in roughly half of the states, and eventually perhaps the whole country.
The first sermon I ever preached on abortion was on January 22, 2012. The text was Leviticus 20:1-5. The title was “Child Sacrifice and the god of Self.” In that text, God condemns those who participated in the horrific practice of child sacrifice to the false god Molech. My point was, we are no more enlightened than those people in ancient times. We still sacrifice our children, only now the god is not Molech. It is ourselves. Almost every abortion is the killing of one life so the life of another can be more comfortable.
In that same text in Leviticus 20, not only does God condemn those who sacrificed their children, but also those who knew about it and passively stood by and said nothing. That, perhaps more than anything else, convicted me that I would not be a preacher and yet say nothing from the pulpit about the evil of abortion.
If you had asked me back in 2012, when I preached that sermon, if I ever thought I would live to see the end of legalized abortion in America, I would have said “probably not.” When I consider the overall direction of our country, it seems it is in the exact *opposite* direction of biblical morality. And yet, while the trajectory on so many issues is ungodly and immoral, the tide on abortion has shifted quickly and significantly toward pro-life! When I was young, we used to learn about the horrors and evils of slavery. We learned about the holocaust. And as we learned, we asked ourselves, “*How could people have been so blind?*” It is my prayer that very soon, we will look back at the last 49 years and ask the same question about our own generation.
Please Lord…
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