The Abortion Holocaust

Pastor Jeffrey J. Meyers

A Combination of Two Sermons Preached at

Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church

October 2, 1994 & January 19, 1997

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I am making these sermons available to the congregation of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church for their edification and instruction. I feel constrained to say that this is not a polished article or paper. I have not had it proofread. Neither have I not spent a great deal of time correcting or refining the

grammar and style, leaving it largely in the form of an extended outline. I have resisted the temptation to expand and supplement the arguments. At many places it is uneven and repetitious because it is essentially the written draft that I took with me into the pulpit. I have also not bothered to go through the text and acknowledge all of my sources. There may indeed be some sentences or paragraphs that are taken largely from William Brennan’s magnificent, but haunting book The Abortion Holocaust: The Final Solution (St. Louis: Landmark Press, 1983). If memory serves me,

some of the biblical arguments I use come from John Jefferson Davis’s Abortion and the Christian (Phillipsburg, PA: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1984). I hope this sermon will educate God’s people here concerning the atrocities that have become routine daily realities for late 20th century Americans. God’s people can never remain quiet even though such brutal practices have won for themselves the full legal and political sanction of the government of our United States. God will surely not tolerate such monstrosities much longer. The Church of Jesus Christ must pray for speedy judgment, and hope that it is a judgment unto life for our country and culture.

I. Introduction: Holocaust defined

In 1859, the official definition of abortion by the American Medical Association (the AMA!) was, “The slaughter of countless children; no mere misdemeanor. . . the wanton and murderous destruction of the mother's child; unwarrantable destruction of human life.” In 1871 the AMA added that abortion is “the work of destruction; the wholesale destruction of unborn infants. It is a foul, unprovoked murder.” Notice the candid, non-euphemistic portrayal of the act of abortion!

In 1871, Here's how the AMA described physicians who stooped to perform abortions. They are “men who cling to a noble profession only to dishonor it; false brethren; educated assassins; these modern Herods; these men, who, with corrupt hearts and blood stained hands, destroy what they cannot reinstate. They destroy the fairest fabric that God has ever created under the cloak of medical professionals. They are monsters.” AMA went on to say that “the members of the profession should shrink with horror from all social intercourse with them, professionally or otherwise; these men should be marked as Cain was marked; they should be made the outcasts of society; it becomes the duty of every physician in the Unites States to resort to every honorable and legal means in his power to crush out from among us this pest of society.”

By 1967, however, this prestigious association of medical doctors had changed their tune. The definition changed to reflect the ungodly, drift of our country away from biblical standards in social ethics: The AMA in the late 60’s called abortionists “conscientious practitioners performing therapeutic abortions for reasons other than those posing as a threat to the life of the mother; equally conscientious physicians who believe that all women should be masters of their own reproductive destinies and that the interruption of an unwanted pregnancy, no matter what the circumstances, should be solely an individual matter between the patient and her doctor.”

The AMA in 1967 also defined abortion as “the interruption of an unwanted pregnancy.” In 1970, they shortened it to merely “a medical procedure,” and now instead of marking these licensed killers with the sign of Cain the AMA ruling was that “they should be allowed to perform abortions as long as they are done in an accredited hospital acting only after consultation with two other physicians.” And now in 1997 the murderous act has been euphemized out of existence. Today we are so much more sophisticated, so much more civilized and genteel. Today, what the AMA once called “the murderous and unwarranted destruction of human life” is now called a “clean up procedure”, “evacuation”, “emptying”, “removal.” Once Doctor's called the fetus “a human life,” now the unborn child is a “nonperson”, “a subhuman”, “a parasite”, “a mass”, and even “trash”, “waste”, and “garbage.” And, of course, everything is just peachy because it’s all perfectly legal, socially acceptable, performed by educated, licensed, state-supervised physicians wearing white robes.

This is the ABORTION HOLOCAUST. What makes it a holocaust, like the WWII Holocaust in Hitler’s Germany is that deplorable atrocities are being perpetrated on a massive scale against innocent and defenseless human beings WITH the sanction of the government and culture at large. Just like in Hitler’s Germany, incomprehensible horrors become routine daily realities. They continue unabated with the express approbation and approval of our federal and state governments while most of the people of our land greet these atrocities with silence and indifference.

We are in the midst of a holocaust that has surpassed that of Nazi Germany in WWII.

1. It has surpassed the Nazi holocaust in the sheer mind-numbing numbers of innocent human beings mercilessly slaughtered/sacrificed to the idol of social utility. The Nazi killed upwards of 6 million Jews, 1/4 of a million handicapped Germans, 1/4 million Gypsies, and their special killing units, the einsatzgruppen, who followed on the heels of the German Army slaughtered 5 million non-Jews. Now, in 20th Century America, since 1973, we have all minded our own business and lived our lives at home, work, and play while dozens and dozens and dozens of millions of little babies have been systematically and brutally exterminated.

