Abortion is America’s national sin. Abraham Lincoln considered slavery to be a stain upon his nation, a sin for which there was the accounting of the Civil War. He was right, not in the sense that God directly sent this war in response to the evil of slavery; we have no Word from God to make that declaration. But a nation that flaunts God’s Law will find that there are consequences to such evil. God doesn’t just arbitrarily make laws, He declares laws for our good, for the betterment of society as a whole. And so our national sin has consequences, and it is already happening. You cannot devalue life, declaring that an entire classification of human beings can be killed for any reason, and expect it to have no effect. Whether we like it or not, this world is ordered according to God’s holy Law.
God created life, and so He acts to protect it. The Fifth Commandment is God’s definitive statement on the value of life, for there God declares, “You shall not murder.” Luther gives us the explanation: “We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need.” God created life, and He expects that the crown of His creation, the human race, would have the same respect for such life that He does. The Fifth Commandment calls abortion what it is: a sin, a great evil, perhaps the greatest evil this world has ever known. The Fifth Commandment calls on us to help and support our neighbor in his or her physical needs; it call us out on our silence. But what the Fifth Commandment ultimately does is drive us to Jesus, for forgiveness, for grace, and He will provide; even the sin of abortion, even the sin of quietism, is nailed to the tree.
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