INNOCENTS by Dr. Shah, Clearview Church, Henderson, NC
Introduction: Lately, it has been tragic for me to read the news coming out of Great Britain. You may or may not have heard of Adam Smith-Conner who was found guilty of praying silently in an abortion buffer zone in the coastal town of Bournemouth, England. Even though he got a conditional discharge, which means if he does it again over the next two years he will be sent to jail, he still must pay a fine of 9,000 pounds = $12,000! So also, according to a legislation passed by the Scottish government in September of this year, there are 200 meter “safe access” zones around abortion clinics. If anyone is seen acting in a manner that could cause harassment or distress to anyone going to the clinic, that person is liable to be prosecuted. Even religious preaching and silent vigils are liable if they are done with “intent or recklessness.” This even applies to anyone who might be pray in the privacy of their own home. The Scottish government sent out a letter warning the people that the rules are about actions in the public places, but a private space or home could also be liable if seen or heard in the zone. What bothers me the most is that this is the land of John Wesley, Susanna Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, and C. S. Lewis, to name a few. Today, even silent prayer against abortion is outlawed. Unfortunately, this is only going to get worse. In our series through the book of Judges, we are looking at Samson and his birth. As the wording of his birth pronouncement shows, he was a type of Christ. There is a deeper truth about life here that I want us to focus on today, and that is very relevant for our time.
Judges 13:7 And He said to me, “Behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now drink no wine or similar drink, nor eat anything unclean, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb to the day of his death.’ ”
Context: The idea that a woman would bear a male child and he would be special is found several times in the Bible. We find it before Samson and after Samson:
- Genesis 18:10 And He said, “I will certainly return to you according to the time of life, and behold, Sarah your wife shall have a son.”
- 1 Samuel 1:20 “So it came to pass in the process of time that Hannah conceived and bore a son, and called his name Samuel…”
- 2 Kings 4 15 So he (Elisha) said, “Call her.” (Shunammite woman) When he (Gehazi) had called her, she stood in the doorway. 16 Then he said, “About this time next year you shall embrace a son.”
- Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”
- Luke 1:13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
- Luke 1:31 “And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name JESUS.”
- Matthew 1:21 “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.”
These references are not chance or coincidence, they have been deliberately included in Scripture as types leading up to the virgin birth of Jesus. They are to remind us of the promise made by God in Genesis 3:15 “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” This is referred to as the “protoevangelium” = first gospel. It was a promise of God that he would send his Son into this world to save fallen sinful humanity. Did Adam and Eve understand this? Genesis 4:1 “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, ‘I have acquired a man from the LORD.’” Cain is the first person to be born of natural generation, but it is very interesting what Eve said – “Qainiti Ish Et Yahweh.” Qainiti = I have acquired/gotten. Ish = man. Yahweh = Lord/God. The big question is how to translate the particle “et?” A particle is a word that is beyond the 8 parts of speech like noun, verb, pronoun, adverb, adjective, conjunction, interjection, and preposition. For example: to run, “to” is a particle. They don’t really have any meaning of their own. What’s the point? What is Eve saying here? Translators are still not sure! They try to say – ‘I have acquired a man from the LORD” or “I have gotten a man withthe Lord’s help” or “I have gotten a man through God.” In the very next verse, Genesis 4:2says, “Then she bore again, this time his brother Abel.” It is the same particle “et”: “Et Habel.” We don’t translate that – “She bore again his brother from Abel or with Abel’s help or through Abel.” So here’s how Genesis 4:1 should be translated: “I have acquired a man: Yahweh/Lord.” The Targums translate that correctly, albeit they say, “I have gotten a man, the angel of Yahweh.” Martin Luther (the great German reformer) translated it best: “I have the Man, the Lord.”
Now, Satan had also heard the promise in the Protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15, which was also God’s curse against him. He hated Eve because she was going to be the carrier of the Promised One who would crush his head, and he began to eye both Cain and his brother Abel. By the way, ladies, Satan hates each one of you, and he still wants to deceive you. He will constantly try to get you to doubt your self-worth. Are you pretty enough? Are you smart enough? Are you good enough?” As you know, he led Cain to kill his brother Abel. Someone might say, “There’s no mention of Satan in Abel’s killing…” John 8:44 “…He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth…” With just one act, Satan took care of any chance that either of Eve’s sons would be the “Seed of the woman.” Of course, Eve had another son named “Seth,” and it says in Genesis 4:25 And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, “For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel, whom Cain killed.” Again, Seth was not the one, but every woman had to raise her child as if he could be the one to break the curse. That’s why Paul said in 1 Timothy 2 14 “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. 15 Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.”
Something very important to understand: Eve did not know which son would be the skull crusher and Satan did not know which woman would bear the seed. Therefore, Satan has wanted to murder the young ever since the Garden of Eden. This was practiced by the Canaanites, as you’ve heard me preach on that before. God told the children of Israel not to copy their neighbors when they came into the land. Unfortunately, they made their children pass through the fire as well. Satan’s hatred for children became very intense when Jesus was born. Remember, magi from the east came looking for the star. When Herod heard that, he was afraid and all Jerusalem with him. After the magi went back another way, being divinely warned in a dream, he was angry, and he put to death all the male children in Bethlehem and in all its districts who were two years old and younger. Even though Christ has already come, Satan continues to go after children, especially the unborn.
