Exploring Abortion in the Age of Fulfillment
Live from Salt Lake City, where we are learning together how to live in the age of fulfillment.
Reflecting on Abortion
I want you all to know that Seth and Wendy and I pre-taped another show called abortion last week. But the Spirit would not let me rest on the matter and this is a completely new pre-taped show. I want to thank those of you who have written in and asked me to really consider the ramifications of abortion on society, families, individuals, and of course especially on women, the unborn child and God. These letters have served to move me to further investigation on the subject which have included my watching videos from both sides of the issue, watching two actual abortions being performed, and reading thoughts on the subject from some of the most informed minds out there.
This show is called Heart of the Matter for a reason – it could equally be called, “the Root of the Problem,” or “the Core of the Issue” – as we are dedicated to facing the forest of information and opinions on every topic we try and address (excepting interviews) and speaking to the essential themes of the issue relative to biblical Christianity lived in an age of fulfillment. Again, I am speaking to Christians who understand eschatology and then understand that we are living in an age where the culture and walk is different than what is described in the New Testament. There is perhaps no greater subject on earth that affords me a better opportunity to illustrate the principalities of Christianity in the age of fulfillment than the subject of abortion.
Personal Beliefs and the Role of Christianity
Understand clearly that I am personally appalled by abortion, have never participated or encouraged an abortion and have had a number of occasions to conveniently do so. As a sold out believer to God and Christ, the word of God and His hand in creation, the idea and actuality of abortion breaks my heart.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS?
(beat)
The fanatics from either side, however, can turn the channel now – I cannot appease you or your zeal to defend or attack abortion and have zero interest in trying. This is important for me to say here and now because ABORTION is much, much, much more in our day and age then the act of ending a pregnancy before the delivery of a baby. Because of this fact, which I intend to illustrate tonight, the Christian community loses, in the end, when it steps in “representationally” or “collectively” and decides to fight against it.
Why? We are fighting an unwinnable war; We will not stop abortion even if we legislatively get it banned. And most importantly, we lose what being a Christian is all about (AS DEFINED by what our Christian leader Christ said and did in His life) and what His apostles did with theirs – which was to share Jesus as the solution to this world’s ills.
Balancing Both Sides of the Debate
The difficulties with the topic or debate on abortion need to be mentioned:
First, there is great purpose and value in both positions – who doesn’t care about the well being of the unborn and who isn’t interested in freedom of choice for people? Both of these things are vital to God – unless you see God as a sovereign law giver who wants his children on earth to reign despotically over others by the law! Related to this first point, when either side and either argument is freely laid out and presented – in speeches, films, and/or interviews – when they are viewed in isolation of the opposing side, they are genuinely convincing – unless, of course, someone has prejudiced themselves so much that they can only see and hear their own views reiterated.
I try VERY VERY hard not to let my prejudices influence my opinions because opposing views do have merit – to some extent or another, and when they are included fairly into a conversation they have the ability to produce a number of really important things, like:
Compassion Love Prayers And actions that lend to helping others rather than just condemning them.
This reasonable approach to topics like abortion are shut down by the polarized sides because they thrive on the emotionalism of the topic. What Christian isn’t moved by the sight of an aborted baby’s arm, and what person wanting choice isn’t offended by personal assaults on people working at abortion clinics? This stuff is the fodder of fanaticism, and I don’t see either my King or His apostles getting anywhere near such tactics.
Super extreme difficulties are created when we examine a topic and we refrain from trying to…
Abortion Perspectives
see things from ALL the participants points of view. In the case of abortion, I think it’s very necessary to try and see the act from:
The Mothers point of view (all things considered) The Father’s point of view The baby to be aborted point of view (including pain and trauma, life opportunities lost or gained. Societies point of view (sociologically) The medical practitioners point of view, and of course in the case of being a Christian, from God’s point of view (in terms of what is actually said in scripture and then the fruit of the Spirit working on and in those who are His).
I won’t even try to articulate these various perspectives tonight, but they are important when we try and examine any subject but especially abortion. Finally, as far as I am concerned, the issue at hand must be absolutely de-politicized and completely gutted of religious influence – which I realize is a pipe dream – but political sway and religious influence has a way of swinging others away from these things I just mentioned and bringing them to bias – which is so easy to do in something like abortion.
I know that the world at large will disagree with this last part – especially the zealots on either side of the fence – but political leanings and religious indoctrinations allow for dogmatic thinking, and dogma only serves to emotionally polarize people who would otherwise do better if they sought to see the issue of abortion from a big-picture stance rather than a political or religious one.
