This post originally ran September 26, 2018.
Of course everyone recognizes that the battle over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is a battle—all understand that there is a fight going on. And more than a few understand that the battle is over Roe. But this understanding is greater on the side of the secularists, their understanding is much more pronounced. Many Christians—bless their hearts—think this battle is over whether Brett Kavanaugh actually was a sex offender.
If you would be so kind, I would like to address all of this through a series of short observations, short but inescapable. I trust that doing so in this way will help Christians to get to the heart of the matter.
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Christians and secularists both have a blood-red sacrament at the center of their understanding of the world. We have the broken body of Christ, and the wine-red blood of Christ, the meaning of which is my life for yours. They have tens of millions of dismembered children, all of whose bodies have had very different words spoken over them—your life for mine. Because we are followers of Christ, one is a faith of self-sacrifice, even if it costs us our lives. The other is a religion of self-indulgence, even if it costs you yours.
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Criminals will go to great lengths to cover up a crime, or to prevent that crime from being brought into open court. The same goes for entire societies that have given themselves over to criminal behavior, as ours has. A people, a nation, a party, a faction, that has the blood-guilt of 60 million children on its hands, will certainly not stick at slandering a nominated jurist if that slander will successfully prevent a reckoning for the murders.
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A society that is complicit in guilt of this magnitude cannot afford to honor Lady Justice. She is their sworn enemy. Due process is their adversary. An orderly weighing of evidence is the very last thing they can afford to allow. And so a society that will not repent of murdering the children is a society that must insist on murdering Lady Justice. There is a reason they hate that woman.
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Much rides on whether Senate Republicans discover a spine, and confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Court. They should do so regardless of what is said or done from this point out.
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Gorsuch replaced Scalia, and so did not tip the balance of the court. Kavanaugh is slated to replace Kennedy, who was a swing vote. But on issues like abortion and sexual deviance, Kennedy was a friend of the progressives. Kavanaugh is not, and so would likely move the court back toward some form of sanity. Hence this battle. But if the next open seat on the Court is to replace someone like Ginsburg, then we will likely be at the point of open civil war. And when I use the phrase civil war, I am not speaking metaphorically. This battle over Kavanaugh is an example of the secularists stretching “ordinary” politics to the absolute breaking point. The reason they are more than willing to go way beyond ordinary politics is seen in a word I used earlier, which was reckoning.
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That word reckoning is important. If—through the undeserved mercies of God—Roe were ever to be struck down, and America turned from the crime of human abortion in real repentance (and real repentance is the only way out for us), then this would mean far more than a mere shift in policy direction. It would not be that the party that wanted abortions available would be now unable to have it their way until the next election. Rather, there would have to be a spiritual sea change. This would mean that those who always stood against these murders would remain right where they were. Many of those who were complicit in the slaughter, who had repented, would turn from the very thought of continuing such crimes in furious self-loathing. And those who insisted on staying faithful to the blood-lusts of secularism would necessarily become pariahs—like so many Buchenwald guards living in Argentina now. They are not willing for such an outcome, and they will fight to the last ditch to prevent it.
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There will be no liberation from this crime of human abortion unless and until there is a willingness to name the sin for what it was, is, and always will be. Abortion is human sacrifice. Not only is it human sacrifice, it is human sacrifice that is futile, vain, useless, empty, stupid, and fruitless. The gods being propitiated are gods that are deaf, dumb and blind. These gods of self-indulgence are unable to save anyone. The gods of self-indulgence led us into the morass that we need salvation from. They are the blind guides who got us into this, and cannot be trusted to get us out. We must leave them behind.
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Human sacrifice is inescapable. The Christian faith is also a religion of human sacrifice. But the sacrifice that occupies the center of our faith was a once-for-all sacrifice. The death of Christ on the cross extracted the sting of death completely, and the resurrection of Jesus from the grave swallowed up death forever. The potent sacrifice of Christ was the death of every form of vain sacrifice. So the choice before us is plain. We must opt for the definitive, once-for-all blood sacrifice, which happened outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, or we must settle in for the secularist alternative, which is endless blood sacrifice, ongoing blood sacrifice, recurring blood sacrifice, with rivers of blood being poured down that yawning, gaping, and bottomless pit called self.
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So far from removing blood-guilt, the crime of human abortion generates blood guilt, multiplying it. When we hear the words of Christ, my life for yours, we respond to Him in faith by surrendering our lives. When we surrender our lives, we find that they are then returned back to us, thirty, sixty, and one hundred-fold. We surrender our lives, and they are then given back to us. Not only are our lives given back to us, but they are given back to us alive. But when we cling to our lives, and to the flattering and sibilant gods who entice us with them, we look up at the end of the day to discover that we are missing a v. All this time, we were clinging to lies, not lives. And so we lose the very thing we thought was everything. We gambled and lost. The man who gains the whole world and loses his soul, loses something else in the process—the whole world. The end of that process is the outer darkness, in which there is nothing but time to gnaw on the remnants of self, which by that time will be like trying to chew smoke.
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We are a stiff-necked generation. We are a wicked, apostate and backsliding people. If NFL players were kneeling in repentance for all the abortions they have procured for their various girlfriends, and were weeping because they lived in a nation that permitted and encouraged that kind of vile behavior, such a response would be entirely appropriate. But however appropriate it might be, I can pretty much guarantee that the football player who started such a movement would not be receiving millions of dollars from Nike.
“He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.” (Revelation 19:13–16, ESV).
Why do I write this way? Because the word of Christ is a sharp sword “with which to strike down the nations.” America is a nation, and desperately needs to be struck down. The only alternative is whether or not we will be struck down into repentance, or struck down in the fury of wrath, in a judgment from God that is hissing hot.