BST No.10 Abortion - what the Bible Says

Relax and listen to the word of God. First of all from Jeremiah in chapter one. The word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. Then Psalm 139, for you created my inmost being.

You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Then Isaiah in chapter 49. Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See, I have you engraved on the palms of my hands.

And Jeremiah in chapter 31. The Lord appeared to us in the past saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with loving kindness.

Proverbs in chapter three. Speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Isaiah in chapter five.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. And then Matthew in chapter one. This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.

His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph, her husband, was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. The Lord will add his blessing to those readings from portions of his word. Father, we're dealing this evening with a very, very important subject.

And it's thrilled many of our hearts to at least hear one national leader declaim against the scourge of unwarranted abortion. And we would to God that there might be people in our country who would likewise stand up in Parliament and say similar things. So we commit our nation to you and some of those statutes on the books of the legislature which run contrary to the greatest book in the world.

And we ask that ere long they may be changed. And we pray for more Christian members of Parliament. And we pray for Christian doctors and all those who are involved in trying to maintain a Christian morality in a day when immorality and amorality abound.

For the sake of Jesus Christ, we ask these things pleading to for your help as we now look into your word and discuss a somber yet vital issue for the Savior's sake. Amen. I'd like to appeal particularly for your concentration this evening.

The subject in mind is not one that I would rush to speak on, but it's something that I believe needs to be brought to the attention of everyone here. And in one sense, the younger you are, the more important this topic is because the more you're going to have to face the consequences. Though one prays for the Tabb family, no one will be personally involved in the issues that we're going to have to look at this evening.

The topic, of course, is abortion, what the Bible says. There are many things that fascinate me about this book, and perhaps one of the greatest is the unique way in which the most delicate matters are handled in a fashion that causes one to recognize just how wonderful is the subject and how good is God's gift of sex and reproduction and family life. There's many a novel that you could pick up at WH Smith's or any other book seller, and it would make you blush, and it would make you get a wrong impression about human relationships.

Things that were precious have been brought down to the level of the sewage, and what God has called good, people have turned unclean by misuse and by perversion. But when the Bible speaks about sexuality, it speaks in the most tender, yet in the most frank ways. And perhaps one of the most lovely illustrations of dealing with consummate skill in the area of a delicate subject is discovered in the first chapter of Luke's gospel.

You might like to turn to it. It's about the only place where we'll keep coming back to in scripture this evening. And while you're finding your place, let me remind you that there's a young woman, probably not much more than a girl in late teenage days, and she discovers that something remarkable is about to happen to her.

So you read the story of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and the events that preceded that birth. Luke 1, 26. In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David.

The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, Greetings, you are highly favored. The Lord is with you.

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, Don't be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God.

You will be with child and give birth to a son. And you are to call, you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. His kingdom will never end. How will this be? Mary asked the angel, Since I am a virgin.

The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.

I'm so grateful to the translators of the NIV that they followed the good habit of the authorized version and went against many modern translations when describing Mary's future condition after this piece of information was given to her. They don't translate the Greek, Mary will become pregnant. I'm glad of that.

They say, Mary will be with child. And if I could shift any term out of the English language, perhaps with only priority given to obscene terminology, it would be the word pregnant in respect of a mother anticipating birth. I think the Victorians were dead right when they used that rich biblical expression with child.

Mary was not just pregnant. That's a clinical way of describing it. She was with child.

That means to say, of course, that if the child wasn't delivered or if for some reason there was a miscarriage, she would be without child. And in one sense, those two expressions pinpoint subject matter and present the challenge and the dilemma, the problem of tonight's ministry. If once you were with child, and then not as a result of a natural accident of the body, shall we say, you are without child, then how do you describe what causes you as a woman to move from one category into the other? That's really what we're asking.

And a supplementary question to that one is, this being within the womb, is it an it or is it a person? And that little reading from Luke's narrative of the birth of Christ seems to tie it all up. And indeed, if you follow me no further, though I trust you will tonight, you've got the biblical answer set down in that lovely choice passage of the description of the announcement of Mary's future birth of Jesus and how that birth was to come about. Now Mary was excited, though she was puzzled, and she realized that something extraordinary, by way of a coincidence, had happened.

She got a cousin some distance away, not in northern Galilee where she lived, but in the south of Palestine in Judea. And she too was with child. It wasn't a miraculous conception, it was a natural conception.

