I want to begin by saying something a bit controversial. I know it can be polarizing to lead off with a debatable point, but here it goes. I just don’t feel good about public executions of innocent children. I know. I said it. Retract my invitation to the Christmas gala if you must. But I simply can’t sign off on the practice.
I wish I was telling you an imaginary tale. But these sick, abominable executions took place just last week in our nation’s capital outside the Supreme Court. Antilife protestors assembled there shouting, “Abortion Pills Forever,” some of them proceeding to take Mifepristone, a pill involved in killing a baby inside the womb. No arrests were made.
God is providing us with several examples of the inescapable concept. It is not whether, but which. It is not whether you will have eternity, but which eternity you will have. Eternal life is one option, and that is the option we Christians extend to you in Jesus’ name. Eternal death is the other option, and that is what Planned Parenthood offers you, and quite explicitly: Abortion Pills Forever.
Now I am aware that the Dobbs case is a great opportunity. Indeed, God has blessed us such that we are having a conversation of some significance about overturning Roe. I do not want to diminish any gratitude for such advancements. Rather I want to take whatever advancements have been made and immediately advance further. I want to get down to the heart of the matter.
It is not hard to imagine some moderate evangelical taking me aside at this point and reassuring me that things are not as bad as they seem. “Yes, Jared, those protestors in D.C. were off the rails, but they were outside of the court. Inside the court, you could not find such a sentiment.” Is that so? I contend just the opposite. Inside the court was the basis and rational for the public executions that took place outside. There was an organic connection between the two. Inside the keys were struck, outside the pipes bellowed.
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!
At the opening of the court last week, the Marshal of the United States Supreme Court announced a lovely and traditional declaration: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”
That’s right. That wasn’t theonomists smuggling God into the court. That was the Marshal, the head of the U.S. Supreme Court Police.
Nevertheless, having invited God to save the court, Justice Sotomayor quickly disinvited Him from that court. She apparently would not have His salvation. In her questioning of Scott Stewart, Solicitor General for the State of Mississippi, she sought an answer about when life begins. She asked, “When do you suggest we begin that life? Putting it aside from religion.”
Justice Sotomayor wants to say, yes Mr. Stewart, I know that the Marshal over there said some strange words at the beginning that you might have heard in Medieval England. They had something to do with Oyez and God. But now that we are through that part, and putting aside God’s salvation of our nation, can you tell me when life begins? Mr. Stewart, putting aside Life Himself for a moment, can you tell me when life begins? Putting aside Truth Himself, can you tell me the truth about this matter? Putting aside God altogether, can you tell me when this little one bears His image?
You can’t snip the line to the heavens, without plunging yourself into hell. We will be one nation under God, or one nation aside from Him. The latter nation seeks eternal death, rather than eternal life.
All Kinds of Insanity
Laying God aside is the foundational problem. And from that soil springs all kinds of insanity.
Ms. Rikelman argued the following before the court, “For a state to take control of a woman’s body and demand that she go through pregnancy and childbirth . . . is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty.” This is Orwellian newspeak of the highest order. The state prohibiting abortion is not the state taking control of a woman’s body. It is the state preventing another human from taking control of a woman’s body to murder the life in her womb. In the old days, folks called that protecting your child. It used to be a thing for which we gave thanks. And now, Ms. Rikelman laments it as a deprivation of her liberty. When Patrick Henry declared, “Give me liberty or give me death,” I don’t think he had in mind the liberty for others to murder and mangle your children.
Ms. Rikelman was not the only one speaking in such a way as to make us think the clocks are striking thirteen. When your very own Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar, was asked by Justice Thomas what right there was to abortion, she replied,
The right is grounded in the liberty component of the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Thomas, but I think that it promotes interest in autonomy, bodily integrity, liberty, and equality. And I do think that it is specifically the right to abortion here, the right of a woman to be able to control, without the state forcing her to continue a pregnancy, whether to carry that baby to term.”
The language of autonomy has been employed in proabortion arguments for some time. In a 1985 North Carolina Law Review, the late Justice Ginsburg wrote, “I appreciate the intense divisions of opinion on the moral question and recognize that abortion today cannot fairly be described as nothing more than birth control delayed. The conflict, however, is not simply one between a fetus’ interests and a woman’s interests, narrowly conceived… Also in the balance is a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course—her ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen.”[1]
One appreciates Justice Ginsburg’s honesty. She agrees with me that the protestors outside of the court were not taking birth control pills, but publicly murdering their children. She also acknowledges the conflict between the child’s interests in the womb and the mother’s interests. But there is more. The baby in the womb must war against a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course. And I say there is no such thing. So, stop setting up the poor child in a battle with this idolatrous deification of woman.
Your Representatives Speaking
America must realize that these are her representatives speaking. God hears. He sees and knows. You miss the point entirely if you claim, “I did not appoint these judges and generals to their offices.” Fine, but your president and senate did. You follow with, “Well, I didn’t vote for them either.” Oh, so are you of the tribe that says, “Not my president?” No, you are not of that tribe. You are a citizen of this nation. And to deny that it is your representatives who are speaking above is to give into the very autonomy that is being argued by the proabortion side. I understand that we are nation divided. And I thank God that many individuals in America are not in agreement with their godless representatives. But I repeat, they are our representatives.
When you find a nation conversing for decades on end about the legitimacy of using a vacuum to suck a baby out of her mother’s womb, then you’re getting very close to what is called the outer darkness. And Christ is the only One who can deliver from the weeping and gnashing of teeth in that endless night.
So, this is the message for all of those advocating the abortion carnage, be you holding the gavel inside courts or forceps inside Planned Parenthood. Jesus Christ came to save sinners. He is the Son of God who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered under Pontius Pilate. This Christ was crucified. He was crushed for our iniquities, even those of crushing children in the womb. He has risen from the dead, never to die again.
His blood is enough to clean the vilest sinner. And His blood is the only way sinners get clean. So come to Him in faith, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.
[1] Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade.” North Carolina Law Review 63 (1985): 383.