I just watched a video of a young man saying that he is OK with murdering children up to three months after they’re born. Watch the video if the Facebook link works. Even if it doesn’t, you’ve already met this guy many times in your life already. You work with him, you go to school with him, he may even live with you. Many of you reading this will be this man. I’d like to share some thoughts with you on where I think such a man comes from.
Consider this “man.” How can he possibly exist? Why do we meet him everywhere? With a straight face he says he’s okay with parents killing a kid not just before they’re born (which most would) but up to 3 months after. Surely it’s longer, but 3 months is presented, and he’s cool. This is the face of America now. He represents the majority of our wretched people, and he’ll just dig his heels in.
How does such a man develop? How can the world create such a stoney heart? We’re all unique to some degree, but to arrive at such clear levels of wretchedness, it takes a village to raise such a child.
Here are just some needed ingredients to produce such an excuse for a man:
1) No knowledge of God. He must not only have no real grasp of the teachings of Jesus the Christ, but he must have a certain fashioned animosity toward him that comes from making a cliche’d reading of just a few aspects of his message made offensive to his pleasures to serve like a narrow doorway to the rest. Years of such a calloused and shallow view will make him feel like he’s explored the teaching while keeping it at double arms length away.
2) Such a man must be, at best, an agnostic. He does not know if any God exists he has to say. He has to be a naturalist. An evolutionary mindset is crucial to this kind of a concrete heart.
3. Sexual exploitation. He is almost surely addicted to the sin of pornography. His fluids are dried on his legs and hands. He is vulnerable to spiritual forces of shame that he doesn’t understand. Men like this have defiled themselves for years, and while unbeknownst to them it won’t keep God from coming to them, it will allow for any sort of openness to the light to be compromised by the spirit of shame and selfishness they’ve invited in with each masturbation.
4. Violence exposure. He seen 10,000 bloody murders on screens. He’s probably also a gamer who’s committed murder in his heart 100,000 times. An exposure to wickedness disarms us whether it’s on a screen or in reality. In reality is far worse, but this man has also never seen a baby smothered to death or dismembered in reality. He’s only “seen it in the theater of his mind” and he’s fine with it. So, the exclusive lack of reality actually creates the carnality.
5. No sound parental model. It is very likely that this man has had no tender exposure to a loving and disciplining father. His mother and his father likely did not model Christ and raise him to fear the Lord. In fact, like most of us, his parents likely divorced.
6. Wealth, materialism, selfishness, greed. It is impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom, Jesus taught in one instance. Why? I’ll be very brief, but this kind of man of modern life doesn’t come without being able to take for granted 1,000 blessings. There is something we recognize in the nature of a spoiled rotten child that produces a whole other level of selfishness and degeneracy. You don’t have to be wealthy to have these things, but wealth, in the heart of the wealthy, is a stumbling block to humility. This man has likely not done a hard days labor in his life. He doesn’t know how to produce. He knows how to complain, and yet has been marketed effectively to believe that everything he wants is still within grasp. This man is among the wealthiest human beings that have ever lived on this planet. An idolatry of possessions will produce a person willing to murder anyone who gets in the way of it. If a child threatens my ability to “be happy,” to have the unfettered sex I want, to finish high school or college, I’ll end them. That’s how selfish such a “man” is! I will not lay anything of my life on the altar as a sacrifice to my possessions, but I will lay my child (or children) there and with a straight face imagine that I get to move on. These are the murderous folks that we see daily now. Something like one in four men and women have already murdered a child in abortion. If you don’t think that murdering someone affects you you’ve never counseled a soldier from war. And that is not to equate the two. It’s to say that taking a life always comes with a cost. If it’s unjust, it comes at the cost of your own life. Murderers will not go unpunished. And there will be both spiritual and mental consequences prior to hell. You see it show up in the insanity this man just demonstrated in this video. Such a man as this has no desire to understand this, but we have to to understand where such a man comes from. He comes from the weight of the 100 skeletons on his back.
7. He must find community in his “freedom.” When the crowds cried out for Christ to be crucified, they had the kind of unity in rebellion that many of my people enjoy today in secularism. There is a herd mentality to wickedness. This has always been true, but our level of wickedness comes from seeing the façade of a good life supposedly possible without God entirely portrayed all around us. We have been duped to believe that we can be happy and good without God to a level no one on the planet has ever known before.
8. Pride. This young man cannot be wrong because his whole life has told him that he is the center and determiner of everything. His comfort, his future, his emotions are all that really matter to him. He’s probably even been told by a well-meaning evangelist that he gets to decide whether or not the Gospel of Jesus Christ is true or not. Even God has been put at his feet as if to be examined and weighed. This makes monsters out of idolaters. He has no concept that he’s a mere creature under a Creator.
None of these individual items can be shown to be the sole, exact, or direct cause of someone being able to say it’s OK to murder a child in everyone’s case, but to produce the majority of brain dead and hostile to God people filling our schools, some combination of these factors must exist. It takes a village to raise a secularist.
We are reaping what we’ve sown.
What’s the point? Consider this man. Pray for him. Pray to hate the evil that animates him. Evangelize him. If you’re not able to go and to do right now, how are you helping to send and encourage those who are?
And, where do you see these things in your life, or in the lives of your kids? How are you modeling faith and pointing them to Christ?
We’re not victims, we’re the perpetrators. But Christ still saves.
