By Pastor Samuel Chess

Grace Emmanuel Church

Port St. Lucie, Florida

We are who we are because of who God is:

We love because he loved us first…

He calls us to be Holy because he is Holy…

He is righteous and calls us to live righteously

He love justice and enables us to live justly…

(Psalms 36:9) … For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. He is the great I AM…in him is the very power of being.

(John 8:12) …. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."

A) God loves life….

…… and everything about life. When he created this world he poured it full of life. He didn’t have to. He could have made one man, and one horse and a chicken and Adam would have lived pretty well…for a few weeks. Genesis 1: 20 says when God created the world:

Creation Teemed with Life!

1) When Jesus was asked about paying taxes he took a Roman coin and said (re- phrase) “Give to Caesar that which has his stamp on it‘s face…Make sure you give to God what has His stamp on its face.

2) What has God’s stamp on it’s face right down into the tissue and bones?______ Humanity! Human being do not have just relative value, like a plant or a pig…they have built in intrinsic value. They are valuable whether they act like, look like, produce like, anyone else believes they should and our value comes not from what we do but from who created us and the fact that our Creators image is stamped into our very soul!

3) Human life is not to be casually destroyed, discarded, sacrificed, or euphonized because anyone else thinks they might be useless. Their value comes from the fact that they are cherished by their Creator.

A) Among all human life; God especially cherishes innocent human life!

When we think about God’s dealing with the Israelites we remember things like plagues, and the earth opening up and swallowing people, and God commanding the whole Canaanite society be put to the sword to preserve the purity of Israel’s relationship to God. Sometimes we get a picture of God that he was almost indiscriminate in the taking of human life…..Not so!!!

God only brought punishment to those who wholeheartedly rejected his laws. To everyone else God jealously protected their lives.

In fact.. God was incensed if a human life was taken unjustly!

I have never really notice this until this week…look with me at Deut. 21:1-9. This has to do with God’s law to the Israelites if an innocent person is found murdered:

(Deuteronomy 21:1-9) "If anyone is found slain, lying in the field in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess, and it is not known who killed him, "then your elders and your judges shall go out and measure the distance from the slain man to the surrounding cities. "And it shall be that the elders of the city nearest to the slain man will take a heifer… the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with flowing water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and they shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley… and all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley. "Then they shall answer and say, 'Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have our eyes seen it. 'Provide atonement, O LORD, for Your people Israel, whom You have redeemed, and do not lay innocent blood to the charge of Your people Israel.' And atonement shall be provided on their behalf for the blood. "So you shall put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD. (NKJV)

What an elaborate and costly ritual to go through just because somebody was killed who didn’t deserve it.

The whole town comes to a stop..

They kill a perfectly good heifer..

They sacrifice it on a prime piece of real estate making the

land holy unusable for anything else.

All so that God can remind them how much of a value he places on human life, especially innocent life!

Interestingly enough, the people, themselves were not guilty of killing the innocent themselves. They could honestly say, “We did not do it, we do not know who did…yet God demanded that their leaders lead them in this costly ritual to openly renounce the shedding of innocent blood; Just so they would collectively feel the heartbeat of God for the preciousness of human life.

Let’s go one step further…

B) Among all forms of innocent human life, God especially cherishes children!

Our society, perhaps every society operates the same way. If you hurt a child…if you are speeding through a school zone and hit a child or you run a stoplight into the side of a school-bus; you might as well just drive off the edge of the earth. Jesus had the same feeling about children.

He’s talking very tough…it’s something we all do when we feel something very deeply.

C) Among all innocent children, God sees the Pre-born as His unique work of creating!

Now Pastor you are going to go getting all political on us: Let me make a statement for the record. I’m not at all concerned with the political correctness or the political incorrectness of what I’m going to say. This is not primarily a political issue…it is a spiritual issue. We don’t solve this issue with answers of logic or majority vote, we must solve this issue with Biblical truth.

We live in a weird society: If Scott Peterson kills his pregnant wife with an unborn child in her womb he will be charged with; not one murder…but two… If he hadn’t killed his wife and she decided she did not have time to take care of a child she, herself, could have gone to a doctor, eliminated the baby and much of society would have applauded her action.

If a drunk driver kills a mother and baby on the way to an abortion clinic he will be charged with a double homicide. If the mother gets there safely she can have the same baby removed piece by piece or have the baby killed as it’s born in a “partial birth” abortion and the law not only will not punish her but will strongly support her right to do so.

Here’s a familiar passage everyone uses on Sanctity of life Sunday but it is deeply revealing about God’s view of the reborn child: King David writes:

In our society we carefully use different words to talk about the born child as opposed to the unborn child. The born child is “My Baby”; the unborn child is “the fetus”.