2. The horror of the Abortion holocausts surpasses that of Nazi Germany in the sophistication of the cultural warfare used to justify such atrocities. It is the central horror of any holocaust—whether it involves the extermination of Jews by Nazis, the massacre of 20 million Russians by the Soviet Regime, the eradication of one-third of the entire population of Kampuchea by the Khmer Rouge, or the slaughter of unborn children by medical doctors—the central horror is that millions of humans bearing the image of God are methodically and officially murdered because they are considered indiscriminate masses of subhuman expendables. Before this can ever happen in a culture, the society must be carefully misled into defining these human beings as less than human and therefore devoid of respect, value, and finally legal protection against genocidal liquidation.

How does it happen that such brutal atrocities become routine and acceptable realities in culture, whether it’s Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, or America? Why the silence, the apathy, the indifference on the part of so may bystanders? Why haven’t more people insisted on halting the contemporary blood bath?

Why such a drastic change of perspective from the late 19th century? Two reasons, at least:

First, our doctors, our representatives, our judges, our culture has abandoned the authority of the Bible. The Bible very clearly forbids abortion because the unborn child is accounted as a person made in the image of God. It happened in mid-twentieth century Germany, it has happened in America. A few generations of theological liberalism breeds biblical ignorance and unbelief and lays the foundation for a holocaust.

The second reason for the drastic change in outlook has been the success of massive program of re-education that the secular doctors along with the media have been engaged in. The power of language has been used to desensitize the American people to the atrocity called abortion. In the last 50 years we have witnessed the euphemization of Abortion. By means of linguistic warfare, the pro-death forces have seared the American conscience. Very few people know what really goes on in an abortion clinic. Everything is so well camouflaged. They have been told not to worry, every thing is just fine. The average citizen waxes eloquent in moral outrage when he hears of radical pro-lifers who pickets abortion clinics, but will not even think twice about his wife's doctor who dismembers unborn babies with a steel curette on the side for a little extra cash. Such is the nature of our American culture.

This, then, is the recipe for modern holocausts 1) mass exterminations of unwanted people, 2) combined with a comprehensive sophisticated program of re-educating the masses so as to justify the atrocities. It can only happen when a Christian culture’s conscience has lost all connection with biblical social standards and then been seared with Nazi-like semantic warfare in which the true nature of abortion as murder successfully camouflaged under a mountain of deceptive, humanistic propaganda.

II. Let’s now deal with the Biblical data since it is foundational

The AMA was right in 1871, to identify abortion “a foul, unprovoked murder.” They were right because their moral foundation, their authority for examining the issue was God's Law as it is revealed in the Old and New Testaments. Not the passing of more than 100 years nor the mind-numbing number of children killed by abortionists in this country alone since 1973—upwards of 30 million—none of this should not be allowed to blur the truth.

The bare brutal truth behind all the innocent sounding slogans of the pro-abortionists is exposed by God's Word: Abortion is murder! Christian's must not be deceived, Abortion is premeditated and aggravated murder. And we know that because the Bible tells us so.

Let’s be clear about this: The abortion question is not first of all a scientific question but an ethical/religious question. We may amass all sorts of medical and scientific facts relating to the life of the fetus, but we will never find what God requires us to do with respect to the life of that fetus in the realm of science and medicine. How does God view the fetus? To answer that question we must look at God's perfect revelation of his will—the Bible. As Christians, as those who have had our hearts and minds supernaturally restored by God's grace to function as they were intended to function at creation, as Christians we judge the rightness or wrongness of any act in God's world by God's law as it is revealed in the Scriptures. How Does God view the unborn child?

A. Abortion is murder because the unborn child is a human person made in the image of God and deserving the full protection of the law.

This can be established with three observations about the biblical data:

1. The Bible unquestionably uses personal language when it talks about the unborn.

2. The Bible uses the same terminology to describe children both outside and inside the mother's womb.

3. The unborn child at conception bears the image of God and therefore to take away the life of the unborn is murder, a crime punishable by death (Genesis 9:6).

First, The Bible unquestionably uses personal language when it talks about the unborn.

Biblical writers consistently trace their personal history back beyond their birth to the point of conception. Your life did not begin at your birth, according to the Bible. Your personal history begins at conception.

For example, Job in Job 3:3 curses the day of his birth saying, “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, 'A man-child is conceived.’” The Hebrew word geber, which usually refers to men or males outside of the womb, here is applied by Job to his prenatal life. At the moment of conception he became a geber—a man.

Similarly, the beginning of David's personhood is traced back beyond his birth to his conception. Look at Ps. 51:5. “Surely I have been a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” David's sinfulness is traced back into the womb. He was personally guilty in his mother's womb. He was a responsible, guilty person from the moment of his conception. He had an ethical and moral relationship —that is, a personal relationship—with God while he was yet in his mother's womb.

Unborn children are persons! Persons with whom God has a special relationship. In the next verse, verse 6, David continues, “Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.” The best Hebrew Scholarship has recently shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the Hebrew words translated “inmost place” (tehoth) and “inmost parts” (satem) do not refer to parts of David's adult body, such as his heart or his mind, but rather to his life in his mother's womb. The language refers to God's secret work with the unborn child in his mother's womb. Even in his prenatal state David was being taught the moral law of God. Even in his mother's womb David had a personal relationship with God and his law.

