And served their gods...

In a course titled Environmental Ethics at UW(Madison), I remember our prof declaring it self-evident that if one Indian village in South America attacked a second Indian village seeking a young girl for human sacrifice, it would be the duty of every last man in the second village to fight to the death to protect that child. Our prof was no believer and I was the only student who confessed Christian faith, yet no one disagreed.

During the conquest of Canaan, the Sons of Israel refused to obey God's command that they wipe out the Canaanites, so it happened just as Jehovah had warned: 

The sons of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and they took their daughters for themselves as wives, and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. (Judges 3:5, 6)

One of those Canaanite gods demanded his followers offer their sons and daughters as burnt offerings. The Sons of Israel did not remove this abomination from their land and thus they came to worship Molech, offering their own Covenant children to his fire.

Across the Roman Empire, believers of the Early Church were known to protect the pagan children from murder at the hands of their fathers and mothers. Read the Early Church fathers and you'll find them condemning Christians who feed their dogs while... neglecting to rescue the children wailing on the hillsides behind their houses. Their pagan fathers and mothers had exposed these little ones, so Christians rescued and raised them as their own.

The same defense of children (particularly baby girls) was a characteristic Christian witness in China a century ago. Samuel Moffat once described to me seeing children exposed on the riverbanks of China. Christians rescued these children just as the first Christians rescued the children of the Ancient Roman Empire.

So what has happened to this witness today? Does God no longer call us to break the jaw of the wicked, snatching his prey?

The Christian Church of North America lives among Canaanites whose worship demands child sacrifice. All authority in Heaven and Earth has been given to Christ the King, so we can't very well dismiss this ongoing murder of millions of babies as extraneous to the life and work of the Church militant.  If we were missionaries, would we tell those villagers to lay down their spears and blowguns; that it would be better for one young virgin to die for the sake of the people?

These are the questions that go through my mind as I look at the 2012 Annual Report of Planned Parenthood of America. With pride they report murdering 333,964 defenseless babies this past year—one tiny, helpless victim every ninety seconds. The report begins:

This past year will be remembered as the year Planned Parenthood declared its commitment to making the next generation the healthiest ever.

Words fail me. These ghouls and vampires slaughter the next generation of our nation's children, then preen themselves over their commitment to make that generation the healthiest ever. Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich's head of propaganda, said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Planned Parenthood's lie is big enough, isn't it? They keep repeating it, don't they? The bloodthirsty state magistrates shield us from the political, economic, and military consequences of that lie, don't they?

So where's the dissent? Where are the Christians who, from love of the least of these, never stop exposing the lie?

My judgment is that God's covenant people today are silent witnesses because we've been compromised. We turned our backs on the right preaching of the Word of God, the right administration of the Sacraments, and the right exercise of church discipline. Not preaching repentance and not fencing the Lord's Table bore the fruit of intermarriage and idolatry which in turn led to God's people drowning in a river of the blood of our neighbor's children, first; but now, also our own children.

An hour or so after seeing Planned Parenthood's Annual Report, I read a CNN review of a new PBS documentary on the abolitionists. In the middle of the review, I read:

Lincoln is a Mount Rushmore figure today, but the abolitionists also did something remarkable. They took on the colossal wealth and political power of the slave trade, and won. (Imagine activists today persuading the country to shut down Apple and Google because they deem their business practices immoral.)

The abolitionists "forced the issue of slavery on to the national agenda," says Sharon Grimberg, executive producer for the PBS documentary. "They made it unavoidable."

A million and a half unborn children slaughtered by their mothers and fathers each year in these United States and CNN's reviewer is so utterly brain-dead concerning that slaughter that he bores down to some hypothetical concerning Apple and Google being involved in "immoral business practices" as a way of helping his readers imagine mortal enemies of a powerful lie giving bold witness to the truth. Did the slaughter—not the enslavement, but the slaughter—of a million and a half unborn citizens of these United States even enter his mind?

I think not, and that is a damning indictment of our comfortable existence intermingled with the Canaanites.