The Role of Believers
This is an important part of being a believer in the age of fulfillment:
We, by the Spirit, whose fruit is love, take every situation in hand, appealing to the Law of God written in our hearts, and humbly assess situations like abortion through these lenses – not through what the extremists, the politicians, or the religionists demand.
We are sons and daughters of God, and as such we are fully responsible for OUR individual views, words, actions and behaviors – toward those who are like-minded, and toward those who are NOT like us, who do not live or think like us. This brings me to a stark reality that must be considered IF you want to live your faith out in this world as Christ lived His.
And that reality is this – and has always been this, like it or not:
There are those who live (act, make decisions, speak, think) their lives for the immediate “here and now,” and there are people who live (act, decide, speak, think) their lives with an eternal perspective in mind. Herein lies the demarcation line between those who are Children of God – his actual sons and daughters, and those who are not.
Short-term vs. Eternal Perspective
Now, all of us, Christian or not, have acted or lived our lives in the immediate view. This view is the view of the world as it has very little care for the eternal view but is only concerned with surviving here and now. And so most of us have cheated on tests and taxes, have broken traffic laws, and have fulfilled our lusts improperly.
We do this because we believe such actions are necessary or convenient to our earthly well-being. Relative to having abortions, this is the general world view – the participant is acting on the immediate well being of themselves – just in a more extreme expression – an expression many Christians will condemn all the while forgetting that everything all of us do to serve our own needs is a similar crime.
To me, since we are all guilty of doing this to some extent or another, Christians ought to refrain from condemning those who find themselves doing it too – even if we convince ourselves that selfishly taking cuts in a long line is nothing like selfishly ridding ourselves of an unwanted pregnancy – in the end, the reality remains – these are all decisions based on “a short-term, immediate temporal world view” of life.
Alternately, those who strive to see life through what I am calling “the eternal view,” are far more apt and equipped to see selfish short-cuts as incongruent with the long-view and are then try to make the appropriate choices. What we are looking at, then, when it comes to abortion, is the difference between those who see life through a short-term immediate temporal world view and those who see life through an eternal world view.
And the means by which we help people adopt the
Immediate vs. Eternal Perspectives on Abortion
latter is bringing Jesus into their lives, NOT attacking the short term self-centered acts that accompany that vision. In every frame of footage I watched on the subject of abortion, the decisions from people who chose to either have an abortion or to defend the rights to abortion were entirely couched on the immediate world view.
This mind-set is not one bit different that the younger prodigal son in Luke chapter 15, to impetuously took his inheritance, went to a far country, and spent it all without any plan for the future. Sad? Yes. Painful? Certainly. His choice? It was – and he lived with the consequences. Interestingly though, it was his poor choices, and the pain from them, that led him back to his father. Something Christians in the age of fulfillment need to seriously remind themselves of.
Unfortunately – again, truly and deeply unfortunately – many people who are in strident opposition against abortion have chosen to respond to the horrors and shame and guilt and pain of abortion from the same ever-so-limited perspective – the immediate – and that only makes true eternal resolution far more difficult and complex.
Responses to Abortion
Let me explain what I mean by this. Those who strive against abortion posit their revulsion against the act in the “framework of the immediate,” instead of in the framework of the eternal, and in so doing have resorted to showing bloody depictions of brutalized baby parts, shaming women who are going into family planning clinics, and even killing medical professionals who are performing them.
Most of them use “God and the Bible” as being really concerned and angry with abortion – and they speak and act for God (without authority) in these actions, but again, it is all couched in the immediate world-view. The problem, and the actual hypocrisy in approaching abortion in this way, and not from the eternal view perspective, is it absolutely fails to explain both God’s relative indifference to other atrocities that happen to children and their own. Let me give you some examples.
Other Atrocities Allowed
Did you know that God lets: Over 1 million children disappear around the world every year? Many never seen again? That he allows over 26 million pornographic images of children to exist on the dark web for sexually depraved people to indulge in?
Did you know that God allows 3.2 million children a year to experience physical abuse – which in 80% of the cases involves at least one parent participant? That in the US alone 5 children under three die from being beaten to death every day? Did you know that according to UNICEF God allows over 3 million children to die from malnutrition every year (with many of their deaths being the results of disease overcoming them because their little bodies cannot resist the invasion)? That infanticide (which is the killing of babies at birth) still runs rampant in many 3rd world nations and that in places like Africa and India 41 out of every thousand births end with that baby dying from being strangled or abandoned?
Did you know that around the world there are over 73 million children under 10 who are forced to labor in hazard-filled jobs? Did you know that around the world that there are over 100 million homeless children? Who allows this? Listen – in the end, it is the same God who allows abortion.