This would be enough to establish the point, but let’s look briefly at Psalm 139:13-16. Notice 3 very significant things about this passage:

First, the inspired writer has no qualms about identifying himself with the prenatal work of God's hand. David as an adult assumes continuity between himself and the prenatal individual described in the Psalm. In verse 13 he says, “You knit me together in my mother's womb.” David's personal history began at his conception.

Second, notice God's intimate involvement with the unborn child. Even if the child were not yet a “person,” just the fact of God's direct personal involvement in the creation and formation of each unborn child would be enough to make us shrink back in horror from ending such a relationship by dismembering God's work and scraping it out of the womb into a garbage pail.

Third, notice that God's special relationship with human beings can long precede any awareness that they might have of that relationship. In other words, even though we may not have been conscious of it, God was there with us in the womb. God related to us in a personal way while we were yet in our mother’s womb. We may not and do not have any recollection of any awareness of God’s presence with us in the womb, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not true.

Here we might anticipate an objection. How can the unborn, be called “persons,” since they don’t have a well developed consciousness, or a well developed memory, or the capacity to reason. In answer to this we must respond with the following:

First, the issue is not the level of consciousness, but consciousness. The unborn child does not have conscious awareness? Who says? Medical Science extending the consciousness of the fetus back more and more. You’d never get this idea from the Bible! Brain waves are present after 43 days!

Second, it is fallacious and dangerous to identify personhood with a certain level of consciousness and memory or intelligence. To identify the self with certain capacities of mind, consciousness or memory is ludicrous. How many of you remember your life as an infant? Where you not a person in the whole sense? What about those in comas or the elderly or sick who have lost some of these capacities? Are they less that whole persons. You can see where this is leading. Joseph Flechter, the author of the infamous book, Situation Ethics, has defined human-ness and personhood in terms of self-awareness, memory and a certain minimum IQ. According to him, this gives society the right to execute the mentally retarded, the elderly sick, and ultimately, the unborn infant.

Third, conscious awareness and memory arise out of the fact of our personhood. Personhood cannot be reduced to mental, emotional, or intellectual, or psychological capacities. If it is, we have put a variable price tag on human beings based on how they measure up to certain standards.

We are still defending the proposition that Abortion is murder because the unborn child is a human person made in the image of God and deserving the full protection of the law.

We have seen, first of all, that the Bible unquestionably uses personal language when it talks about the unborn. Now. . .

Second, the Bible uses the same terminology to describe children both outside and inside the mother's womb.

In The New Testament the Greek word brephos is used in Acts 7: 19 to refer to the children that were killed at the command of Pharaoh, and the same word is used in Luke 1: 41, 44 to refer to John the Baptist while he was still in his mother's womb. Look at Luke 1:41. Two important things here: 1) Human emotion is directly attributed to the unborn child. 2) the child is called a brephos, the term freely used to describe infants and newly born children in the Bible (Luke 18:15; I Peter 2.2: Acts 7:19).

In the Old Testament the Hebrew word yalad is used of children in general, but it is also used specifically to refer to the unborn child in Exodus 21:22. This is a very important passage and demands some special attention. There is no passage in the Bible that is more important in this debate than Exodus 21:22-25. This one passage would be enough to positively forbid abortion. One key passage in the defense of the fatherless. This passage establishes the fact that abortion is murder because God's law affords special legal protection to the unborn infant. The passage is a “case law” that prescribes what should happen in the case of an injury to an unborn infant.

“If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

If you are using the New American Standard you have a grossly inaccurate translation of verse 22. This is now recognized by almost all conservative biblical scholars. The end of verse 22 reads in the NASV “and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, and yet there is no further injury.” By definition a miscarriage is a premature birth that results in the death of the infant. This is an inexcusable error. It is not even a possible translation of the Hebrew here. The NIV carries this “interpretation” in a footnote. But it shouldn't even do that.

In the Hebrew text the two words are yalad yatzah, lit: “the child goes out.” Yatsah is the Hebrew word which is commonly used to describe “birthing.” The word yalad is the word for the fruit or child. In no case does it ever describe the dead product of a miscarriage. The dead product of a miscarriage is always described as a nephel in the Old Testament never a yalad. In fact, the Hebrew Old Testament has a technical word for miscarriage, the word shakol. If the writer wanted to indicate that a miscarriage was in view here this word was readily available to him. Two chapters over, still in the law of the covenant, in Ex. 23:25-26, the Lord promises that if the people continue to worship the Lord, “I will take away sicknesses from you and none will miscarry and be barren in you land.”

So what we have here in Exodus 21 is the common word for “child” and the common word used to describe “birthing.” The reason we need to be clear about this terminology is important. God's demand for a just punishment expressed in verses 23 and 24 applies both to the mother and the prematurely delivered child. There is no limitation in the text. If the baby is born dead, the life of the offender is required. If the mother dies in the birthing, the life of the offender is required. If there is some injury to either the baby or the mother a just punishment must be administered by the civil courts.