So what does Mary do? Well, she decides that she'll leave Nazareth for a while and she'll go down and she'll have time with her cousin Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth hears and sees that Mary has arrived, some interesting conversation develops and something rather strange happens in Elizabeth's womb. Look at verse 41.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby, the future John the Baptist, leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed, Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child you will bear. But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby, unborn, in my womb leapt for joy.

Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished. The reason why I have every right to speak from this pulpit and particularly on a Sunday night on the subject of abortion can basically be summed up like this. Man is made in the image of God.

He's not just an ordinary creature of nature and we should treat them well also. He's an extra ordinary one because there is such a distinction between him and the most intelligent beings in the animal kingdom. And when the image of God is attacked, then those who believe the gospel which speaks about man and God should declaim against the attack that's been leveled.

Secondly, the Bible makes it very plain that what is contained within a woman's womb is not, as I suggested a moment or so ago, an it, but is a being. And there are many scriptures which demonstrate that, a selection of which David has already read to you. And the third reason why I have every right to speak to this subject is this.

The Bible says in the authorized version language, thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not kill. What is abortion? Well, the Latin dictionary or the dictionary that traces it back to the Latin word gives us this definition.

To perish by an untimely death. To perish by an untimely death. A modern dictionary gives us this.

The procuring of a miscarriage of birth. The procuring of a miscarriage of birth. There are a number of ways in which a miscarriage can be stimulated.

This is rather unpleasant, so switch off if you don't like unpleasant things. But we live in a rather unpleasant world and we need to face some of these issues. A miscarriage can be stimulated by suction.

That means to say that the little baby in process of formation in his mother's womb, in process of growth to be more accurate, is sucked out and what is left in the womb is scraped away. There's another fashion in which an unborn child can be caused to miscarry in the womb and that is by forgoing the suction and just taking the knife and in effect cutting the little fellow or girl up and as a result through the natural process of the body what is remained, what remains, is aborted. It is discharged.

Later on in pregnancy, if such is to be terminated, to use the language of abortionists, it wouldn't be possible to apply these two methods and so what you would do is you would poison the little fellow or the little girl and you'd do it by injecting into the sack in which they exist in the womb some concentrated salt. The salt will burn the skin and within a day or so there'll be a miscarriage and what comes out is a shrunken, shriveled little fellow or little girl. If the quote termination unquote occurs very late in pregnancy then they'd have to go into the lady like a cesarean operation but the objective would not be to sustain life, it would be to snuff life out.

That's how abortions are done. There are varying permutations but that is basically what happens. The Washington Post in a January edition 1983 said this, one in four pregnancies are now, now end in an abortion, thus making this one of the nation's most commonly performed surgical operations.

You heard President Reagan and all credit to him for daring to say it publicly and for it then to be broadcasted on the national media in the states, declaim against the fact that 15 million Americans, more than all the wars, all the people lost in all the wars that America has ever fought, have been wiped out as a result of this practice, 4,000 abortions a day and in our country we've passed well on 2 million abortions since the legislation, allowing abortion not intended by demand but that's how it's worked out to be available to people a few years ago as a result of David Steele's bill in parliament. What then, if that is abortion, what is the abortionist saying? What is the person who believes in abortion saying about that little baby, so to speak, that is in or will be in Mary's womb after this projection by the angel comes to pass and the seed is deposited by the Holy Spirit? Well in effect the abortionist is saying this, Mary is not with child. She's not with child.

She is with a protoplasmic mass. She is with fetal tissue. Any words are used to describe what is there within the woman's womb by an abortionist but not the word child.

This Jesuit monk, John Powell, to whom I made reference a little while ago, talks about the pro-abortionist need to construct a new vocabulary and one medical journal that I read a quotation from in the States refers to semantic gymnastics. That means juggling with language that's necessary for the abortionist to put his case in a way that seems to be gentle and sophisticated and acceptable to 20th century people. And so we've got a whole new vocabulary.

We talk about pregnancies rather than being with child and we talk about the termination of pregnancies rather than killing. Anything is done to take away the idea that what is in the womb is a being and ultimately will develop all the personalities or all the characteristics of personality that you and I possess. And where you go to have your child killed is not called a killing center.

It's called a clinic. Euphemism. That's what is technically the word used to describe when you exchange a crude blunt word with something that's softer.

