Kennystix's podcast
Abortion and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
Let's pray together. Lord, the problem is very old. It's very, very old. This insurrection against the Almighty. And I pray that our rebellious hearts, now in this room, would be softened and subdued by the Word of God. Indeed, they have been already. Oh, that you might come and speak to us now. Help me to handle this explosive and controversial and painful and deeply evil topic with biblical faithfulness and biblical balance and with gospel compassion. So that a great saving work is done in this room. Saving from abortion, saving from the condemnation of past abortion. And the saving of our land from destruction and we want Christ now to be magnified. So come, oh God, I pray and help me and us. I need to speak. Help us to listen and you go down and open the hearts. I pray and bring about a great work that magnifies Jesus and saves children, saves mums and dads, saves a nation perhaps, in Jesus' name I pray, amen. The modern secular world, the world that is attempting or has attempted to remove God from his all creating, all governing, all sustaining, all defining place. That world has no choice once it has removed God but to make itself God and to define its own morality. In other words, when man abandons God and God's self-disclosure, self-revelation as the objective ground of what is true and what is right and what is beautiful, man necessarily defaults to the next highest court of appeal, namely himself. We become the deciders of what is right and what is true and what is beautiful. If God is not the measure of what is true and right and beautiful, then I am, or you are. And since you and I may not agree on who's deity takes precedence in defining the right, life becomes power struggle, which is in fact what is the case in education and media and industry and popular culture today, not a struggle to find the truth, objective truth about right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, true, false. That does not exist when God is banished. The struggle now is who's got the power to define it? Who defines what is true? Who defines what is right? Who defines what is beautiful when God is off the picture? There's no court in heaven anymore to which the weak can appeal. The one who has the power has the right definition for personhood, for right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. And the really powerful man is God almighty, now, maker of truth, inventor of right, definer of the beautiful. And the proof of it is the 20th century. The bloodiest century in the history of the world with its Stalin and its Hitler and its Mussolini and its Milasovitch and its Pot and Amin and Mao and Sun and Hussein and the abortion industry prove that the one who has the power defines with devastating, horrific consequence. The evidence is all before us. The implications of a God dethroning secularism for abortion and genocide are huge. And we'll come back there in just a moment. But first, let's just see how old this modern world is. Genesis chapter 2 verse 16. The Lord God commanded the man saying, "You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die." What's the meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why did it have that name? And why was it forbidden? And what did it mean? What did it signify to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? It's not bad to have the knowledge of good and evil if you're God. Chapter 3 verse 22. Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil." Now that was bad, for man to have it was bad, for God to have it was good. What is it? The tree of the knowledge of good and evil signifies independence in determining what is good and what is bad. God is independent. He doesn't consult a law and he doesn't consult us. He is right. He is the truth. He is beauty. That's where we learn what it is. The tree was there signifying God has this right. God is this essence. Don't go there. Don't take that for yourself. Don't become a definer of good and evil. Rest in God. Trust in God. Leave that to God. The knowledge of good and evil in that defining being sense is his. Don't eat it. It's proper for God to have the knowledge of good and evil. It was devastating for man to try to cut the cord and get it. Don't go there because you'll die, he said, and we went there and we've been dying and it's been killing. This independence, this claim to know what's right and claim to define the truth and claim to define what's beauty has been killing us ever since and it's killing big time in the 20th century and today. All death is rooted in this insurrection against God. So let's see it played out chapter 3 verse 1. