Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” Genesis 22:2
Dear People Who Keep Company with God,
Hebrew Rabbis have historically taught that this particular story of Abraham and Isaac reveals that God forbids the ritual and practice of child sacrifice. They explain that when God brought Abraham to a new land, it was a fruitful and fertile place. One where it was common for the people, hoping to keep the crops growing and their flocks increasing, to sacrifice first-born sons to their pagan gods. Then one day, God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the promised son. Abraham obeyed. He was about to kill his son when God stopped him. He sacrificed a ram instead. In the end, Abraham had shown his willingness to obey God, and God revealed that He could not accept human blood, that He rejected all human sacrifices. The rest of the Bible confirms that the sacrificial murder of children is condemned by God. The God of Abraham, as the New Testament reveals, doesn’t desire our children’s blood. Instead, “He spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all.” (Romans 8.32).
There was a time when Israel turned their backs on the God of Abraham and began to worship the Moabite god, Baal of Peor (Psalm 106:28). What followed was devastating. “They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood.” (Psalm106:37-38) The spirit of Baal is still at work today murdering and destroying the lives of the innocent. Our land is polluted with the blood of the unborn and just born children. When nations and cultures move away from the Creator, the result is always a loss of respect and honor for all human life. As Mother Theresa said, “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use any violence to get what they want.” President Ronald Regan warned us that, “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life, the unborn, without diminishing the value of all human life.”
The God of Abraham profoundly respects and values all human life, including the unborn and just born. We are made in His image. He personally touched and created each one of us in our mother’s womb (Job 10:8). Not only does He have hands-on involvement in our creation, He has a purpose for each of us (Ephesians 2:10). God told Jeremiah, “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” (Jeremiah 1:5). The Lord also made us for relationship. Revelation 4:11 says, “For you created all things, and by your will, they were created and have their being.” There is no such thing as an unwanted child. There are only parents and people who do not want the child. The early followers of Christ knew that the Roman practices of abortion and infanticide were forbidden by God. Christians, as well as Jews, consistently opposed it, standing up and defending life from the very earliest days of the church. Our heritage is that God gave us His Son so our children’s blood would never pollute the land. All life is precious.
Many Blessings, BW