STUDY THEME: GOD’S PROMISE OF GRACE. 1-19-03

"THE PROMISE OF LIFE’S VALUE." PSALM 139: 7-16; MARK 10:13-16.

PSALM 139: 7-12, 13-16; MARK 10: 13-16.

PLEASE OPEN YOUR BIBLE TO PSALM 139.

Today we have our annual "Sanctity of Human Life" lesson and I would like to spend much of this time looking at the problem of ABORTION. This seems to be a major problem in our society today. The verses just read would lead us into a discussion of three attributes of God. Omniscience means that God is all knowing. Omnipotence declares God to be all-powerful. Omnipresence means that God is everywhere present.

Let’s move on to our study of "The Sanctity of Life." September 11, 2001 is a date that will live forever in the memory of all who witnessed the horrible events of that day. Thousands of human lives were sacrificed by terrorists who apparently believed they were doing the will of their god. Such total disregard for the value of human life is beyond our comprehension. How could anyone be so deceived as to think God would approve of the destruction of persons He created and gave His Son to redeem?

Today’s lesson addresses the Life Question, "Why should I value and protect human life? The Biblical truth is "Because God created and values all human life, His people are to value and protect human life. The desired Life Impact is to help us value and protect human life.

In Psalm 139 we have this great passage which says that the unborn child is the special work of God, created in His image.

Since this is one of the most important Bible passages with bearing on abortion, we will look carefully at it to be sure we understand its message. The overall message of these verses is that God created new life within the womb and that He has a purpose for each new life.

What a beautiful expression of the personal involvement and care given by the Lord! He designs and forms each person to be a unique product of His creative work. From the moment of conception and throughout the development of the child, God is working to accomplish His purpose. There are five points in these verses that answer five questions: who, how, where, what, what, and why?

For one thing, God is the One who is the Creator of human life. He created Adam and Eve in a unique way in the beginning, and He continues His creative work in each new life conceived and developed within the womb. Conception and birth are not purely biological processes. Mother Nature does not do it. The eternal God does it. The fact that God is the creator is crucial.

Life begins at conception---the embryo is the first stage of human development. To interrupt this process that God has begun brings an end to a human life. The destruction of over 2,800 lives in the Word Trade Center disaster was a horrible act that the free world condemned. However, the most recent statistics reveal the gruesome fact, that an average of 3,700 deaths by abortion, occur daily in our nation! Abortion is the expulsion of a fetus from the womb before it is sufficiently developed to survive. Another way of describing abortion, from this Scripture text, is to say it is the human way of preventing God from knitting together a person in a mother’s womb.

The combination of these four words shows that God is the One who creates human life within the womb. He is pictured as a skillful weaver who puts together the complex parts of the human body. This focuses our attention on the third question about where the work is done. The psalmist wrote that God’s creative work in making him took place in my mother’s womb.

David’s sense of amazement progressed as he pondered the wonder of his own creation by God. To put it another way, "When you embroidered me, You made the very fabric; you pulled together every tiny little piece, and You wove it all to make me." If he could have seen how life develops step by step, he would only more loudly have affirmed what he wrote.

Human characteristics appear early after conception. On day 20 foundations of the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system already are established. On day 21 the heart begins to beat. On day 28 the backbone and muscles are forming. Arms, legs, eyes, and ears have begun to show. By day 30 the new life is 10,000 times larger than the fertilized egg.

Vs. 16 helps to answer the why question. The words all my members is literally "all of them." The King James Version assumes hat it refers back to substance, hence the development of the new life within the womb. The NIV understands "all of them" to refer to the days of one’s life. The first line of Vs. 16 reinforces 13-15, but the last part seems to make a related point: that before our birth, God knows all about the days of our lives—our eternal destiny.

What an amazing revelation! Not only does the Lord put us together in our mother’s womb, but He also records the days of our lives before we are born. How eloquently and beautifully this speaks regarding the fact that our lives have a God-given purpose. The One who creates us in the womb does so with a definite plan for our lives; and He designs us to fulfill that plan. Doesn’t this convince us of the value of every human life? And should we not be devoted to the protection and preservation of each life?

