Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

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: Sanctity of Life Sunday..

Define Life… _________________________________

Webster- a living being

Obviously life is more than a beating heart. Plants are alive, yet no heart beats. There are no restrictions in the Bible against killing a plant. Animals have beating hearts…. Yet God told Noah (and PETA) that animals were provided to man to be killed and eaten.

Genesis 9:1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

As early as Noah, God was very specific about the difference between plant, life, animal life,….. and human life:

Genesis 9:4 "But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. 6 "Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.

God holds sacred human life, because human life, and only human life, has his image, his likeness stamped on it.

I. Human Life is to be Treasured!

Society seems to struggle with a really good definition of what it means to be alive ….. but all of us are fascinated by life, or the lack thereof:

-The possibility of losing our life is one of our strongest motivators.

-Every instinct in us will surface if anything threatens this elusive thing called life.

There’s another set of miners trapped in West Virginia. Miners go into the ground every day, few pay any attention; yet when their life is threatened, they become national news… why? Because we have a fascination with life… and death.

Other than for political reasons; why do reporters in Iraq go right past a new school, or a new hospital which would be great news for Americans to hear, and report on somebody who has been blown apart by a roadside bomb? Because that’s what gets our attention!

There is something deep inside us that holds life as special, sacred…. We are fascinated and somewhat horrified when life is suddenly ended. That’s good… because history tells us that when that fascination with the sacredness of life dies…. that civilization crumbles.

Remember the Roman Empire…. You have to remember because it doesn’t exist any more. The Romans were the most advanced civilization of their day. They were a powerful nation, gobbling up countries around them…. making them part of the Roman empire.

Notice the sequence of events: (Does this sound familiar?)

We’ve all heard of the Roman circuses where human was pitted against wild animal to the death and we say, how could they do that!!! We read of the Emperor using Christians as human torches to light his garden parties and wonder how any one else could stand under a burning person sipping their martini…. It was the Romans who first began a logical thought out system to practice euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.

I submit to you that their behavior was not all that unusual

It is simply part of a pattern of a Godless view of human life that is repeated over and over throughout history. The only antidote to a godless view of live is:….. GOD!

II. Christianity’s Impact on the Value of Human Life

(Genesis 1:27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (NIV)

The entrance of sin into the world brought with it a worldwide phenomenon.

The devaluation of Human Life!

Once you lose sight of God… and the fact that men and women are created “in His image” the value of an individual life falls off dramatically. Cain’s improper focus on God led to the murder of his brother, and you know that the early history of the world is a history of paganism and barbarianism.

In all civilizations where Christianity didn’t deeply touch; the taking of another human life was not something to be concerned about. In today’s civilization, where the true God of heaven is absent, we find atrocities that defy our ability to understand. We can’t even conceive of the atrocities of a Hitler or a Osama bin Laden. We can’t even fathom the mind of a suicide bomber.

You must understand….the only reason you value life, like you do, is because of your God-centered value system. The more our nation moves away from Christian roots…. toward a post-Christian future… the cheaper life is becoming….it has started with our unborn infants, will eventually/ and is moving to the elderly, and then the unwanted in society…the deformed, the criminals, the unproductive, the Christians. Pastor…you are being overly dramatic…

No I’m not….read your history books!

In the ancient world, the pagan world, the world Jesus was born into; it was common practice to sacrifice a child, Not one….. thousands and thousands of children were murdered. If you were being born in ancient Rome or in ancient Greece (and those were the civilized countries) a newborn came out into the most dangerous environment imaginable. In the Rome of the New Testament:

1) Abortion was considered a normal and desirable part of everyone’s lives.

2) It was perfectly common for an unwanted child to simply be placed in the woods for the wild animals to feed on, or for strange and perverted people to come along and retrieve for whatever purposes they intended.

3) Virtually all deformed babies were simply abandoned

4) If you were a girl your chances at survival and a good life were minimal

5) Romans considered the child the property of the Father…up until age eight he could kill or sell his child and it was considered simply a matter of wise economics.

6) Only about ½ of the children born… lived beyond age eight.

Then came Jesus! Christianity spread across the “civilized” world…

1) Abortion virtually disappeared in Early Church times.