And that's what the medical men meant in California when they talked about this semantic gymnastics. These new words that have to be brought out to make what is happening more acceptable because people perhaps feel that if such words as killing and such words as child or baby are not used to describe what is in the womb, then abortion will be more acceptable. Dr. Magna Deans, a doctor in the States who had an abortion, researched the abortion clinics and she told the Chicago Daily News that when she questioned the medical authorities, quote, there wasn't a doctor who at one time or another in the questioning did not say, this is murder.

This is murder. The abortionist is saying, Mary is not with child. Any other word, but don't speak about child.

Don't speak about baby. Don't speak about personality. Don't speak about feeling.

Don't speak about hurting what is within the womb. And for goodness sake, don't speak about something being in the image of God lurking there. The second thing the abortionist is saying is this, that what is in the womb has no rights.

What is in the womb has no rights. The Supreme Court of the United States in a judgment now reversed in 1857 said of Negro people that they really had no legal status. They are not people they are property.

Now the Supreme Court had all the biological evidence obviously in front of it to recognize that that was a nonsense statement. A black man is as much a being as a white man. In similar circumstances, when you talk about the unborn child, there's all the biological evidence in the world to convince people that that unborn child is a child and should have rights.

But we can turn as blind an eye to those rights as the Supreme Court turned an eye to the blacks white rights in America some years ago. The Bible says, open your mouth for the dumb. The unborn child, he or she cannot speak.

The prophet puts a question and he expects a negative answer. Can a woman forget her nursing child or have no compassion on the child in her womb? Perhaps not then. I said the psalmist, actually it was a prophet, Isaiah.

Not then, Isaiah. Perhaps not in your day. But in our day, alas, the answer is yes, she can forget.

And so the question comes back or the demand comes back to righteous living people, open your mouth for the dumb. There's a very great man by the name of Albert Lely. He's a medical doctor.

He's not just a doctor, he's a research professor and he lives in New Zealand. He's in the advance or he's on the forefront of medical research on the fetus, that is on the unborn child. As a result of his brilliance, it has been possible to treat the child in the womb from some of the sicknesses that perhaps the child had or would have.

Amazing steps are being taken in treating children before they are actually born these days. And he says this, in a world in which adults control power and the purse, the fetus is at a disadvantage. Being small, naked and nameless and voiceless, he has no one to defend him and equally except for callous adults, no one to attack and condemn him.

The safest place on God's universe should be within the womb of a mother expecting a child. The safest place. We're all born with a tendency to want to go back to that.

You say you must be joking. Well, you've never seen yourself asleep, have you? Of course you haven't. If you said you had, then maybe you need a little bit of treatment from your doctor.

But if your husband, assuming you're married, sees you asleep or your mother or your father, as the case may be, they'll tell you that you tend to curl up to the prenatal stage in the way of your body posture. It's so comfortable being crouched on your bed like that with your knees coming up, perhaps not under your chin, but towards your chin. It's just a remains, a little vestige, if you like, of that comfortable position that you were in when you were enjoying it in your mother's womb.

Is it really true that the being in a mother's womb is not a person? That's a question I want to ask and to answer. Is it really true that the being in the womb is not a person? Because if the being in the womb is a person, then somebody does need to speak out, and maybe Christians should be at the forefront. Not maybe, but surely they ought to be in the forefront.

Let me give you one or two delightful facts. 18 to 25 days after conception, before probably the mother even knows that she is with child, that little boy or little girl's heart has started to beat. It will eventually beat 3,000 million times, assuming a natural lifespan, but it will be beating in the womb 18 to 25 days after conception.

By 45 days, you could take electrical impulses from that baby in the womb and chart them up independently from the electrical impulses of the mother. By eight weeks, unique fingerprints are formed. They'll never change, apart from the fact, obviously, the fingers will grow, but the prints will be there then, and they will remain the same, assuming a safe delivery and a normal lifespan throughout all the years of the life of that child.

By the 12th and 13th week, the baby will suck its thumb, a very pleasing experience to suck your thumb. It'll also be developing fingernails. Let's jump a little.

By the sixth month, it responds to light and sound. It hears its own mother's heartbeat and can recognize its, his or her, own mother's voice. It can even hiccup.

You can't get more human than hiccupping, can you? So to the question, is it really, is really the being in the womb a person? The answer must be yes. There's a man in the States by the name of Dr. Nathanson. He's experienced a remarkable conversion.

I don't mean by that that he's a Christian. His story is gruesome, but all credit to him, he has tried to redress the balance of certain things that he allowed in his medical profession. He was the first man in the Western world, as far as my research is at any rate of unearthed, who was in charge of an abortion clinic.

