James L. Rudd
Editor, The Covenant News
We Need to Repent
As a result of our Legislative Analyses, I received email from many of our readers saying that they had never considered the underlying consequences of regulating abortion, so the analyses have become a real eyeopener for them. Yet some people were not a little distraught that I said, "regulating abortion is not pro-life." A few people thought I was saying that they were engaged in the act of murder and going to hell. No, I don't think pro-life Christians are going to hell, but the position many Christians have taken is one that we need to repent.
It's really very basic: People do not have a "right" to murder other people. Therefore, if someone claims he has a "right" to murder people, what do we say? Proverbs 26:4 says, "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." Does that mean our response should be to help pass laws to regulate the way the fool commits murder? No. That makes us like unto him.
Proverbs 26:5 says, "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." When people say they have "abortion rights," or, we need to "regulate abortion," the correct response is to point to the error in their thinking. Murder is the willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing of an innocent human being, and it is absurdity to consider then how best to regulate the murder of innocent human beings.
Murder is a capital crime and our laws are to emphatically state to people, "If you murder an innocent human being you will be arrested, prosecuted, and punished to the full extent of the law."
With such an answer as this we remove the conceited fools' ability to imagine themselves to be wise, ("lest he be wise in his own conceit"). This answer eradicates both the claim that the "right" to murder people exists, and the belief that said "right" to commit murder by abortion must be regulated.
Why are pro-life Christians helping to regulate the way people murder innocent human beings? Because we've gotten off on the wrong foot.
The legislative strategy of regulating abortion is flawed from the very first. Which means -- years ago -- the initial decision[s] to engage in such a legislative strategy, by default, first acquiesced to the notion that a "right" to murder innocent people in fact existed, which then led to the erroneous conclusion that the process of murdering people could be regulated through legislative actions, and then those legislative actions were labeled "pro-life." Thus, over the years, many Christians have unwittingly joined themselves to these foolish actions.
We need to repent. The Bible say that "offenses will come: but woe unto him through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." -- Jesus, Luke 17:1-2.
Notice where it says "through whom" the offenses come? Helping to regulate merely the way "one of these little ones" is murdered, is an offense many Christians are guilty of -- many times over. This is the sin we need to repent.
Jesus loves us! As God's children, when our eyes are opened by The Spirit of adoption to see a sin that we are guilty of, through Jesus Christ our Lord we can run as His children crying "Abba, Father," please forgive me! Please forgive me! And having asked for forgiveness then true repentance is turning from our wicked way by casting off the bondage -- not to be involved in that sin anymore.
Having repented of helping to regulate the way people murder innocent human beings, then what do we do? There is only one type of legislation our lawmakers need to be concerned about passing into law in the States and U.S. Congress: A law that establishes without any doubt or alternate interpretation the Unalienable Personhood of every human being from the moment of conception until natural death.
We must continue to press in at all cost to speak for those who have no voice until they have Equal Protection of the Law.
Jim Rudd
Washington, D.C., Director
Christian Street Preachers Alliance
email: editor@covenantnews.com