Humanity: An endangered species
by: Richard Land - Jan 18, 2010 - comments: 3
Of all the issues that face the American family today, none of them has produced more heartache or tragedy than abortion. Many of us have failed to understand that human life is not like any other life. The Bible tells us that God made man in His image and breathed life into man. We are not just a part of the animal kingdom.
Yet since 1973, the legal status of unborn children has been that they’re not children at all, but “products of conception” that can be removed at the mother’s whim. (How there can be a mother but no child eludes me.)
The Bible’s teaching on the sanctity of each human life is unmistakable. Even so, the most endangered species in our culture is the unborn human being. You can abort your baby without penalty, but if you shoot your dog you can be arrested (not that I am condoning such animal cruelty).
We’ve been brutalized, desensitized, and paganized by an ever-rising tide of the blood of the unborn as our nation aborts over 3,300 babies a day. America is practicing child sacrifice through abortion and the abuse and neglect of our young children because we have forgotten God and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator.
God has a plan and a purpose for every single human life that is conceived (Jer. 29:11; Eph. 2:8–10). Have we aborted a gifted evangelist, or the researcher God sent to find a cure for cancer? Have we aborted an insightful theologian, a great president, an international peacemaker? Each of those American babies was a child—a child with a future and a purpose, sacrificed to the pagan gods of social convention, career advancement, and material well-being.
I can still remember as a young boy having a Sunday School lesson about how the children of God had become so paganized that they sacrificed their little children to the pagan god Molech. I could never have imagined then that I would live to see my country offering up its unborn children as a type of pagan sacrifice.
God judges us, I believe, in large part as a society, on how we deal with the most helpless and defenseless among us. We’ve lost our moral compass. And so there are going to be those around us who will give us conflicting advice, conflicting opinions. And there is no longer, as there once was, a presumption in favor of life, particularly for unborn babies.
Death has invaded the nursery and the retirement home too, making young and old alike the victims of biological bigotry. We must oppose the barbaric, lethal combination of technical expertise and spiritual ignorance that would deny that there is a spirit in man that is not in the animal kingdom. We must oppose those who would abort and experiment on the preborn, harvest fetal tissue, allow death into the nursery for our mentally and physically handicapped infants, and encourage euthanasia in hospitals and retirement homes.
Unless we reverse this relentless march of death, many of the people who are aborting their children will themselves be euthanized in their old age by the very same criteria they have used to eliminate their own offspring—when others consider them to be too ill, too embarrassing, too expensive, or merely too inconvenient.
Richard Land is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. Our free, downloadable Impact resource is also available online. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.
Further Learning
Learn more about: Life, Abortion
comments (post your own) feed
1 On Jan 20th, 2010, at 5:57pm, Kemper Lawson wrote:
The blood of innocent aborted babies cry out to GOD from the ground.
2 On Jan 26th, 2010, at 6:16pm, D. S. Hughes wrote:
Our country is desperately in need of an Awakening including God’s children. We have closed our eyes, and been silent too long. Materialism and convenience have become our idols taking precedence over the value of Life.
Abortion is America’s holocaust.
3 On Jan 26th, 2010, at 11:08pm, Terry Beals wrote:
Think of the impact 50 million million people would have made on our society and economy. Buying, working, spending and having more children… We would not be worried about Social Security or anything else. We would truly be the richest and strongest nation in the world and we would have God’s blessings on it all.