I believe if memory serves me right, and I am now just quoting from memory, some 70,000 abortions were done in his clinic in either Washington or New York when it was open. He suddenly came to a realization that this was terribly, terribly wrong. Indeed, he went so far as to say that the abortion racket really ticks over because of the immense amount of money that falls into the coffers of those who are running these places.

In America last year, I believe it was 700 million dollars that poured in as a result of the abortion industry. But I digress. Dr. Nathanson came to a realization that what he was doing was wrong, that he was engaged in killing.

And he says now these words, if the womb were transparent, abortions would topple in number. To quote him exactly, if the abdominal wall of the pregnant woman were transparent, what kind of abortion laws might we have? There's a little adage that says, what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. And in the case of abortion, you don't see unless you're on the medical end of the whole business.

Everything is done to cushion you from just what is taking place. And if that sounds an emotional and emotive thing to say, my reference to nursing staff and doctors, I've got so much respect for them and concern for the counsel of one young nurse only two months ago who said to me, I can't get out of my mind the horror of dousing through the sluice a little thing that I knew was potentially as alive and as human as I am. And I speak in defense of such nurses and the fact that sometimes decisions are imposed upon our young men and young women in our hospitals, which are very difficult for them to take.

And very often in the development of their professional career, it's not always too easy to draw a moral judgment and to fight against what others are allowing. Dr. Nathanson then has told us that if the abdominal wall of the pregnant woman were transparent, what kind of abortion laws might we have, he asks. And the answer is that there would be probably a tremendous reduction in the need for this sort of service.

But let me try and bring what I have to say to some sort of biblical conclusions. If you were to read through the prophecy of Amos, a very brief prophecy in the Old Testament, you would discover that one of the sins that is denounced there that was entered into by the nation of the Ammonites was this, that they were cruel to pregnant women. They ripped open their wombs and they destroyed what was inside.

That merited the censure of God in the eighth century. My dear friend, if language means anything and if God does not change in his own ethical and moral code, how can what was wrong in the eighth century BC be correct in the 20th century AD? Reagan is about to release a book within a couple of months. I believe it's going to be entitled Abortion, the Cancer of the 20th Century, something like that.

I put the question, what is abortion a symptom of? What is abortion a symptom of? And the answer is this, it's a symptom of the de-Christianizing of society. Humanism is very much in the rage these days, is very much the rage. What does that mean? Well, it means that God is no longer taken into account because God is reckoned not to exist at all.

Man has no responsibility to any higher being at all. Dorothy Thompson once went to Dachau. Dorothy Thompson's a writer in, one time writer in Women's Magazine.

She went to Dachau, the German, one of the German concentration camps in the 1940s. And she said when she came out of Dachau, I am beginning to think that when God goes, everything goes. When God goes, everything goes.

If you don't recognize that there is a personal God to whom you are responsible, then ultimately everything goes. And in the 20th century, be warned, abortion is only one thing. The plundering of life in the womb is only one thing.

It's like dominoes that are set up one after another. You knock the first down and the next comes and the next comes. From abortion, the destruction of the child in the womb comes infanticide.

What does that mean? The destruction of the malformed child, the Mongol child, the child with terrible deformities. No longer should it be allowed to live. And so it's snuffed out, or that's the way the thinking goes.

And when you've dealt with this, and there's a Nobel Prize winner who is already saying that there should not be such thing as legal rights given to babies before they are three days old, with all the implications of that statement. When you're done with infanticide, go to the other end of the scale, euthanasia. We're going to have a terrible problem, you may say you're looking at it, of old people as the years go by more and more because we're living longer and the strain on our economy is going to be greater.

And the society that was prepared to engage in abortion on demand will not blink at extinction on demand also. I make that as a bleak prophecy, but I don't think I'm overstating the case. We're already hearing this being asked for.

The Bible teaches us that man is made in the image of God. And because he's made in the image of God, he has something that is absolutely precious, absolutely unique. And as a result of being made in God's image, he is responsible to God for what he does.

But man doesn't like to acknowledge that God exists, because if he does, well there are certain things that man might want to do. At a human level that he can't really do, because it falls against God's laws. And so what happens? Dangled in front of modern man, as dangled in front of the first man, is this option.

Forget God and become God yourself. Disobey God, break his laws, recognize that they don't even exist, they've got no influence on your life at all, and live as though you were God. The de-Christianizing of society.

