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Introduction
They called him the weeping prophet, and with good reason. He was
called by God to preach messages to His people that they would not want
to hear, God’s correction that they would not receive and His commands
that they would not obey. He was destined to rebuke kings and priests,
false prophets and a profligate nation.
He didn’t want this
burden, but God put a fire in his bones and made him want to preach His
message. He spoke against the many sins of Judah and prophesied that the
nation would be carried off into captivity in a faraway land. In one of
the tenderest passages in all of scripture Jeremiah was permitted to
speak message of hope for the people of Judah – a promise that God would
ultimately restore them to their homeland.
In the middle of that
promise a bleak description of the despair the people were feeling in
those long years of their captivity comes forth from the lips of the
empathetic prophet: This is what the Lord says,
“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping
for her children and refusing to be comforted because her children are
no more.” (Jeremiah
31:15)
When the Babylonians invaded Judah and dragged off
the people, Jeremiah sees with his prophetic eye, and later experiences
personally, not only his precious Jerusalem being destroyed, but
innocent children being slaughtered in the invasion. As our news brings
us endless scenes of destruction and death in Haiti we are ready to
understand the bitterness and sorrow of the mothers.
He pictures
for them Rachel, Jacob’s wife and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, weeping
for all her descendants, as an ancestral representative of the mothers
who wept for their children.
But his words served an additional
prophetic purpose, because they are the words quoted by Matthew in
another dramatic historical event. Generations later, the long awaited
Messiah has come, in remarkable and surprising fashion—as a baby. The
tyrant king Herod out of suspicion and jealous rage orders all male
children in the vicinity of Bethlehem to be killed, in hopes of
eliminating this new king with whom the Magi were enamored.
About
the murder of those innocent children Matthew writes,
Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah
was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because
they are no more.”
Have you ever been near a mother whose
innocent child’s life was taken by an act of violence? There is no
consolation for her. The sorrow and anger comingle, the sense of sudden
loss foments and nothing—no words, no touch, no loving concern can
mitigate the pain. She refuses to be comforted.
Injustice and “the Culture of Death”
Unnatural, immoral, hauntingly wicked is the killing of innocent
children. We are not surprised that the Spirit of God would draw on such
a torrid imagery to illustrate what is perhaps the worst miscarriage of
justice in all the world’s history. The most arresting image in warfare
is not the leveling of a city, the strafing of the countryside by
napalm, not even the catastrophic numbers when the numbers of soldiers
dead and injured are added up on the newsreel. What sickens us the most
is that heart-wrenching observation, “and many innocent children died.”
If your spirit listens carefully among the echoes of our
culture, you will hear again the sound of Rachel’s weeping. Among the
dwindling numbers of citizens in this country who dare to believe in
righteousness there is the nauseating awareness of a terrible, ongoing
injustice,. “The slaughter of the innocents” is the grim headline
assigned to Herod’s murderous Bethlehem pillage. It is an apt name for
our more modern holocaust - Abortion.
Many liberal minded people
make a big deal of social justice, but wink at this most hideous of all
social injustices. They insist that in a “just society” there is no
mistreatment or exploitation of the defenseless. And they go to bat, and
rightly so, for the poor, the underdog, the needy, those
circumstantially bereft who cannot take care of themselves. But there is
no one more innocent, more defenseless, more vulnerable than a pre-born
human being. Fully alive and responsive, but helpless in a pool of
amniotic fluid, the fetus is the most endangered species of all.
Nevertheless, these same liberal-minded defenders of the innocent,
champions of the helpless, 37 years ago this Saturday marshaled their
forces and legalized the most heinous of all injustices. The Roe v. Wade
decision recklessly handed down by When a most injudicious team of nine
judges recklessly handed down their grisly decision in the Roe v. Wade
case in 1973, they in fact signed what has become, to date, the death
sentences of 50 million innocent, vulnerable, helpless babies.
You shall not murder.
Exodus 20:13
And it won’t do to stick our heads in the sand
of imbecility and call them simply masses of tissue. Their hearts beat,
their brains work, when they are threatened they recoil, and when they
are stabbed, sliced and suctioned out of their wombs, they scream with
pain. Keep praying that our president, our legislature and our wayward
courts will one day wake up and say, We have made a horrible, horrible
mistake.
The chances of your being killed by terrorists anywhere
in the world is about 1 in 650,000. The chances of your being killed by
a mugger, sniper or maniac in any major city in the US is 1 in 4,000.
The chances of your being killed if you’re in the womb of an American
woman – 1 in 3.3!
It sounds like the baby shower from hell. As cake and punch are passed
around, a doctor runs medical tests on a month-old baby. If he passes
the tests, the guests welcome the child to the human community. But if
the baby fails -- if he has, say, Down's syndrome, or cerebral palsy --
the parents bid him a sad farewell. And then, the doctor snuffs out his
life.
Believe it or not, a Princeton professor thinks parties
like these would be a good idea. This is a tragic illustration that the
killing of a month-old child -- once absolutely unthinkable -- has
become a debatable moral question.
