How Should Christians Think about Planned Parenthood?

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Dr. Ben Carson, a brilliant cutting edge scientist and neurosurgeon formerly of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, made an incredibly challenging public statement recently.   He said, “the whole purpose” of Planned Parenthood is to “eliminate black people”.    He was referring to its founder Margaret Sanger who was a staunch advocate of the eugenics (good genes) movement intended to ‘purify’ humanity from it’s ‘weakest’ components.   As an American citizen and as a Christian it is important to understand the underlying ideologies/theologies behind the things that our society values and which our government funds.   I suggest you Google Margaret Sanger to understand her ideology and then compare that to what you see when you Google the most recent undercover video interviews of Planned Parenthood doctors and administrators who were caught on camera selling body parts of aborted babies.  

The News Media has given the death of a lion in Zimbabwe (yes, the natural world does matter to God!) twice as much coverage as the calculated death of millions of babies, aborted in such a way that their organs would not be damaged so that those organs could be sold in tact.   As Christians our thinking is informed by the Bible that tells us that human beings are image bearers of God, that each human matters and that life is sacred.   I’m not sure what the age of a life has to do with the value of that life, be the person 15 weeks, 15 years or 95 years.  

On Sunday we considered the gap between sinful humanity, my sinful self, and the holiness of God.   It seems to me that one of the reasons that Jesus said,
       “Enter through the narrow gate because the gate and road that lead to destruction are
        wide. Many enter through the wide gate.  But the narrow gate and the road that lead
        to life are full of trouble. Only a few people find the narrow gate.”
                                                             Matthew 7:13-14 (GW)  

is that we humans are prone to an all too easy desensitization to our fallenness.   We are like the fish who is wet, but doesn’t know it.   We look at others and see how “wet” they are, but we don’t see ourselves and what we swim in without thinking.   When I meet God on judgment day will I not find that my silence and inaction in regard to the inhuman intentional deaths of millions of unborn children made me complicit?   Will I not be responsible as an American citizen for funding these deaths?  Will I not be find my own heart to have become too calloused to see that the most sacred of all human relationships must be that of mother and unborn child?   Will I not, on the Great Day of Judgment, find myself broken, full of unmitigated regret, and fully afraid before the blazing heat of God’s love?   So who is it who is responsible for the incredible horrors that you witness when you go to YouTube to watch these undercover videos which expose Planned Parenthood?  As the great hymn implies when it says, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? . . . . . . .  it makes me tremble, tremble, tremble”, my answer is, “yes, indeed, I too was there”.  

That leaves the thinking Christian with some things to ask him or herself.   Am I ‘wet’?   To what and to what extent am I desensitized?  Does violence bother me?  Do the YouTube videos bother me?   Whom do I blame?  Am I a hater and see the sin of everyone else so that in so doing I am able to let myself conveniently off the hook?   Do I see the sacred relationship between mother and unborn child as inviolable?   Do I view Planned Parenthood doctors, administrators and supporters as evil and myself as righteous or do I see them and myself all as sinners who are loved by God and in need of rescue by God’s Grace?  

On Judgment Day there will be a momentous meeting between Holiness and sin.   When my time comes I will be there along with the rest of humanity, in as much trouble before God as anyone else, maybe more so.   And I, like everyone else, you included, will have only one thing to say when, along with the Holy Glorious Lord, I meet the slain Lamb of God, Jesus Himself,  sitting on the throne and in his ‘slainness’ I see my sin crucified in him.   And in his life I see my life having been forgiven, rescued and resurrected with him.   

What a day that will be.   Can you imagine?  Have you ever experienced the most horrific of pain and regret and the most exhilarating and intense joy and freedom imaginable all at the same time?  So I see it being.  “Amazing Grace” will finally and fully be understood and experienced.     Think then of the moments that God gives you in this life when He gives you the gift of seeing your sin along with the Grace and forgiveness of God along with the opportunity to change.   Think of the pain of it and, if you have indeed changed that thing in your life, how joyful you are to have changed.   Now multiply that by 100 billion gazillion (a conservation estimate).   That’s judgment day for the Christian.  

 
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