The Bible says, then, that even in the case of an irresponsible accident that results in an abortion and the child's death the punishment shall be life for life. This may sound awful harsh to us in our modern liberalized society, but this is how God views the fetus. This is how God respects human life. This is how God relates to the fetus. The unborn child is to be so protected that even accidentally killing it calls for the most severe punishment. Most today would argue that the fetus is less than human so that less legal protection is required, but God says that the fetus is fully human, and the legal protection for this little human person is heightened, no doubt because of his defenselessness.

Now, if the death penalty is the maximum penalty for premature births that result in the death of the infant when the miscarriage was an accident, how much more serious is it when a man invades the womb with a knife or poisonous solution with the intent to slice up or poison the unborn child in his mother's womb.

This passage alone is enough to establish beyond all doubt that God views the fetus as a person deserving full and even special legal protection.

Third, the unborn child at conception bears the image of God

This fact follows necessarily from the proof of the unborn human’s personhood. And I would remind you that, according to Genesis 1:26-27, man—male and female—are created in the image and likeness of God, and this fact demands capital punishment for every murderer. Genesis 9:6 says “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man must his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.” An assault on man is an assault on the dignity and honor of God, whose image man bears!

What does it mean to be made in “the image of God”. Let me suggest that the image of God is not so much some resident quality in men (like consciousness, reason, or any of his moral or intellectual capacities)—the doctrine of the image of God is fundamentally a relational one. The essence of man as created in the image of God is his unique relationship with his creator and covenant Lord. You see, the image of God does not refer to some intrinsic powers that man possesses, but to man’s unique personal relationship and fellowship with his Creator. No other creature has such a personal relationship with God. That is the essence of man. Man has an “imaging” relationship with God. Man is “human” by virtue of this relationship with God. Not homo sapiens but homo religionis, not man the thinker, but religious man—man inescapably in covenant with God.

Now, what of the unborn children? Do they possess the image of God? That is the same thing as asking if there is a personal relationship between God and the unborn. We have already established that. Ps. 51 and Ps. 139 make that point abundantly obvious. Many passages in the Old and New Testaments presuppose that infants, even unborn infants are in relationship with God (Psalm 8:2 [Matt. 21:16]; Psalm 22:9-10; Psalm 71:6). But we ought to look at Job 10:8-12:

“Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese, cloth me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews? You gave me life and showed me kindness (or better “covenant love”—hesed!), and in your providence watched over my spirit.”

Even in his mother's womb Job can say that God's relationship to him can be described as Hesed love. This is the key word in the Old Testament used to describe God's covenantal relationship to his people. This is the same hesed love extended to Abraham, Moses, and Israel. Here hesed love is said to be the privilege of unborn children of the covenant!

J.J. Davis says that this passage along with Ps. 139 prove beyond all shadow of doubt that “the development of prenatal life is understood not as a blind natural process, but as God's creative and sustaining effort.” God has intimate personal involvement with the developing child! The developing child is an image bearer.

The conclusion is inescapable. Since unborn children are image bearing humans, and since Gen. 9:6 explains murder as an attack on God's image in man, therefore abortion is murder.

I could go on and talk about how the Bible clearly speaks of God electing individuals for salvation or damnation while they are yet in their mother’s womb (Gen. 25 and Romans 9). How God calls men to specific tasks in life while they are yet in their mother's womb (Judges 13 and Jeremiah 1). But everything I have said so far is enough to establish the first biblical point.

To sum up the first biblical argument: Abortion is murder because the unborn child is a human person made in the image of God and therefore deserves the full protection of the law.

1. The bible uses personal language to describe the unborn. A man's personal history begins at conception.

2. The Bible explicitly teaches continuity between prenatal and postnatal life by using the same words to describe children inside or outside the womb. And because of the innocence and defenselessness of the unborn child, God’s law affords them special legal protection.

3. And a personal relationship exists between God and the unborn, such that the fetus can be said to be made in the image of God, and any attack on that image is murder.

B. Abortion is murder, a particularly heinous form of murder owing to Jesus' love for the innocent and defenseless.

The reason I say that abortion is MURDER is because it cannot be justified by biblical law. The sixth commandment, “thou shalt not kill,” is qualified and explained by the Bible itself. There are 3 sets of circumstances where it is lawful to take a human life without it being murder.

1. Civil justice in the case of capital crimes (Gen. 9:6, “by man shall his blood be shed”; Rom. 13, “he bears the sword”).

2. Self-defense (Exodus 22:2-3)

3. Lawful warfare (which is a extension of the first two, see Deut. 20).

Does abortion fit into any of these categories? Let's see.

1. Civil justice (Gen. 9:6; Rom. 13). Pre-Nazi social elites in German described bringing sick and undesirable children into the world as a crime, but how could anyone possibly think that the unborn child is guilty of a crime!

2. Self-defense (Exodus 22). According to Exodus 22, you may defend your house and family even if it means killing an intruder. This would not be murder. Now, can anyone really believe that the unborn child is an aggressor against the mother! Nonsense! The prophet Jeremiah speaks directly to the kind of murderous rationalizations that our governmental and judicial leaders have hidden behind. Jeremiah 2:34-35, “On your clothes men find the lifeblood of the innocent poor, though you did not catch them breaking in. Yet in spite of all this you say, 'I am innocent; He is not angry with me.' But I will pass judgment on you because you say, 'I have not sinned.’” There will be no hiding on the day of judgment.