I would like at this time to read from a sermon preached by John F. McArthur Jr. Of course I will not attempt to read to you the entire 25 pages which you can get in its entirety from the Internet at http://www,biblebb.com/files/MAC/ABORT.HTM or you an obtain a copy of the tape by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA. 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE.

McArthur said "As we come this morning to the matter of abortion, before I take you into the scriptures and we look more closely at what the Bible has to say, it is probably fitting for us to get some kind of a grasp on the issue itself. So, I want to address that, if I may, for a moment. What I am going to say to you may sound like an article in the newspaper because it is full of statistics and quotes and that kind of thing, but it does set the scene for understanding the issue at hand.

To sum up what we are experiencing with regard to abortion in America, we could simply say, "America, as a nation, is highly committed by law and by practice to a form of mass murder." And that is really the bottom line."

"This nation which certainly prides itself on its humanitarianism, is in a murderous cycle of violence that makes the Nazi Holocaust look mild by comparison. Nearly 2 million babies are aborted each year in America. Every third baby conceived now is being murdered. Among teenage women there are 736 abortions for every 1,000 births. Among married women abortions now exceed births! More babies are killed than are born. Some would tell us there is an abortion about every 15 seconds in America.

In some metropolitan hospitals, in the major cities of our nation, abortions far outnumber live births. Planned Parenthood has gone so far as to say, "This is nothing more than a means of preventing disease; pregnancy being noted as a disease." If you think that sounds farfetched, I will remind you of a paper by Dr. Willard Kates, from the Planned Parenthood Physicians Association. The title of the paper is, "Abortion as treatment for unwanted pregnancy: the second sexually transmitted disease."

Pregnancy then, is seen by Planned Parenthood as a sexually transmitted disease that needs to be cured by abortion. Planned Parenthood has somewhere approaching 1,000 abortion clinics doing somewhere approaching 75,000 murders a year, and receiving millions of dollars of support from the U.S., Government and the United Way, and other agencies like that. Our nation and other nations in the world are frankly wiping out an entire generation of human beings in mass infanticide.

It is estimated that perhaps as many as 75 million babies will be murdered this year around the world---75 million! That’s probably conservative. It’s more than all the deaths in all the wars, in all the history of the world. This kind of murder is shocking. I will skip the methods used in first, second, third trimesters and partial birth abortion because it is offensive.

The Van Nuys Police had a dilemma not long ago, when a woman in Van Nuys had a baby in a bathroom—and she killed the baby with a razor blade. Had she killed the baby before it was born, she would have had no problems. But because she killed it with a razor blade after it was born, she is serving an 11 year prison term. This is the stupidity of Humanism.

Fifteen year olds can get abortions without parental knowledge or consent; in fact, generally the law wants to say that parents are the enemy of the freedom of the child; in fact, even the consent of the spouse is unconstitutional. Dead fetuses are used in an industry of business and experimentation. Squibbs Co. is involved in paying tens of thousands of dollars to doctors to experiment with fetuses for use in research on high blood pressure drugs.

Bags of babies are found by trash compactors, yet on the other side of this, a wounded American eagle was found recently in Maryland and rushed to emergence treatment. However, it died and a $5,000 reward was offered for the arrest of whoever injured it. The same people who want to save the eagle are leading the parade, usually, to kill the babies.

Abortion has developed into a multi-billion dollar industry. Many people make their money on this. I talked to an abortionist who was attending our church, some years back, and presented to him the gospel. We had several meetings together and he understood fully the gospel. I don’t know his spiritual condition at this time, but I remember on the days that I talked with him that he told me that he himself alone did $9 million worth of abortions in a year in his own clinic. (that’s one doctor).