People think that abortion is just a twentieth century movement for political purposes. That’s just not true. I don’t have time to go through the history of abortion, but for the next few moments, I want to focus just before and after the coming of Christ. My information is coming from several sources, primarily Michael J. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World.
Did you know that abortion was widely practiced among the ancient Greeks and the Romans? It was more common among the rich but also among the poor. It was among the married and the unmarried, also the good and the prostitute. Sometimes, it was the husband who forced the woman to get an abortion. Other times, it was a lover. A major reason for abortion was sexual affairs. Other reasons were to maintain the body shape. One woman had an abortion because she didn’t want to share the child after a divorce. Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle recommended abortion to maintain the population. Plato (427-347 BC) in Republic:
“A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty… And we grant all this, accompanying the permission with strict orders to prevent any [subsequent] embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such an union can not be maintained, and arrange accordingly.”
Abortions could be therapeutic (mother’s life is in danger) or non-therapeutic (mother’s life is not endangered). There were drugs available. There were also paid amateurs and experts. So, abortions could be chemical or mechanical. Celsus (25BC – 50 AD) in his work De Medicinarecommended taking “four grams of ammoniac salt,” “four grams of Cretan dittany in water,” and “hedge mustard in tepid wine…on an empty stomach,” and it would expel the fetus. Some of the instruments used were like copper needle or spike. Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24-79) in his work Natural History, talks about abortion being available from tenth day after conception to the seventh month, which would be fatal at that point.
There were those who opposed abortion. In a work known as Pseudo-Galen, not by Galen (second century Roman doctor), the writer tells us about Lycurgus (9th century Sparta) and Solon (6th century Athens) who in their works on law prohibited abortion. The Oath of Hippocrates (460-357BC) reads:
“I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Health, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture…. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.”
The Stoic philosophers were also against abortion, albeit they did not think the fetus was not a person. Cicero, Roman orator (106 BC – 43), called for capital punishment for deliberate abortion. I think that’s too much.
Juvenal (AD57/67 – 127), a satirist:
“Poor women… endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing to which their lot condemns them; but how often does a gilded bed contain a woman that is lying in it? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb.”
Ovid (43 BC – AD 17), a Roman poet, in Amores:
“Of what avail to fair woman to rest free from the burdens of war, nor choose with shield in arm to march in the fierce array, if, free from peril of battle, she suffer wounds from weapons of her own, and arm her unforeseeing hands to her own undoing?
She who first plucked forth the tender life deserved to die in the warfare she began. Can it be that, to spare your bosom the reproach of lines, you would scatter the tragic sands of deadly combat?”
The people who unilaterally opposed abortion were the Jewish people. There were 3 different schools of thought: Alexandrian, Palestinian (major), and Palestinian (minor). They differed on minor points but agreed against abortion. The only allowance was fro life-threatening situations. Listen to Philo (25BC – AD 41) in Special Laws:
“If a man comes to blows with a pregnant woman and strikes her on the belly and she miscarries, then, if the result of the miscarriage is unshaped and undeveloped, he must be fined both for the outrage and for obstructing the artist Nature in her creative work of bringing into life the fairest of living creatures, man. But, if the offspring is already shaped and all the limbs have their proper qualities and places in the system, he must die, for that which answers to this description is a human being, which he has destroyed in the laboratory of Nature who judges that the hour has not yet come for bringing it out into the light, like a statue lying in a studio requiring nothing more than to be conveyed outside and released from confinement.”
Where did they get their convictions? Exodus 21 22 “If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23 But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
LXX – the word for harm (ason) is actually translated form.
Psalm 139 14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. 15 My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
When the church came along, they had similar convictions.
Clement of Alexandria (150 AD – 215) in Paedagogus:
Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, in order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the matter completely dead, abort at the same time their human feelings.
Hippolytus (170 AD – 236) in Refutation of All Heresies (Philosophumena):
Women, reputed believers, began to resort to drugs for producing sterility, and to gird themselves round, so to expel what was being conceived on account of their not wishing to have a child either by a slave or by any paltry fellow, for the sake of their family and excessive wealth. Behold, into how great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time!
Council of Elvira (305 AD):
Canon 63: If a woman becomes pregnant by committing adultery, while her husband is absent, and after the act she destroys [the child], it is proper to keep her from communion until death, because she has doubled her crime.
Canon 68: If a catechumen should conceive by an adulterer, and should procure the death of the child, she can be baptized only at the end of her life.
Council of Ancyra (314AD):
Canon 21: Women who prostitute themselves, and who kill the children thus begotten, or who try to destroy them when in their wombs, are by ancient law excommunicated to the end of their lives. We, however, have softened their punishment, and condemned them to the various appointed degrees of penance for ten years.
Basil of Alexandria (330 AD – 379):
Moreover, those, too, who give drugs causing abortion are [deliberate murderers] themselves, as well as those receiving the poison which kills the fetus.
Chrysostom (347 AD – 407):
Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?
Bottom line: their motivation against abortion was for 3 reasons: life is precious; murder is sin; and compassion for the unborn.
This may be a tough message for some. If you’ve been through abortion, God’s grace is there for you. There is forgiveness and healing. You may have questions: what about incest and rape? As painful and horrible as it is, the baby is innocent. How about the mother’s life? Yes, it is allowable. The statistics are 0.118% of all abortions.
Personal story: my sister’s birth.
Are you saved? Will you stand on biblical values?