Christians Need To Seize This Galvanizing Moment To Stamp Out the Blight of Abortion
Since the Reproductive Health Act was passed in the New York State Legislature, a law that would essentially make abortion legal up to full term, I have been sensing a “galvanizing moment” for the church in America.
I was astounded and encouraged to see many Christians, not to mention a few high-profile leaders, become very outspoken concerning the injustice of RHA, and of abortion overall. I was not the only one to observe the sudden willingness of Christian men and women to bear the reproach of confronting secular society’s central sacrament in abortion.
Although the murderous institution has deserved the church’s constant attention since Roe v. Wade, and although several horrifying revelations about the abortion industry over the years have failed to stir our adequate ire, if this is what to takes to shake the church out its complacency, so be it.
If this is what it takes to restore the moral and spiritual authority of the church as the “conscience of the state,” let it happen now, and let us take full advantage of the opportunity before us.
While the public grapples with the prospect of 9-month-old children being delivered alive only in order to be needlessly butchered, the church needs to grab society by the collar and say, “Look!” And we must not relent until they see it for what it is and see their need for God’s mercy on this nation.
But in order for this to happen, the people of God must, too, be incessantly spurred on by the prophets of God to speak. We must not allow this news item to be just another news item, another “outrage of the week” for us to rant about on social media until something else grabs our attention.
And Scripture commands us to be “making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16). What follows, then, is a modest proposal to Christians great and small to seize this galvanizing moment we have to stamp out the blight of abortion in our generation.
In 586 BC, the City of Jerusalem was destroyed and its were people carried off into exile by the Babylonians. The biblical accounts of the destruction are graphic and horrifying, and this was declared to be a divine judgment from God upon an unfaithful and wicked nation. Leading up to this, the prophet Joel warned the people, urging them to return to God, and implied that this disaster could be averted if they would only do so.
In Joel 2:12-17, the prophet calls for a national fast. The priests were to lead all the people of God, great and small, to cease “business as usual” so that they may gather before the Lord and implore Him to show them mercy and favor.
If indeed they had understood the gravity of the situation, and that their greatest problem was God’s judgment and the only solution was God’s mercy, then perhaps they would have heeded the call. But they did not, deluded that God was on their side and would deliver them from Babylon, and history tells us the sad tale of their resultant undoing.
This case study gives us pause to consider our own situation as the church in 21st century America. Do we believe that the blood of 60 million unborn children, along with innumerable other corrupt practices and injustices, has polluted our land? Do we believe that God, at the very least, has to the right to be angry with and to judge a sin-sick society that has collectively rejected so much favor and so much light from Him over the centuries?
Unlike Joel, I do not have the prophetic insight to declare with certainty anything akin to the Babylonian Captivity in our near future, but when we read of the pervasive bloodshed, corruption and unfaithfulness decried by the Prophets, can we say as a nation we are any better?
If indeed there were an imminent disaster looming over our heads, how would we live? We would do anything we could to avoid the disaster. Or at the very least, we would prepare so as to mitigate our potential losses.
We should learn a lesson from our Judean forebears. It took nothing short of the Babylonian Captivity to turn them from their idolatrous ways. In the same way, it took a Civil War, which cost over 600,000 lives, before slavery would be abolished in our own country. And had they not been decimated in World War II, who knows how long the Holocaust would have been allowed to continue in Germany.
“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people” (Pr. 14:34). As God’s creatures living in God’s world, we as a people cannot defy God’s ways and expect to prosper.
With the examples given above, I would like to reiterate the question, how would we live? Or rather, how should we live? How do the faithful people of God conduct themselves in the midst of a national crisis?
Who were the faithful believers during the time of chattel slavery? They were the abolitionists, like Theodore S. Wright and William Lloyd Garrison, who boldly confronted that evil practice and subverted it at every turn.
Who were the faithful believers in Nazi Germany? Were they not those who worked to hide Jews from the Gestapo, often at great personal cost, like the family of Corrie Ten Boom?
Were they not bold prophetic preachers like Dietrich Boenhoffer, who was tried and executed for his vocal opposition to Hitler’s regime? We honor those men and women who courageously opposed institutional evil in their generations.
But are we their descendants? Or are we descendants of those religious cowards who made a peace with a satanic status quo? If abortion is indeed our generation’s holocaust, then these questions are not merely theoretical.
We are writing the story of our generation and of generations to come. At this galvanizing moment, we can be the difference between deliverance and disaster.
Jared Walker is a pastor and professor who loves to think, read, write and speak on how the Christian worldview applies to current events.
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