In an article entitled
"Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong," philosopher Peter Singer writes:
"Perhaps, like the ancient Greeks, we should have a ceremony a month
after birth, at which the infant is admitted to the community. Before
that time," he says, "infants would not be recognized as having the same
right to life as older people."
This means that if the child is
considered "defective" in some way, the parents would presumably have a
different kind of ceremony -- one that ends with child being admitted,
not to the human community, but to a grave.
This is morally
acceptable, Singer says, because newborns, while indisputably human, are
not really persons. They don't become persons, and acquire a right to
life, until weeks or even months after birth because they lack
"self-awareness." This man is teaching your kids at Princeton!
It’s no wonder that the wisest of our contemporary philosophers and
sociologists are now saying that history will record that this season in
our nation is when the “culture of death” was inaugurated. Recently our
president made a statement to Pope Benedict that he “would try to reduce
the number of abortions in the United States." Here’s the question: if
abortion is not wrong, if abortion is not murder, why did he pledge to
reduce the number? If abortion is murder, why pledge to “reduce” the
number of abortions? Why not abolish them altogether?
I pray for
our president. I give him all the honor and respect I can. But he is
wrong. And our government is wrong in this matter of life versus
abortion on demand. A far greater pastor than I, and a man with awesome
intellect and communicative skill is John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem
Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Here is some of his stirring commentary .
. .
Play the Tangle video at this site:
http://www.tangle.com/view_video?viewkey=8768cf5b97a6d08ae5ce
Righting the Monstrous Wrong
Edmund Burke’s famous quote is as true to today as it has ever been in
the 225 years when he first said it: “All that is necessary for evil
to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” It hurts me in a deep
place to admit that good men have been far too quiet concerning this
heinous cancer in our culture. We must do all that we can under the law,
around the law and in spite of the law, to put it finally to an end. It
should never have been, and it most certainly should not continue.
1. We must redress our government concerning this evil. That
involves Prophetic pronouncement—that is, the church speaking clearly,
courageously and continuously the mind and heart of God. It involves
political engagement—at the very basic level, voting for righteousness.
I don’t care if they’re Republicans or Democrats or Libertarians, we
must find the best candidates among those who respect life, and vote for
their best platforms.
It involves participation. Where are the
letters to the editors that wisely and responsibly spell out the
reasonable notion of respect for life? Where are those who will stand
against the tide of immorality and idolatry before the gods of hedonism
and convenience? And it involves prayer. Would you do the perfect will
of God and intercede daily for the abolition of abortion? Let us come
before God and repent for our ill-chosen laws, our spineless passivity
and our thoughtless culpability. Get involved with Mosaic Ministry, pray
for them, fill those baby bottles. . .
2. We must personally
repent while we come to the God of holiness and righteousness, for
inasmuch as the Church of Jesus Christ has remained silent and paralyzed
before the noisy and amoral minority , we have allowed them to steer the
culture, when that is our rightful stewardship as salt and light. The
temptation here will be to shy away from repentance, but that is only
pride and arrogance. Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift
you up and cause you to stand. Draw near to Him and He will draw near to
you. Honor His Word and He will honor your cause. Repent of sin and He
will heal you.
3. We must receive God’s healing In a group this
size, statistically, there are predictably a dozen or more women who
have had an abortion. And there are as many men who’ve condoned and
encouraged those abortions. The message to you this morning is simple.
God wants to forgive you. His Son died to make it possible.
Post-abortion counselors agree there is very troublesome residual pain
that abortive women deal with for the rest of their lives. The church is
not here to add more guilt to that burden, but to give you good news
that God knows all about your sin AND your need, and He longs to forgive
and heal you.
I recommend to you that you seek post-abortive
counseling. It is offered through Christian agencies such as Mosaic, and
appointments can be easily and discreetly set up. Let someone help you
in the name of Christ. Find deliverance from guilt and shame through the
personal ministry of the Spirit of Christ working through sincere
believers. And let there be no tsk-tsk-ing among the rest of the sinners
in this room who might wrongly assume that abortion is somehow more
wrong than your sins. We are all sinners in need of the reconciliation
Jesus died to provide us. Self-righteousness is an affront to the God of
truth and mercy. Repent of it, and receive His healing.
To the
rest of us, especially those of child-bearing ages, both men and women,
I remind you in the sanctity of God’s Word and the power of His Spirit,
hold your sexuality in holiness as befits the children of God. Marriage
is God’s ordained confines for the sexual relationship. There you can
avoid unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease and much, much emotional
pain.
If and when you come to the place where you consider
abortion as an option, remember, where the sperm and egg has joined, God
has created a human life. Respect it. This child is more than a part of
your body. S/he is a human being in the image of God. It is God we serve
and it is He alone to whom we must answer, not the gods of pleasure,
preference or convenience. May Rachel’s weeping finally come to an end
in America.
Manhattan Declaration comments
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