Fear God, Save Babies (Psalm 82.3-4, Luke 10.30-37)
Psalm 82.3-4 is a passage that parallels Proverbs 24.11-12 in many ways:
Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”
Through passages like these God is calling his people to intervene whenever the vulnerable are threatened, be it an individual or an entire group. Masses of German Christians should have com to the active defense of their Jewish countrymen, and a much larger segment of the American church should have joined the fight against slavery and segregation. Why didn’t this happen? Why don’t more Christians today follow these passages into the active defense of unborn children? I would suggest that most of us, myself included, have too narrow a definition of who our neighbor is and too narrow a view of what it means to love him. Regarding widespread oppression and injustice, we tend to confuse opposition in principle, with opposition in practice. We content ourselves with the idea that we’re not participating in injustice, failing to consider the fact that we’re often doing nothing to stop it either
Martin Niemoller, a German pastor imprisoned for his opposition to Hitler, made the following statement in 1946:
Christianity in German bears a greater responsibility before God [for the Holocaust] than the National Socialists, the SS, and the Gestapo.”1
How could he say this? Because he recognized that those who have been rescued unto salvation are far more accountable to God than those who remain mired in blindness and unbelief. If we don’t get a better grasp of what it means to love our neighbor, history is going to again look at the church with the same indictment: “Where were all of the Christians while innocent babies were being murdered en masse?” We would do well to turn our attention to the Good Samaritan.
- Quoted in Hitler’s Cross: Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross, Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1995. p. 191 [↩]
