Underground Exiles

While orphans, widows and abortion-vulnerable children are all “in distress” - and generally unwanted by society at large - the circumstances surrounding their distress are very different.  It is one thing to provide food and shelter for people in need, and another thing entirely to intervene on the behalf of people who are about to be killed.  Perhaps you wonder if the Bible actually mandates our involvement in the more extreme circumstances, whre the price of involvement is much higher, and the level of opposition is more, much more, significant.  Here enteres Proverbs 24.11-12:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.  If you say, “Behold we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay each man according to his work?”

Like almost all biblical proverbs, the text gives zero indication what kind of specific injustice, if any, the author has in mind.  It serves as a general guidline for what God’s people are called to do in the face of violent injustice.  If innocent human beings are in danger, God-fearing people are to come to their rescue.

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The book of James is a practical book about meeting practical needs.  It even provides a practical definition of true religion, found in James 1.27:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

This concise definition makes it clear that helping those in desperate circumstances is a primary component of pure and undefiled religion.  Orphans and widows are the examples given, but it’s pretty unlikely that these are the only two groups he has in mind.  In the very next chapter, he warns against neglecting the poor; so we must surmise, then, that the application of James’ admonition goes beyond just widows and orphans alone.  They are simply representative of those in severe distress.  And lest we wrongly assume that James’ emphasis on practical deeds of love is out of step with the rest of Scripture, consider the prophet Jeremiah’s command in Jeremiah 22.3:

Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed.  And  do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

In the patriarchal society in which James and Jeremiah wrote, where there was no safety net of state-funded social services, the prospects for widows and orphans were bleak in the extreme.  With their natural providers gone, orphans and widows would not likely survive apart from the active intervention of God’s people.   As daunting and desperate as their circumstances were, children facing abortion are even worse off.

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If you read the Bible from beginning to end, you will encounter over 14,000 different words, and the word abortion doesn’t even make a single appearance.  To be completely straight forward, Scripture says precisely nothing on the subject, yet you are reading an article called “Fear God, Save Babies”.  Is that a little presumptuous?  Is it even possible to articulate a biblical position on a subject the Bible apparently never mentions?  I would argue that it is possible, and moreover, it’s necessary.  If Scripture did deal with abortion directly, we wouldn’t have to wrestle through what a biblical response would look like.  So we must take everything the Bible does tell us, and apply it to everything it doesn’t.

The most significant question about abortion for those of us dealing with the Bible isn’t whether it is right or wrong, but whether God expects us to do anything about it.  I say that because any honest query into the act of abortion reveals it to be nothing less than the deliberate execution of a living, growing, genetically-distinct human being.¹

Since the Bible expressly condemns the shedding of innocent blood², recognizing the injustice of abortion should be fairly easy.  Figuring out what to do about it is decidedly more difficult.  On the one hand, abortion kills almost 4,000 helpless human beings every single day, and that’s just here in the United States.  On the other hand, abortion is the natural fallout of an increasingly self-serving, self-centered society.  Abortion, in fact, is deserving of God’s wrath, and may well be a manifestation of Gods wrath.³

Some have argued that opposing abortion takes crucial resources away from the primary call of the church.  Others believe that opposing abortion is the primary call of the church.  What is a biblically-minded person supposed to do?!

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1. “[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th ed.
   Keith L. Moore, Ph.D. & T.V.N. Persaud, Md., (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998), 2-18.

   “Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed… “ Human Embryology & Teratology, Ronan R. O’Rahilly, Fabiola Muller, (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996), 5-55. [↩]

2. Exodus 20.13; Deuteronomy 19.13; 1 Kings 2.31; Proverbs 6.16-18; Isaiah 59.7; Jeremiah 19.3-5, 22.3; Joel 3.19 [↩]
3. When Pharaoh refused to let God’s people go, the wrath of God manifested itself in 10 plagues, the most severe of which was the death of all of the first born sons in Egypt.  When David sinned with Bathsheeba, the wrath of God manifested itself in the death of their innocent child.  Children are the hope and future of every society.  When God’s wrath lands on them, for the sins of a parent or the sins of a nation, it is an incalculably severe blow.  When a society starts killing its own children, it engages in nothing less than self-destruction.  Romans1.18-32 makes clear the fact that God’s wrath can simply be the “giving over” of people to bear the natural consequences of their actions.  For a nation that allows its children to be executed in the womb, not only does such behavior deserve punishment, in many ways, it is punishment. [↩]

I recently interviewed with a church on the South Carolina coast, and the conversation with the gentleman I would have been working with left me a little upset.

On a good day, at most I’m a four and a half point Calvinist.  Other days, I’m maybe a three-point or at most four-point Calvinist.   I still just can’t figure out where I fall on the Limited Atonement question, so I often oscillate back and forth.  I didn’t become a Calvinist by just jumping on a bandwagon; I arrived here after throwing myself against the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Romans for about 2 years.  For reasons of biblical faithfulness, I hold to a Reformed theology.

The gentleman I would have been working for on the coast is an all-out Arminian.  These two teams of Calvinist and Arminian have been holding different theological positions for several hundred years - the argument between them ain’t new by any stretch.

So as I sat and talked to this man, he was the most hostile person to Reformed theology that I’ve ever met.  I was actually taken aback at the amount of venom he spoke with; to be honest, I was shocked, since I’m not that angry about folks holding to Arminian theology.  I believe since I arrived at being a Calvinist by a lot of theological reflection, then obviously an Arminian must have as well.  I think that stands to reason.

At any rate, our conversation got me thinking down a particular vein: why can’t we get along?  I’m convinced that there are good, biblical reasons to be Arminian in your theology.  I don’t think that the Arminian position says anything the Bible doesn’t say, I just don’t think it says everything the Bible does.  Nevertheless, it’s not heresy; this is an in-family debate.  I can’t think of a single Calvinist I know personally that would berate or browbeat someone of a Wesleyan Arminian theology.  Why is it then that Calvinists have the reputation of being bullies, when it’s the Arminians I know that are hostile?  I just don’t understand it.

There are only three questions I have to have answered to be able to work with someone:

1. Do you love Jesus?
2. Do you love the Bible?
3. Do you desire to see people reached with the gospel?

As long as the answer to all three questions is yes, I can work with you, no matter what you believe about election and predestination.  As long as we both love the Bible, we can disagree, and still have a place to go back to to settle our disagreements, since we both hold Scripture to be the final authority.

Has anbody else experienced this?

Obviously, I’ve not posted in a while.  I just haven’t had anything to say, and don’t see that changing for a bit.  I’ll update more when I actually have the desire to write.