3. Lawful warfare. Would abortionists want to argue that we are at war with the unborn child and therefore we are justified in killing him or her?

These are the only three cases where it is lawful to take the life of another human being. In each of these cases God provides for the execution or killing of another human being without imputing sin to the executioner or killer. Abortion does not fit in any of these categories. Abortion is not just killing, it’s murder.

The reason I say that it is a particularly heinous form of murder is because Jesus as he spoke through the Old Testament Prophets condemned in the strongest possible language the way those in power murdered the innocent to further their own ends. Jesus of the New Testament is Yahweh of the Old Testament.

And when Jesus spoke through his prophets in the Old Testament, especially in the period of Israel's apostasy, one of his central concerns was the treatment of the defenseless, the innocent who were condemned to death, those who were unable to defend themselves against the powerful and corrupt rulers in Israel, the widow, the fatherless, the children.

Just one verse: Isaiah 1:15-17, “Stop doing wrong and learn to do right. Seek justice. Remove the oppressor. Defend the case of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow.” Our society may oppress and kill the fatherless—the unborn child who has no father to defend him—but God will not. One of the primary reasons for Israel's slaughter and exile in 586 B.C. according to God in II Kings 24 (and other places) was all the innocent blood that those in power had mercilessly shed. God help us.

All three of the synoptic Gospels record the incident where Christ's disciples attempt to drive off people who were bringing infants and young children to Jesus. His disciples thought that these infants were not important enough to merit Christ's attention. We might even say that they thought that they were not persons in the whole sense. Jesus had better things to be doing. But you see the disciples were not really reflecting on who Jesus really was. Jesus is Yahweh. The one who shows special concern for the weak, the powerless, the widows, orphans, and little ones.

Mark’s account (10:13-16) of this incident more fully reveals Jesus’ attitude towards the disciples who rebuked those who carried the children. Jesus was indignant (“very angry,” “greatly displeased,” even “boiling mad”) when he rebuked the disciples: “Permit the little children to come to Me, and do not hinder them; for of such is the kingdom of God.” Jesus sternly warns the disciples (and us) not to hinder (or forbid) little children to come to him. This is one of the few times during his earthly ministry that Christ becomes furious. That should tell us something.

“What is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15). Anything and everything is esteemed above the unborn child these days—the woman's career, the parent's convenience, the momentary pleasure of irresponsible sex—but these are an abomination in God's eyes when the become rationalizations for killing little unborn children. John Jefferson Davis again says, “There could hardly be a more fitting paradigm of the electing love of God that today's unwanted unborn child, rejected by culture, but valued in the sight of God.”

Sum: Let it proclaimed loud and clear: Jesus, the Lord, abhors power and money hungry people who slay innocent defenseless children.

The bare brutal truth behind all the innocent sounding slogans of the pro-abortionists is exposed by God's Word: Abortion is murder! Christian's must not be deceived, Abortion is premeditated and aggravated murder. And we know that because the Bible tells us so.

Furthermore, when a murderer slays another human being, according to the Bible the blood cries out from the ground for vengeance. This vengeance must be executed against the murderer by the civil authorities who bear the sword for that purpose as ministers of God. The crime of abortion demands the death penalty. Genesis. 9:6, “Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed; For in the image of God He made man.” (Gen. 9:6). Exodus 23:7, “Do not put an innocent person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty.”

II. The second reason for the drastic change in our culture’s outlook has been the success of massive program of re-education that the secular doctors along with the media and other cultural elites have been engaged in since the 1960’s.

The power of language and video and technology and has been used to desensitize the American people to the atrocity called abortion. In the last 50 years we have witnessed the euphemization of Abortion. By means of linguistic, semantic warfare especially, the pro-death forces have seared the American conscience.

Isaiah 5:20 “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.”

Ephesians 5:11 “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”

Very few people know what really goes on in an abortion chamber. Everything is so well camouflaged. They have been told not to worry, every thing is just fine. The average citizen waxes eloquent in moral outrage when he hears of radical pro-lifers who pickets abortion clinics, but will not even think twice about his wife's doctor who dismembers unborn babies with a steel curette on the side for a little extra cash.

What is hair-raising about all of this is how closely it resembles what happened in Nazi Germany. The parallels between Nazi atrocities and how they were justified to the German public and the abortion barbarism and how it is justified to our public in America are shocking.

How so?

1. The power of the legal code is used to mold the ethical conscience of the people. Given time, what is legal is moral.

2. The power of technology is brought to bear in order to conceal the victims and reduce mass killing to the trivial level of a technical procedure.

3. Physicians who performed abortions are transformed into credentialed executioners of the unwanted, a role diametrically opposed to the physician-as-healer ethic embodied in the Hippocratic Oath and its modern counterpart, the Declaration of Geneva.

4. Cultural leaders in Government, media, and apostate pulpits utilize the power of terminology to relegate the victims to a less-than-human level and obscure their extermination under a blanket of semantic camouflage.