Where is all the Christian uproar over these grave real situations that are heaped upon children? We see and hear very little from our street choirs, right? That is because abortion has been politicized and is the card that divides the world (and nation) politically – and many emotionally driven souls who see and hear the horrors of abortion are recruited to join the fight – on the streets, online and in the voting booths.
Where’s our ardent compassion of the abused, raped, illicitly filmed, kidnapped, prostituted children? Who is really fighting to feed the children that we have? How on earth could we have children sleeping on the streets in a world of Christian love? The answer lies in the fact – the fact – that we have allowed politically driven men and women sway people of faith into believing that they are actually accomplishing something by fighting abortion.
My point is not to say any of these things are okay or acceptable, just like the point is NOT to say that abortion is a harmless act – its all ugly, harmful, brutal and riddled with straight-up PAIN for the innocent.
The Illusion of Earthly Solutions
The point is to say that in the end – understand this – in the end, God lets and allows all of it to happen and in the end, all of it has always happened, all of it is going to continue to happen, and no matter what short-term empty cause Christians embrace, it is not the cause of Christ. He lets and allows disease to flourish, and terrorism to occur, and natural disasters to wipe out some pretty good segments of society. He allows the atrocities of war, children with deformities to be born, cancer to thrive, and carloads of teens to die in accidents almost every weekend of the year.
And Christians have a few choices we can make in the face of these facts: We can do what Jesus and His apostles did, and live lives of faith and agape love, and shine light into this needy world – light of compassion, and forgiveness and hope in the face of all this human atrocity OR we can do what Jesus and His apostles DID NOT DO, and we can embrace secular temporal causes, become political, rally behind religion and their puppeteering, and Don Quixote the whole mess, absolutely deluding ourselves – in the name of Gawd.
The Rise of Christian Reconstructionism
Unfortunately, many misguided men and women have chose and have chosen the latter. It has gone on for thousands of years but relative to abortion, the religio-political approach really took hold around 1973 when four men – all of them ardent Calvinists, by the way – decided that God, through political action, had to start ruling over the lives of individuals like He did over the Nation of Israel anciently. The leader was a man named Cornelius Van Til and the three that borrowed heavily from him and systematized his legalisms were named Ruosus Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, Gary North, who helped Rushdoony create a book to support their views of “Christian Reconstructionism.” The book was titled, The Institutes of Biblical Law.
Just as the writings of Hegel influenced Marx and the mind of Nietzsche influenced Hitler, this book, which again promoted returning to God’s Law (as found in the Old Testament) influenced a group in the Americas called the Religious Right. Their focuses? School prayer, homosexuality, contraception, pornography, and of course, abortion. Rushdoony was so zealous he wrote that there should be the death penalty for “public blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, witchcraft, incorrigible delinquency, unchastity and the propagation of false doctrine.” These men somehow forgot, with all of their learning, that the Law was nailed to the cross of our Christ, that we are dead to the law, and free to live lives according to the New Commandments of faith and love. From this book came the moral majority, and innumerable other factions that hijacked the names of God and Christ, and systematically got a nation of believers to think our faith is political, religious, and worst of all, aimed at forcing the world to fix itself.
The True Source of Change
Look – it is a no-brainer to see the devastation of abortion on the baby, the mother, the father, the family and the world at large. Go watch one being performed if you disagree. The toll for even watching one will rip you up. But abortion is not one bit more horrific than infanticide or the prostitution, kidnapping, beatings, homelessness and malnutrition of our children.
There is one, and only one solution to all of these evils, folks, and it does not come by the flesh of Man – that is the cause of it all. The solution is our King – shared with those who need him, in love, with compassion, with hope. In summary, and in the age of the fulfillment of all things (except the individuals decision to walk in the light of an eternal perspective or the immediate) there are two questions Christians, Sons and Daughter Christians, must ask themselves when it comes to abortion:
- What is my world view? (And)
- How will I choose to react to those whose world-view is different than mine?
The idea of an earthly kingdom materially governed by righteousness is a lie. We will not ever bring one down by our fleshly efforts nor will we ever stop fugly things like abortion, child abuse, or infanticide – ever.
But God did give us a solution that actually works – it heals, it saves, it…
Eternal Solution
That is the response to every abortion ever committed – Him. Nothing more, nothing less. Because He is the eternal solution, and can become the immediate for people who choose him.
Embodiment of Christ in the Abortion Debate
Isn’t it interesting that the opposing sides of the abortion issue are known by names that EMBODY Christ Jesus: Pro-Life (as He is the way the truth and the life) and Pro-Choice (and that all people are given the change to choose this day whom and what we will serve)?
Compassion and Love
Step far away from the zealotry on either side. Choose Him and then help others, with his compassion and love, to live.
Write you comments below and we will review them tomorrow night – here on Heart of the Matter!