2) Infanticide and Abandonment fell off dramatically.

3) The Church started taking in others abandoned children (Orphanages)

Why? Because the Founder of our faith and the Savior of the World is the one who said:

(Matthew 19:14) Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (NIV)

In a day when children had no value.. Jesus elevated them to a preferred status. The early church were so forceful, and faithful, in their attempts to turn the horrible practices around that slowly, but surely, their views became the predominant views of the Romans themselves. Sometime around 300 AD Emperor Constantine passed laws that give children the same rights as adults and made killing children a crime. They also promoted a practice that today we take for granted: Adoption

Why? Because… With an elevated view of God comes and elevated view of life!

III. Whoever finds Me ..finds __________!-God

(Proverbs 8:35-36) For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the LORD. But whoever fails to find me harms himself; all who hate me love death." (NIV)

We talk about the sanctity of human life. The word “sanctity” means holy… sacred unto God….. that which God has declared to have great value!

To the humanist, or atheist, or even many unbelievers, there can be no such thing as the “sanctity of life.”

How can you consider something sacred when you reject the God who makes it so?

Why would you care if God declares something of great value when you have declared that God, himself, has no value?

That godless thinking is showing up in our post-Christian world. We now have far greater penalties against endangering a turtle egg than we do against killing the egg of a human being “created in God’s image.” I’m not anti- turtle; but it seems odd to me that often those who raise their voices, the loudest, to save animals; are also the loudest to give permission to terminate human babies.

Ted Turner said in Miami Beach in 1992:

Overpopulation is the cause of drive by shootings and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants.

The environmentalist magazine, Wild Earth said:

If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it might seem strange. But if you give it a chance I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions , of Earth dwelling species.

The universe was created for humans…. Without humans, there is no further need for sea otters or elephants… let alone millions, if not billions , of Earth dwelling species.

The moral base of any society can be judged by it’s view of human life!

If Christianity had not penetrated into this United States, many of us sitting in this room would never have lived long enough to be here today….

As for our country and its fascination with whether the birth of an unplanned baby should outweigh a woman right to choose what she does with her own body.

Dr. C Everet Koop- former Surgeon General quotes Francis Crick- a Nobel laureate as saying in 1978, “no newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding it’s genetic endowment, and that if it fails these tests, it forfeits the right to live.”

Dr. Koop says that it’s a standard joke in some medical centers in the U.S. that if an unwanted baby is born and doesn’t meet certain physical requirements they are put on a “low calorie diet”.

We’re looking at issues like Kevorkian style euthanasia and thinking that we, the enlightened generation, are really giving these issues and unbiased look for the very first time….. That’s simply not true.

Nationally we can take certain roads in our thinking- We can say were liberated- we can carry signs and chant

But History teaches us that certain belief systems always lead to the same final result.

We here this morning, as Christian people, I trust are searching for the truth, and the truth is… Whatever biases I may have about life …. Whatever political views resonate with me. What ever I would like to be truth really doesn’t define truth in this matter of human life.

Life isn’t defined by what we think. It’s defined by what God thinks. We must shape our view of life to conform to God’s view of life.

In the sixth commandment God clearly delivers the command, Do not murder. God follows that up by repeated applications of the principle that we are not, on our own decision, to take the life of another human being. Issues of war and self defense are not included; these are dealt with separately in Scripture.

*The issue of who is productive in our society is not ours to define

*Economics don’t play a role in who is worthy to live

*Which babies are too retarded or deformed to continue life is not our decision

The question of the start of human life and the ending of human life is not ours to define- It is God’s definition that counts.

Psalm 139:13-16 For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born I set you apart, I anointed you as a prophet to the nations.

It would seem that…. God puts forethought into what a child will be like…He preordains what the child could become…

There never has been any Biblical question about when life begins or when it should end.

Life doesn’t begin! It is inherited! Human life only began once- when God breathed the breath of life into Adam and Eve.

There is no period in human reproduction when life stops and later starts up again.

Biological life is continuous.

The key is that we are simple stewards of life

We do not start it. We do not have the right at any level to terminate it once it has started. That right belongs purely to God and we better make sure it stays there.

 God is the source of life and therefore “Life is sacred”