This is how Germany succeeded in duping the population concerning the extermination of the over 10 million Jews, the handicapped, and the foreign undesirables. This is also how American Fascists have succeed keeping abortion at the safe, psychologically-remote and abstract level of removing insignificant tissue or contents from the womb.

1. The power of the legal code is used to mold the ethical conscience of the people. Given time, what is legal is moral.

Psalm 94:20, “Shall the throne of iniquity, which devises evil by law, Have fellowship with You? They gather together against the life of the righteous, And condemn innocent blood.”

Make no mistake about it: morality can be legislated, so can immorality. The law code of a people influences the ethical mindset of a people. If you are born into a culture where the legislation has established Sunday as a day of rest, then your moral conscience will be molded and shaped by that law. You will grow up thinking that it is wrong to work on the Lord’s Day. But if you are born into a culture where the Sabbath is not so legislated, then your moral consciousness is not so formed. It will be much “harder” for you to accept the concept of a Sabbath day because of legal code has had it’s impact in your moral consciousness. The same is true with homosexuality, adultery, murder, theft. Legislation shapes the mores of a people. Increasingly our culture is inculcating immorality in it’s citizens by doing away with so much of the moral legislation that has been passed down to us from our Christian civilization.

So, change the laws and eventually you change how the people think about abortion.

Guess how the moral sensitivities of the German people were altered? Yep. It started with about 30 years of pressure for legalization. Germany was first country in Western civilization to legalize abortion (1933).

Dr. Poll at a meeting of the Berlin Society of Public Health Culture in 1921: “If physicians should be able to fix in the public mind that it is a crime to bring sick, undesirable children into the world, then, eugenic ordinances and laws that are today looked on as baleful interference with personal freedom would come to be accepted as a matter of course.”

So at the Nuremberg Doctors’ trial in 1947, Walter E. Schmidt supplied the predominant rationalization for the Nazi program of extermination: “The jurists in Berlin told us that this was a legal matter. . . quite legal.”

Have you ever had a neighbor or co-worker drop his mouth open and stare at you in wonder for suggesting that abortion was immoral even though legal?

In Nazi Germany Jews were defined out of existence by the high court. In 1936, the German Supreme court decisions was “The Reichsgericht itself refuses to recognize Jews living in Germany as ‘persons’ in the legal sense.” And in America in 1973 the US Supreme court ruled “The word 'person' as used in the 14th amendment does not include the unborn.”

The power of the legal code to mold the conscience of a nation is very powerful indeed.

2. The power of technology is brought to bear in order to conceal the victims and reduce mass killing to the trivial level of a technical procedure.

Abortion is just a technical medical procedure. So we are told. This is the bureaucratization of killing unborn babies.

The process is safe, clean, efficient, decorous, and technologically sophisticated.

The medical front at Dacau, the location for the horrendous freezing and high altitude experiments on Jews, was described like this:

At first glance Dachau would appear to be a model camp... fine showerbaths. . . spotless kitchens. . . the Revier [sickbay] was amazingly clean and tidy. It included two magnificent operating rooms with a state of the art sterilization room. . . beautiful parquet floors to the wards.

All of this served as a facade. As Holocaust historian has said: “The Nazi physicians pursued but one aim extermination. The whole medical apparatus was nothing but a decor, nothing but a lie intended to disguise the massacre.”

The same principle of cosmetizing destruction lurks beneath the slick antiseptic veneer of today’s abortion clinics. Everything is OK, Miss. We’re doctors. You coming to a medical clinic. It’s clean and decorated nicely. Look at the diplomas. See our white robes. We have the latest equipment. You have nothing to fear. Sit here in our well-furnished waiting room. Listen, we have music like all other doctors. We are professionals. It will only take a matter of minutes. You will see nothing. It won’t really hurt. It’s just a medical procedure. Don’t worry.

3. Physicians who performed abortions are transformed into credentialed executioners of the unwanted, a role diametrically opposed to the physician as healer ethic embodied in the Hippocratic Oath and its modern counterpart, the Declaration of Geneva.

What is the difference? Two 19-year-old college students, Brian Peterson and Amy Grossman, give birth to a son in a Delaware motel room. They then shake and beat the child to death, stuff it in a plastic bag, and throw it in a garbage dumpster.

If they would have just been a little smarter, they would have went to a NY abortion mill just a few days before and had the child killed by a licensed, professional Doctor. And it would have occurred in a comfortable antiseptic room, with white robed nurses. Safe from media and public attention. And the Abortionist would have been much more efficient in killing the baby, using the latest up-to-date technology and pharmacology. Furthermore, the dead body of the child could have been disposed of in special medical trash bins inaccessible to the public. (I remember George Grant telling me that he was shot at by security guards in the mid-80’s when he found a trash bin full of aborted infants outside of a Chicago abortion chamber. Abortionists have gotten a lot more savvy about disposal since them.)

What’s the difference? Kill the baby in a motel room by yourself Have the baby killed in a doctor’s office by a licensed professional? Why are people outraged at the one and unmoved by the other?

That is the subject of this sermon. The difference is accreditation, licensure, professionalism—in a word: propaganda.