Adam swallowed that lie and left to regret it. And we're swallowing that lie again and again and again in the 20th century. And we're told as Isaiah predicted would one day happen in Isaiah 5 and verse 20, that good is evil and that evil is good.

And we know that this is wrong. Malcolm Muggeridge, always a stimulating writer, has this to say. I've used this quotation before, but it's a good one.

Has this to say, trying to suggest that Mary being with child might conceivably have occurred in the 20th century, and describes the reaction like this. In humanistic times like ours, a contemporary virgin, assuming that there are any such, would regard a message from the angel Gabriel that she might expect to give birth to a son, to be called the son of the highest, as ill tidings of great sorrow and a slur on the local family planning center. As a matter of fact, under existing conditions, it is extremely improbable that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all.

Mary's pregnancy in poor circumstances and with the father unknown would have been an obvious case for an abortion. And her talk of having been conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation needing a savior more, perhaps than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born, too enlightened to permit the light of the world to shine in a darkness that grows ever more oppressive.

Muggeridge takes a flight of fancy, but who would deny that within that flight there is not an element of truth. So let's come back to starters. That little boy that Mary conceived, he was delivered.

He became an ordinary human infant like you and me, and yet he retained his sinlessness, unlike you and me, for 30 odd years. And then he died on the cross. And he died to ensure that you and I might have our sins forgiven, because he took the consequences of all that we have ever done that is wrong.

All the infamy of Dakar, of Belsen, of Buchenwald, all the crime of aborting unnecessarily these millions of children, all the squalor that man has indulged himself in, all the times that man has broken God's law, Jesus took that upon himself. And that's why he died at Calvary. And when he was raised again, he was raised to grant new life to all those who would trust him as Lord and Savior.

You say, I haven't liked what you've had to say this evening. Well, that makes two of us. I haven't liked saying it, and I've tried to say it gently.

And I recognize that there are some great problems for unmarried women in particular when they become pregnant. And one of the great reasons for that problem is because there has been a jettisoning of Christian ethical standards, sexual relationships within marriage. The Bible suggests, no declares is the norm.

Put that on one side, and you've got difficulty. And if you're in your difficulty, you get out of it by breaking God's law even more. Instead of resolving your problem, you get yourself more and more into a mess, and you get society into a greater and greater dilemma.

That's the problem with sin. Old Matthew Henry said, it's a brat that nobody can tame. Once it's got you on the slippery slope, there's no stopping.

But you see, my dear friend, that's why Jesus came into the world. Ah, some of you say, but what about those who've had abortions? There is no sin that Jesus cannot answer. There is nothing wrong that you can have done that Jesus has not atoned for.

And the reason why we go to Dr. Jesus is to say, Lord, perhaps not in that area, though some of us may have to say in that area, but in this area and that area and that area, I've sinned. I've done what you didn't want me to do. I've broken your law, and I feel wretched, like some of these women feel wretched.

Ninety percent suffer depressions after abortion, and that's not generally told them, certainly by the clinics. I feel so wretched, Lord. And he said, okay, in your wretchedness, come to me, confess your need of me, and let me cleanse you, and let me set you free, and let me forgive you.

That's what Jesus Christ offers our world. He won't change his standards. He won't change the ethical code within the Bible.

But what he will say is, come back to me, and let's get it cleansed. Let's get your life washed with my blood, so to speak, and let's start again to live by the dictates of this book. The Bible says, unless a woman's life is in danger, abortion is wrong, wrong.

It creates far more problems than it ever resolves. It's part of the lie. It's part of the alternative that the devil dangles in front of us, lets them come back to the teachings of Scripture, and to the standards of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Let us pray. Father, we've many things to thank you for, and right now we want to thank you for our mothers. Life came from you, but you used them as a vehicle, and we thank you that they didn't want to have us aborted.

Instead, they went through the miracle of giving life, with all the challenges, and maybe the gray hairs that ultimately that brought them, but we want to thank you, and now we want to pray. We want to pray for every unmarried mother who's with child, and is in a turmoil, not knowing what to do, and we ask, Lord, that our concerns shall not just be lip concern from a pulpit, but a personal involvement in endeavoring to help, and to show that there are other things that can be done short of abortion. We pray, too, for our doctors and our nurses, and we pray for those who are in abortion clinics for no other reason than to make a modest fortune, and some not so modest.

Lord, enable them to know that they, too, are responsible before you, and we ask all who have confessed sin here this evening, whatever that sin might have been, might have known your absolution and your pardon, because of the shed blood of Jesus the Lord. Amen.