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field the Lord had made and he said to the woman did God actually say you shall not eat of the tree of the garden, of any tree in the garden and the woman said to the serpent we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the mist of the garden neither shall you touch it lest you die but the serpent said to the woman you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil. If you choose to eat this tree then you'll have it, at least you will presume to have it. You will say I henceforth decide for myself what is true, what is good, what is right, what is beautiful and that's God's business in not ours. God alone is the source of objective truth and right and beauty but Satan says otherwise eat it, eat it. You'll be like God which is so true and so false. Satan almost never says a whole falsehood to us, almost never. His lying is always half lying so that it is effective lying. You'll be like God. Picture it like this. God is like a flower. Only it's a very unusual flower almost like one of these air plants. Don't have to have any ground. Only God doesn't need any air either and he's got glorious blossoms and beautiful fruit and he has no roots because he's absolutely independent and self-sufficient. He's not drawing water up. He's not drawing nutrition up. He's not drawing any photosynthetic effect from light. He is light. He is the soil. He is the water. He is the nutrition. He's the flower and he created flowers. Says so chapter 1 in the image of God he created them. So much of God we are like big difference. We have roots in God. All of our soil all of our nutrition all of our water all of our light comes from God and Satan comes and says he says don't don't cut this stem because you'll die. If you cut this stem you won't die. You'll be like God. They were like God and they thought I don't want to have roots in God. I don't like depending. I don't want to get my water of truth. My nutrition of right and wrong. My light of beauty. I don't want to get it from another. I want to be it. So she cut it. You can do that. And die. And die. Verse 6. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate. She gave some to her husband and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. What's the first result of choosing to be God if you're not? A canyon between appearance and pretension. What's the first result of choosing to be God when you're not? A grand canyon between appearance and your pretended deity. We call it shame. I'm God. I've cut the cord. I'm God. Now try standing in front of a mirror and you will laugh. That is God. This is awful. The massive discontinuity, the massive breach between our claim to know what's right and know what's true and know what's beautiful in front of the mirror of our fallibility and our mortality and our finitude and our sinfulness and what have we been doing ever since? Makeup, bodybuilding, tanning, acne treatments and anything to keep from appearing as the wreckage that we are. It's a pretty sad development. Really sad. So the essence of the fall of man into sin and rebellion and insurrection, the essence of the fall is the supreme pleasure we have in being God, not seeing God. The essence of the fall is finding more pleasure in ruling my life so that I get praise than beholding God's life so that he gets my praise. That's the heart of every person in this room. We love our rights and our credit when we do what we do. Praise me. Affirm me. Like me. Make much of me. I cut the cord. I am my God. And it feels so good when people do it to us. Take some miracle called conversion for us to fall out of love with ourselves and our independence and our rights and fall in love with just seeing truth and beauty and goodness and living to praise it him. Take some miracle. The modern world is very old. It puts on different clothes from century to century. Some recent names have been modernism, existentialism, secular humanism, postmodernism. But there's a common route to all of them all the way back, whatever clothes they put on, there's a common route and the common route is God is dethroned and the next highest court of appeal man is looked to be God and to define truth and right and beauty. Little finite fallible puny mortal man. The implications of this for abortion are staggering. Before I make the link explicit, let me make sure that you're aware of what we're dealing with. In the world, not just America, but in the world, probably a conservative estimate, 30 million abortions every year. A third of those probably in Russia. Romania is probably the highest aborting country per capita with about three of every pregnancies ended in abortion. In America since Roe v. Wade, 1973, when it was made legal to kill an unborn baby for any reason at any time. One baby every 26 seconds for 31 years. 151 every hour. 3,629 every day. 43 million babies. Chopped to pieces. Whatever name you call it. In Minnesota, 1973 to 2002, 461,026 abortions reported. 