4. Cultural leaders in government, media, and apostate pulpits utilize the power of terminology to relegate the victims to a less-than-human level and obscure their extermination process under a blanket of semantic camouflage.

Such euphemisms that are now applied to abortion are the result of a well-planned program of deception. The secularists have used the power of language to serve a diabolical purpose. These “Semantic Gymnastics” as William Brennan calls them in his 1980 book The Abortion Holocaust, represent an aggressive strategy of linguistic corruption designed to foster and implement programs of mass extermination. In order to deceive outsiders and to rationalize their basic aims away abortionists and their pro-death supporters have very effectively utilized the power of language. By carefully choosing the language used with respect to abortion, they seek to 1) dehumanize the victims, 2) euphemize the act of destruction, and 3) legitimize the physician killers.

First, the victims are dehumanized.

In other words, the unborn children are labeled something other than human. Nonperson, subhuman, nonhuman, animal, parasite, mass, trash, waste, garbage, and maybe the most horrific of all, a disease. In 1976 Dr. Willard Cates called abortion the “preferred treatment” for “unwanted pregnancy, which is the number two sexually transmitted disease”!

This process of dehumanizing the victims is precisely the same strategy followed in Nazi Germany and which led to the casual acceptance of the mass extermination of millions of people. I am familiar with this kind of psychological manipulation from my work in the Army studying and teaching the ethics in warfare. In order to justify the killing in warfare each side seeks to de-humanize the soldiers in the opposing army. So the enemy’s are Krauts, Chinks, Japs, Charlie, and they are depicted in cartoons and other forms of propaganda as beastly and almost inhuman. Enemy atrocities are trumped up so as to make the nation and the army feel morally justified in killing. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of human warfare. This has been especially prominent in modern warfare when the reasons for fighting seem so thin. A soldier is not likely to kill guilelessly if the cause he fights for is economic in nature. He needs to feel justified in killing the enemy. So the propaganda flows and the semantics of dehumanization kick in.

The Nazi's disposed of the Jews like garbage in giant land fills. One of the Nazi criminals on trial at Nuremberg described the dead Jews as “all kinds of trash” Dr. Wirth in Nazi Germany referring to the disposal of bodies at the Treblinka gas chambers “What should we do with this garbage?” And in America? One example of many: Dr. Marti Kekomaki in 1980 “An aborted baby is just garbage, and that's where it ends up.”

In Nazi Germany Six million Jews were exterminated because they were consider to be subhuman expendables. The Nazi's rationalized their slaughter by denying the Jew's humanness and personhood. Dr. Agustus Hirt, Nazi Germany, described a Jew as “a repulsive, yet characteristic subhuman.” Adolf Hitler, in 1923 said, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” Dr. Augustus Hirt again, in 1944, “The prisoners here are animals, nothing more.” In America, I don't have to quote, it is common to describe the unborn child as a subhuman expendable. One doctor has recently portrayed a living aborted baby as “a spinal animal” Maybe the most telling comparison is this Adold Hitler in Mien Kampf, 1925, labeled the Jews as “a parasite in the body of other peoples” and in 1973 a Boston Feminist group called the unborn baby “a parasite within the mother's body.”

As long as abortion remains at the psychologically remote and abstract level of removing insignificant tissue or contents from the womb, not many people are likely to get upset. The central horror of the abortion holocaust, like the Nazi holocaust, is the systematic destruction of millions of babies who are looked upon as indiscriminate masses of subhuman expendables.

Second, the extermination process is euphemized.

That is, it is deceptively depicted as something other than murder. What happens to the victims is always described in highly positive or inoffensive terms. Consider these euphemisms: the process is called selection, choice, evacuation of the contents of the uterus, emptying, removal, cleanup, pregnancy interruption, humaneness. Such positive and up-lifting words!

What really goes on? There are now four common methods of snuffing out the life of defenseless infants:

First, there is what is called “D&C”, which stands for dilation and curettage. This is a technique most commonly used on unborn children under 3 months old (first trimester). The cervical muscle is relaxed by medication and then stretched open. A curette, a loop-shaped steel knife, is then inserted into the uterus. The “doctor” the begins to scrape and cut, dismembering the developing child and scraping the placenta from its detachment on the wall of the uterus. Bleeding is profuse and the parts of the baby are removed from the womb and disposed of. An alternative procedure is vacuum aspiration or suction abortion. The child and the placenta are violently sucked out into a jar and disposed of.

The second is by salt poisoning. This is usually done with larger children, typically in second trimester (the sixth month of pregnancy). A long needle is inserted into the womb through the abdomen and a concentrated solution of salt is injected directly into the amniotic sac. The child dies slowly by breathing in the salt solution or from a brain hemorrhage. The salt burns off the outer layers of the child's skin. It takes about one hour for the child to slowly and agonizingly die by this method. Approximately, one day later the mother goes into labor and delivers a dead baby. Unfortunately for the abortionists, babies are often born alive with this method. One nurse said this of a live baby girl delivered after a saline abortion: “She was a beautiful pink. There were no physical deformities. She lay there in the basin that was used to catch all the waste. She was waving her arms and legs. You could tell she was making a big effort to live.”