The question then comes, "How did this ever get started? Whoever started this?" Well, sad to say it goes way back. I mean if we want to know where it all stated we have to see that it started certainly in the mind of Satan according to John 8:44, "He is a murderer." Certainly it started from the same kind of fallen attitude that made Cain kill Able. Cain was a murderer; that’s the expression of fallenness. You can go way back and you will find that there have been efforts on the part of Satan to murder babies in the time of Moses and in the time of Jesus. And he was successful, as you know, in the time of Jesus, in massacring babies under the age of two, in order to try to eliminate the Messiah.

Looking around, for example, say the ancient time of Judaism, you can find abortions practiced among pagans, but never among Jews, for obvious reasons. They knew that life was sacred, life was granted by God, and they used to "camp" on the second great commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and since a baby conceived was a person that became their neighbor and therefore to harm their neighbor would be to violate the second commandment.

Coming into the N.T. time there were also pagans who engaged in abortions, but again Jews did not do it in the N.T. time, nor did the church. Plato and Aristotle both recommended family growth limitation through abortion. Abortion was used even in N.T. times among pagans to conceal illicit sex. If you could remove the evidence, you could remove the stigma of illicit sex.

The reformation didn’t change this; the church has always seen abortion as murder, an act of violence and a lack of love towards one God has created. So it isn’t new: the people of God, Israel, stood against it, the church has stood against it; and we must stand against it.

Here we are living in a time when this abortion movement has become a massive industry, has become a reflection of our culture, and if we look back a little bit you can see what the pieces were that sort of came together to build the platform on which the whole thing stands. Let me just see if I can’t share some of them with you. This whole commitment to abortion started:

Step one, the Sexual Revolution---the Sexual Revolution which basically said, "We want to be free to express ourselves sexually." You go back to the early sixties, everybody has got to be engaged in free love. Remember the expression "free love," you remember all the hippies and the whole thing. The Sexual Revolution spawned abortion as an industry, because it basically said, "We have to be free to express ourselves sexually, and we don’t really need to be dealing with the consequences." In fact, they would go so far as to say, "If we are going to be free, we women certainly can’t be victimized by men.

In order for us to be really free, you have got to eliminate the consequences, the major consequence of free sex, free love, and that is you have got to be able to eliminate pregnancy. Otherwise, we become victimized by men, and we don’t want to be victimized by men.

So the Sexual Revolution with its free love really set the stage for the massacring of millions of babies, who were nothing but an intrusion in the fornication’s and the adulteries of a wretched, degenerate society.

Then came along the whole Feminist Movement. The Feminist Movement took the expression of sexual freedom one step beyond. They basically said, "We not only want to be sexually free without consequence, but we want to be able to put on our blue suit and take our briefcase and go to work every day too. We want to compete in a man’s world as equals and if we have to have babies (then) we can’t do that." "Women are not equal," they said, "to men unless we are rid of childbearing responsibilities. Betty Friedan, who is a leader of the Feminist Movement said, "Women must have abortion as a backup to contraceptive failure." Contraception first, and if it doesn’t work then abortion because we can’t be bothered with children. We have got to go to work and make our way in a man’s world.

So you have the Sexual Revolution compounded by this sort of genetic game playing from those who wanted to eliminate the deformed from society, and adding to that compound problem is the third feature which is the feminist argument: "If we are going to work in a man’s world and be equal to men in every way, we can’t be fussing around at home with kids, so we have got to eliminate them from our lives.

Then you had another component, another piece came in to the platform from the population control advocates who were telling us that we all were going to be standing on each others heads if we kept having babies. We were all going to be crushing each other out of existence because the world was going to be overpopulated. Don’t you remember reading that in the 60’s? Everyone was screaming about overpopulation. I remember finding an old book that was written in 1918, in which a man said, "If something doesn’t change---we have too many horses in the streets of Chicago, and at the projected rate it’s going right now, in another 25 years the city of Chicago will be 18 feet deep in manure." This is the same kind of reasoning: we are all going to drown in a sea of babies.

All of this fed the building of this platform; it was all material fed into this building project to build the platform upon which the Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion verdict came down on January 16, 1973. At that point the Supreme Court of the United States excluded unborn children from the protection of the 14^th amendment, which says, "No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law." They said, "Unborn children aren’t persons." Yes, they are!