14,186 in 2002. Most recent year we have. 50% women under age 24, 79% unmarried, 40% had an abortion before. Then this statistic is the one that brings me closest to the link that I'm going to make. 60% reported, and the non-reports who knows, reported that the reason for their abortion was either economic or "does not want child at this time." Now the link between abortion and the modern secular world that I've been trying to describe to you for the last 15 minutes is the word "want" in that sentence. I do not want this baby at this time. I used to think about 13 years ago, no, it's been 16 now, I used to think that if I could persuade abortionists that they were killing children, they'd stop. And then I had lunch with one. Bill Long was his name. He was doing abortions five days a week down at the abortion clinic at 9th and 8th street, about three blocks from our church downtown. And as I came prepared to argue that these are children, he cut me off and said, "I know that better than you do." I was stunned. I said, "Well then, why do you keep doing it?" And he said, "It's the lesser of two evils." I said, "What's the other evil?" He said, "A woman should have a right to do what she wants to do with what's in her body." If you take that away, that's a greater evil than the evil of killing unborn human beings, children. And I was face to face with the power of independence from God when we enthroned the desire of a human to God-like status. I used to think that if I could just take Scott Clusendorf's Sled acronym, which is really good, S-L-E-D, he spoke on Dobson's program twice as past week. And his argument is, and I want to give this to you in just about a two-minute form, because it's so valuable, he said, "The real issue at the level of personhood is, are there any morally significant differences between a one-month-old outside the womb and a baby inside the womb, morally significant differences?" He said, "There are four differences, S-L-E-D, Sled, size, level of development, environment, and dependence." And none of them are morally significant. And you can just think that through for yourself. A size of a baby's not morally significant, because a 14-year-old and a one-month-old are big difference. And we don't say that one has a bigger right to live. L, level of development, the irrationality of a one-month-old baby, and a master student at the university is massive. But we don't say, it's okay, therefore, to kill a one-month-old. E, environment, location, we don't say that a person in this room is safer than a person out there. You can kill them out there, but not in here. Location doesn't determine right to lie. D, development, or dependence. Don't tell a person on a respirator or a dialysis machine that they are less protected by law from killing, just because at that time they happen to be utterly, totally dependent on something outside themselves in order for their life to be sustained. Don't say that an umbilical cord takes away personhood. So those are good arguments. And I found that they didn't do any good at all with some. Got home last night, and two emails showed up from people who had been in the service last night just to keep me up to speed. Wesley Clark said, January 13, Washington Times, life begins with the mother's decision. I'm groping for non-abusive language. What if she decides at one month after board that the fact that a sentence like that can be spoken by a public official and not be driven, run out of town on a rail, is a commentary on the blindness of America right now? Unless you think that's the worst, here's from the Sunday Telegraph quote, "One British medicine's most senior advisors on medical ethics said, 'I don't think infanticide is always unjustifiable.' I don't think it is plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal. People who think there is a difference between infanticide and late abortion have to ask the question, 'What has happened to the fetus in the time it takes to pass down the birth canal and into the world which changes its moral status?' I don't think anything has happened in that time. In other words, he takes Scott Cluesendorf's arguments and turns them exactly on their head to justify infanticide. There is no morally significant difference between a one-month-old baby outside the womb and a baby inside the womb. Since we abort the babies inside the womb, it is right to abort the babies, kill the babies outside the womb. That's the direction. We are very near the heart of the issue with the sentence. 'I do not want this child at this time.' In American history, I would venture to say that sentence is probably at least one of the most powerful sentences that has ever been spoken. 'I do not want this child at this time.' It's powerful because in a world without God, we invest that sentence with divine authority. Not only do we give to this desire that the mother has sovereignty over the child, it's even deeper than that. We invest the will of the strong with the creative capacity to define personhood. This desire, this will, this want creates life. That's protectable. When it disappears, that disappears. That is an awesome development. The fetal homicide law in Minnesota is a remarkable puzzle. Minnesota, along with 33 other states, has a fetal homicide law that documents the tragedy of American culture because of its inconsistency. The fetal homicide law says that if intentionally or not you attack a woman and also injure or kill her fetus, embryo, baby, you will be tried for two offenses, and there will be two victims to the crime. There have been some remarkable cases in Minnesota in recent years. You remember the one of the young man who assisted his girlfriend to commit suicide and was found out she was six months pregnant at the time. And in the trial, the law against assisted suicide is less than the law against fetal homicide, and so he was convicted of fetal homicide. And the most remarkable thing about this case is the sentence in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that