A third method of abortion is for children that are in the last stages of development, the third trimester. They are too big to slice up with the D& C method and too large also to poison with salt. These are extinguished by hysterectomy abortions. They are identical to cesarean sections, except once the child is removed from the mother's womb it is laid aside in order to die from neglect. Many nurses have reported that the more accomplished abortionists speed up the process and suffocate the child.

The fourth and most recent abortion technique is the use of drugs like prostaglandin E2 and prostaglandin f2a, developed by the Upjoin corporation. The drug is administered in a variety of ways, by the result is always the same: The drug induces violent contractions which are uncontrollable. The child is not killed directly by the drug. The violence of the contractions kills the child during the process of delivery, It's not uncommon for children to be decapitated or dismembered during this kind of drug induced abortion. Besides the severe complications that often plague the mother after these abortions the single biggest problem is that most babies are born alive after the attempt at a drug induced abortion and must be set aside to die.

Those are the four ways that doctors kill unborn babies today. It’s not an exhaustive list, but let me assure you that I did not leave out the harmless, innocent “procedure” that the euphemisms imply. Their is no nice way to kill an unborn baby. No safe way. No clean antiseptic way. There's no getting around it: Abortion is a grisly affair.

But that's not important! What is most important, according to the abortionists is not the concrete objective facts regarding the mass extermination of unborn children, what is most important is the subjective perceptions of the American people and definitions imposed on the facts by the perpetrators and their most ardent supporters. People must believe that all is well inside those well manicured “women's health clinics.” Layers and layers of whitewash to hid the brutal reality.

This is semantic abuse. It is a diabolical deception. But its not the only kind of abuse. Everything about the extermination process called abortion is carefully and deliberately camouflaged. The violent aggressive assault upon the unborn child is disguised as a clean, safe medical procedure.

I have sought this morning to do expose the abortion business for what it is: a massacre which has as its counterpart the Nazi holocaust during the second world war. I have sought to obey Ephesians 5:11 “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”

And avoid the curse of Isaiah 5:20 “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.”

Future Generations will look back and judge late 20th century America to be one of the most brutal periods of Western man’s history.

100 or 200 years from now parents will scuttle their small children out of the family room when a documentary on the atrocities of late 20th century America is announced on the holographic projector. Just like parents today shield their young children from viewing the film clips of from WWII Nazi Germany concentration camps, gas chambers, and mass graves. . .

So when what is nicely hidden from our view is finally made public, and the film clips are broadcast in documentaries showing actual abortions with baby bodies and parts, the true horror of it all will be brought home. The films are there. And they will come to light one day.

What I am suggesting by comparing Hitler's Germany with America is that despite all appearances to the contrary—appearances of affluence, morality, success, etc.—despite how everything looks, our society is in big trouble. God will not permit this kind of atrocity to continue much longer. History will look back on the 70's and 80's and consider them the most brutal periods in Western man's history. We are living in the Dark Ages now. We must act now or it will be too late.

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A Resposive Prayer for Judgment

Scripture Reading: Revelation 8:1-13

Minister: Dearly beloved, our Lord Jesus Christ has assured us that His Church is built upon Himself, the Rock, and that not even the gates of hell will be able to hold against it. To His Church, He has committed the keys of the kingdom of heaven, saying “Whatever you shall bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.”

In the book of Revelation, the office-bearers of the Church are called angels of the churches, and in the eighth chapter of that holy book, these office-bearers are shown blowing the trumpets of the Word of God. As the office-bearers proclaim the Word of God, signified by these trumpets and as the saints of God pray for God’s judgment, signified by the incense that ascends to heaven, God is faithful and pours out fiery wrath upon His and their enemies upon the earth.

Today we bring before you the many men and women in this country who annually murder over one million pre-born infants through the heinous sin of abortion. We ask you to join with us, ordained office-bearers in Christ’s church, in praying that God will pour out His wrath upon them, and upon all in alliance with them. We shall pray that the pouring out of God’s wrath will either awaken them to a proper estimation of their horrible sin so that they repent and seek forgiveness in Christ or that the wrath of God would destroy them and rid our country of this curse. Their destiny is in God’s hands. I shall ask the other Elders and the Deacons to join in solemn Amen, and then I shall ask the congregation to join with us in solemn Amen. Let us pray.

Minister: Almighty and Most Terrible God, Judge of all men living and dead, we bring before You the many men and women now living who have this year, and in years past, murdered millions of pre-born infants; who have attacked Your integrity, by denying Your image in these little ones. We, as Your anointed office-bearers, now ask that You place Your special curse upon these people, and upon all in alliance with them. We ask You to pour out the fire of Your wrath upon them, and either convert them or destroy them; that this awful butchery might forever cease in this world, and that Your Church may be free to pursue the advancement of Your kingdom. We ask that You visibly and swiftly vindicate the absolute righteousness of Your holy law and the government of Your only Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, every one God, world without end. Amen.

Minister: Elders an Deacons, do you join with me in invoking the LORD’s righteous judgment upon these murderers?

Elders: Amen!

Minister: Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, do you join with us in asking God to visit his judgment upon these people? If so, answer Amen.

Congregation: Amen!