Yes, they are.

The phrase "Pro Choice" means "without conscience, or without inhibition, or without restraint," and it parades itself under the Jeffersonian banner of liberty of conscience and separation of Church and state. As a rhetorical gesture, perfectly designed to function as a political banner. This phrase constitutes the last word: the official formulation of official apostate defiance against the God of Christianity. I am confident that God will answer it apocalyptically.

Yes, I believe abortion is the last official stand of the defiant apostate against God. It says, "God, you will not determine who lives or dies—I will!" This is the ultimate apostasy.

That’s where we are in our culture, and we are there by law—the law of our own government. The court ignored the issue of when life begins, which is a medical/scientific issue, even though criminals have been successfully prosecuted for killing unborn children in an attack on a pregnant mother. That child is considered a non-person if its own mother decides to kill it, if a criminal kills it they are prosecuted; if the mother kills it is a non-person.

As far as I can tell, there is no nation on the face of the earth with a more permissive abortion policy than the United States, with the single exception of China. It is reflective of our prurient, lascivious, immoral, perverted Sexual Revolution; of the deviation from God ordained role for men and women. It is reflective of our selfish, materialistic value system. It is reflective, most of all, of our atheistic ethic hostile to God; and we now have a holocaust; and we have a holocaust which God will judge.

What does the Bible say about all this? We have already noted that from a medically scientific viewpoint, conception yields a new person, and so life begins at conception. Person-hood begins at conception. We now say as we look to the Bible, that, "conception is an act of God." Ps. 127: 3 says, "Behold, children are a gift from the Lord." God creates personally every life—Scripture makes that fact clear. In Gen. 20:13, 16:2, and Sam. 1:5-6 the Lord prevented childbearing, while in Gen. 17:16 and 21:2 God give a son to Sarah and Abraham even though they were past the age of childbearing.

Now somebody says, "Now wait a minute. What about the deformed people that are born. Is God the creator of those?" Exodus 4: 11, God says, "Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him dumb or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" I make them that way. It is for His purposes sometime to make men dumb, and deaf, and seeing, and blind and Down Syndrome.

So the first point, and the point at which we must start any biblical discussion is that conception is an act of God. An act in which 23 chromosomes from a father and 23 chromosomes from a mother come together in a strip of DNA that makes a life. And at the moment of that physical coming together God then, by the agency of the Holy Spirit, breathes a soul: an immortal, eternal soul, that transcends the body (for it will live forever though the body will die). And at conception then you have life.

To kill that life is to "play God," and as serious an affront as it is against the life itself, it is a more serious one against the God who is the Creator. That is why it is the ultimate decline in our culture. It is the ultimate evidence of the wretchedness of our culture. It is the ultimate proof of how deep our atheism runs, that we will kill life that God creates. We have usurped the sovereign throne and, we are now God, and we will determine who lives and who dies. This is spilling over into euthanasia, which is coming like a hurricane to wash away our whole old population because, we are now God and we’ll decide. This kind of atheism will bring the wrath of God.

PLEASE TURN TO THE BOOK OF MARK CHAPTER 10.

I remember reading some years back about a lady that most of you remember---her name is Ethel Waters. She was a real instrument for the Lord, giving her testimony she shared a wonderful little story. She said, "A pretty black girl was attacked and raped by a white man in Pennsylvania. She was barely past her thirteenth birthday and soon was found pregnant. And Ethel Waters said, "No, no abortion." Instead, a healthy baby girl who came to love Christ and sing for His glory and make millions happy: a girl whose theme song was "His Eye is On the Sparrow,’ and that girl was me."

Jesus loved children while here on earth. I believe in heaven He cares for the millions who will be aborted this year around the world; the yellow, red and black and white. They are all precious in His sight.

SPEAKING OF HEAVEN; OUR LESSON NEXT WEEK FROM JOHN 14 AND REV. 21 IS "THE PROMISE OF HEAVEN." A.V. DAUGHERTY 1-19-03