described it with stunning truthfulness and perplexing contradiction. "The law makes it murder to kill an embryo or fetus intentionally except in the cases of abortion. The law in Minnesota makes it murder to kill a fetus intentionally except." What? Except what? What's the difference? Why isn't abortion breaking the fetal homicide law? There's only one difference. The imperial divine want of the strong. I don't want this child at this time. In other words, in our law, there is now made room for some killing to be justified, not on the basis of anything in the one being killed as unworthy or criminal, but solely on the basis of the will of the strong. Might makes life. You don't want to live in that world. I promise you. In Russia, they lived there for 70 years. In Cambodia, they lived there for a half a dozen years. In Germany, they lived there for about 10 years. You don't want to live in the world where the difference between your personhood and non-personhood resides not in you, but in the will of the strong solely. I don't want this baby. Therefore, it's not a baby. You don't want to live in that world. I promise you, don't help sustain that world. It will come home someday. We call it anarchy. We close by moving to a remedy. A remedy at two levels. The first, we do the best we can. The second, we lean on God to do the perfect. Let us, as a church, speak the truth and say over and over and over again, might does not make right. Desire does not define duty. Wanting does not create worth. Let us say it over and over again and let us appeal to the intrinsic intuitions of all humans who know that if they are about to be killed, they will scream bloody murder. You don't have a right and will not accept the argument. I create my rights. I'm stronger than you are. I want you dead. Therefore, you're not worth living. You will not know human being in America or anywhere else will suffer that kind of logic when their life is at stake. Therefore, we are colossally selfish as a nation when we put on the weak that logic who cannot cry out from the womb and say, that's not valid. We'll just use it for ourselves. Take any one of the abortionists or any one of the women or any one of the husbands or boyfriends and try to apply it to them and see if the will of the strong is a valid definer of the right of the weak to live or die. So all I can say as far as America goes is tell the truth for him. Tell the truth. Just keep telling it and telling it and telling it no matter how much it's thrown back in your face. Keep telling it because there's coming a day, God willing. I do not know. It is my prayer 100 years from now that we will look back and abortion will be as socially and morally unthinkable as slavery is today. And we will say, I can't believe they did that. I can't believe they did. They'll read about it in the history books and say, you can't look at these pictures. That didn't happen. The Holocaust didn't happen. There are people that say that today. And now the remedy that is full of hope and I'm aware of women in this room who've had abortions and do not hear what I'm saying easily. Let's go back to Genesis 3 or show you the God we worship. Look forward now. Insurrection against God has been committed. They've said, we want to be God. We don't want to be rooted in you as God. We don't decide for what's right and what's good and what's true, what's beautiful for ourselves. Just get out of my life. Show up when I need you if I have a car wreck or something, but stay out of my bedroom and my pocketbook. And after having been told that by his creatures, God says in verse 15 to the devil, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you will bruise his heel." Now this is amazing. You know what this is, don't you? This is the first statement of the gospel in the Bible. Here's Satan in the form of a serpent attacking, ruining everything. And here's man and woman buying into it, cutting their own head off. And God had said in the day that you eat of it, you die. So wouldn't you expect him now to come to the serpent and say, "Serpent, now you wrecked it, they bought into it, go bite their heel and kill them and I'm going to start over." That's what he says is going to happen. In the day that you eat of it, you will die. So go kill him, snake. Do what I tell you to do, go kill him. If you've had an abortion or your sin could be a hundred other things and you feel like that's what's going to happen to me, I did what Eve did, I'm going to die. There's no hope. And God didn't say to the snake, "Go bite her." He's very different than we are. He said, "There's coming a day when he shall bruise your head." That's very strange, that language. Did you catch that? I will put enmity between your offspring, your demonic offspring, the brood-of-ipers that come from you and her offspring. And then instead of saying, "The offspring of the woman will crush your offspring," he said, "The offspring of the woman will crush you." He broke the parallel. Satan goes on and on and on, keeps on working. He doesn't die, generation after generation. He's there in and through his offspring, bringing misery and death upon the world. And God says, "My offspring will come." I saw the movie, "The Passion of the Christ," a few weeks ago. Some of you were at church last Wednesday night when we showed the trailer of it, same scene. Most powerful moments, and I'm going to hear a root for you right now because it is so powerful. I want to see it again just for this scene. It's Gethsemane. Jesus is on his face. Satan is portrayed in a black hooded, ivory, clammy white face. And there's a snake slithering along the grass as Jesus is on his face crying out and praying to God. And the snake goes right under Jesus as he's kneeling. And you wonder what in the world is going to happen here. And Jesus doesn't get startled. He simply slowly stands to his feet, looks, Satan right in the face, and then that's the most powerful moment in the movie. And stomps the head of that snake. That's the banner over the whole movie. This movie's got a statement. He's making a statement about the triumph. He says on the way to the cross, he looks up at his mother at one point and says, "At the moment when he's got the bloodiest face, behold, I make all things new." Jesus Christ came into the world to destroy the works of the devil. And in destroying the works of the devil and shedding his blood to do it, and rising from the dead, he makes a way for all of those of us who have committed insurrection against him to have amnesty, escape forgiveness, justification, acceptance, love, forgiveness. And that's what I want to hold out to you. It doesn't really matter in the end if you've had abortion or have killed or have committed adultery or have stolen or have taken the name of the Lord in vain or have done 10,000 other things when he stomped the head of that snake. When he laid out his body on the cross, he made a way for forgiveness. For abortionists, like Bill Long, who's moved away to California now, I don't know what's become of him. And for all of those women that he helped abort their children and for all of us who've sinned in other ways. Let me end with this. Satan in this room right now is slithering like this. He's whispering with his slithering voice to some of you, and it may have nothing to do with abortion. You won't be forgiven. Not what you did. Not how many times you've walked away from my offer or from God's offer. You won't be forgiven. One of the lies of Satan, one of the worst lies, is that a person who's beginning to have a little bit of hope that there might be the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God and the hope of eternal life all of a sudden loses hope for no rational reason. It's just gone. And maybe I could stomp the head of that serpent, which is what Romans 16 says Christians do. Soon Satan will be crushed under your feet, it says in Romans 16. Maybe I could crush him right now out of your life with that lie by reading a text that God put in the Bible for you at this moment in your life. Listen to 1 Timothy 1, 15, and 16, where Paul does his best in the power of the Spirit to help you say no to that lie of Satan. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost. But I received mercy for this reason that in me as the foremost Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to all who were to believe in him for eternal life. Now listen carefully. Paul is saying God saved me the foremost. What did he mean by foremost? He meant I killed Christians. Acts chapter 9 verse 1, I killed Christians. I was a murderer of God's children. I'm the worst. And he saved me so that I would be a model of Christ's perfect patience for all who would believe on me. Now add this amazing fact. Not only was he a murderer, but he was chosen to be an apostle while he was still in the womb of his mother Galatians chapter 1. Do you see what that implies? God reached down into the womb of a woman and saw this apostle and said I'm going to make him my apostle. He's going to write 13 books in my Bible and then under the providence of God he became a murderer so that when he was called on the Damascus road I could say to you this morning that's how patient God is with murderers. God set it up. He set it up for you. That's why it's in the Scripture. I received mercy for this reason that in me all those listening to John Piper might see Christ's perfect patience as an example and therefore I simply plead with you. Say to the devil right now, no I will not believe you and your emotional effects on my life feeling hopeless and that there's no way I could be forgiven. I will say yes to God in the Bible and the beautiful example that he made for me in the apostle Paul and the ground of that forgiveness on the cross I will say yes to that truth. So Father now as we close I ask that you would perform a saving work in grace. I pray that you would banish abortion from our land. I pray that you would dethrone the imperial self that defines reality by what it wants instead of being rooted in the truth and the right and the good and the beauty that you are. And I pray that there would be forgiveness shed abroad in this room as people say yes to the gospel of Christ and his substitution by which he took all of our aborting sin and all of our other sin upon himself so that we might live. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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