Loyal To LibertyBeta

"…for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children. I will very gladly spend and be spent for you…" (2 Corinthians 12:14)

"For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing… (Matthew 13:15)

By now most Americans not willfully assuming the three monkeys pose acknowledge that the present mad frenzy of bailouts, pork binging and budgetary abandon are driving the nation into the depths of a Mariana trench of indebtedness. Despite the self-serving prognostications of the politicians and purported economic geniuses driving us into this madness, it looks increasingly like the desperate thrashings of a drowning victim compulsively sucking deep into his lungs the water that will seal his fate. Once water fills the lungs the only question is, how long the body can sustain itself without air? For our body politic that means wondering whether the bankruptcy of the nation will hit us now, or not until the overhang of debt breaks off to crush another generation. The dead weight of debt destroys us either way, but our heedless willingness to live on the hope that our children will be the ones destroyed by it reveals the essential nature of our depravity. We have exchanged the parents' natural sense of duty toward their children for an unnatural willingness to make of them an offering to the fierce gods of our ambitious pastimes.

Many people who profess to be Christian are actually supporting and applauding this mentality of child sacrifice. I guess that, with the easygoing smorgasbord mentality too often characteristic of some self-described believers in our time, they choose not to have ears when they get to Scriptural passages like the words of Paul quoted above. Apparently God's lesson to Abraham, most emphatically confirmed in the life and fate of Jesus Christ, has no power to instruct them. It does not warn them against their sacrifice of new Isaacs on the altar of what they claim is dedication to good things like charity, compassion and justice. "We serve the god of love, in this sacrifice," they seem to say "therefore it is righteousness." But if their god demands this of them, what they worship is not truly the God who revealed Himself through the book they profess to believe in. For He made it clear that no offering can save us but only the one that He wills, and has provided, begotten from eternity in the love that informs all of Creation.

Quietly, and perhaps sometimes without being conscious of it, such believers sympathize with those who chide folks like myself for unequivocally rejecting the political idol they have set up as their totem of change and progress. We are unreasoning fanatics who insist upon a false perfection, unwilling to balance good and evil in the scales of rational calculation. They do not remember the wisdom of Solomon, who understood that the willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children gives the lie to our professions of kindness. True human kindness acts with loving respect for their wholesome existence. Like Paul and Jesus Christ true parents would rather lay down their own lives than offer up their children's, even to serve their sense of righteousness.

Tragically for these idol worshiping believers, the chief distinguishing feature of their new age totem openly flaunts this abandonment of wholesome respect for life. He advocates and consistently promotes the cultish ritual of abortion, appointing to power those who have assiduously promoted and proclaimed its central mystery, the redemptive efficacy of child sacrifice. Women are blessed by it with relief from the punishment of carrying their offspring. Health is blessed by it, with the specious advances promised by embryo destroying stem cell research. The world is blessed by it, through U.S. funding of programs that promote abortion for population control and social engineering.

If we could resurrect our offspring, as God did, perhaps we might excuse with power our rejection of His redemptive offering. But for all its Dr. Frankenstein pretensions, our technological prowess can destroy, distort and exploit human life, but its creation remains beyond our capacity. We deny, but cannot solve, its mystery. However if, as Christians profess to believe, God's Word reveals truth, there is no mystery about the evil involved in the destruction of innocent life. Are the Christian idol-worshipers like the Israelites, falling down before a golden calf in the very presence of God's Word? Perhaps they are, even down to the treasure they borrow to enamel it, secured by the aborted hopes not just of one child, or even a multitude, but of our whole posterity. "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." (Matthew, 13:9)