The inspired Word of God doesn’t draw any such distinctions. In Genesis when Rebekah’s twins were preparing to become world leaders God doesn’t say; The two pieces of tissue bumped into each other:

(Genesis 25:22) But the children struggled together within her; and she said, "If all is well, why am I like this?" So she went to inquire of the LORD.

Same word is used throughout the Old Testament for unborn children as is for born children. After Mary conceived Jesus and went to meet Elizabeth we read:

(Luke 1:41-44) And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! "But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? "For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. (NKJV)

Little hard to associate that with: Mary developed excess tissue in her womb and when she met Elizabeth the unconscious tissue in her womb kicked her for who knows why and Elizabeth inanely screamed: Blessed is your tissue because my tissue just kicked me in the gut.

The word “baby” used for Jesus and John the Baptist in the womb is the same word used for the baby Jesus after he is born. There is simply no distinction in God’s mind between the two.

In God’s great plan a child, five seconds after conception has all the genetic material they will ever have. All the stages of human development from an embryo to a senior citizen are already completely present. Pre-born children are not in the process of becoming human…they are 100% human from the time the egg and sperm unite. And..no life doesn’t start at the point of conception….

Life only started one time…when God breathed life into Adam and Eve. After that life is only transferred from one set of human being to another. The discussion about whether life starts at conception or after the birth of a child is complete theological nonsense. Only God himself has the power of being, the power of life, and he transferred is one time for all humanity when he started the human race.

God alone has the power of life and God alone has the power of death. He built uncompromising commandments in his law against taking the life of another human being

and yet….

Almost every third baby conceived in America is killed before it breathes its first breath. One out of every six abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “born again Christians”.

Every 20 seconds in our nation a baby is put to death….every minute and a half a “born again Christian” adds one to the fatality count.

The CDC says that 43 % of American women will undergo at least one abortion by age 45.

To you who have been through the pain of abortion in the past, I strongly encourage you that your past sins are forgiven, God is not holding that sin onto your account. You are forgiven, cleansed…..but to all of you including you teenagers from this day forward………………………………..!!!!

Let me say it again….

God alone has the power of life and God alone has the power of death!

Here’s the logic.. or lack of logic we go through as a nation. Obviously aborting children can not possibly be the same thing as the “You shall not Murder” found in the ten commandments. If it were our nation, collectively, would be guilty of millions of homicides and we’re not murderers. We are loving and caring people. We would never hurt an innocent child. We would all risk injury ourselves before we would allow an innocent child to be hurt. Every one of us would react fiercely if we saw a child being hurt or killed. Abortion cannot possibly be the murder of an innocent child…if it were it would offend our built in sensibilities. Since murdering a born child deeply offends us and terminating an unborn child does not, obviously they can’t be equal in value to the human race.

Abortion cannot possibly involve the murder of a living human being!

Do you know that in the early days of America the people who defended slavery saw themselves as good people who would never hurt or abuse another person. Yet the owned slave and treated them worse than their livestock. The only way they were able to do that was to convince themselves that the slaves were not really people. While they had a beating heart, and arms and legs, and faces they were, in some strange way not on the same level as real humanity.

We look back on that now and think how insanely awful it was that any thinking human being could look on another human being, who had a different color skin or who came from a different country and culture and think that they were less than human. But somehow, they managed to convince themselves that a segment of their society was less than human and when they became convinced of that fallacy they lost all sense of conscience in how they treated others whom God had created.

In just 30 years, since 1973, the majority of our society has gone from believing that killing an unborn child was morally wrong to, now, believing that anyone who still believes that ancient idea is outdated and unenlightened and just plain stupid! 30 years ago our conscience was torn up by the practice of abortion. Now presidential candidates run to win the position of “leader of the free world” ,based in part, on their uncompromising acceptance of this practice.

Come on pastor, your are making too big a deal out of this….Many abortions are to save the life of a mother or child or may be the result of incest or rape…..

93% of all induced abortions are performed on perfectly healthy mothers with perfectly healthy babies.

50% of all abortions are repeat abortions…it is simply another form of birth control.

God’s judgment was very severe on those who had innocent blood on their hands…

(Ezekiel 22:3-4) You shall say, Thus says the Lord GOD: A city that sheds blood in the midst of her… You have become guilty by the blood which you have shed.. and you have brought your day near, the appointed time of your years has come. Therefore I have made you a reproach to the nations, and a mocking to all the countries. (RSV)

God could easily be saying these words directly to America:

Let me take you even one step further:

The heathen around Israel would actually birth their children, then offer them as a sacrifice: God was very clear to Israel:

(Leviticus 20:2-5) "Say to the Israelites: 'Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech. (NIV)

Pastor, you can’t draw a comparison between abortion and Israel sacrificing their children to and idol….. I can’t….Why not?__________________________

Israel didn’t pay attention to God’s laws and God finally brought his judgment. As he is reading off the list of wrongs they did that deserved His punishment, with a final sigh, God says: