The God Who Defies the Spirit of Abortion

You can see the King walking through the field. Silver moonlight glimmers off his golden crown. The singing stars harmonize with the sigh of wind through wheat. All is calm.

But then a cry breaks the peace — the desperate sound of a dying child. The King hears it and runs to find the source before the little life blinks out. After several minutes frantically searching through the waist-high wheat, he stumbles across the baby, naked in the dirt. Wallowing in her own blood, she is sticky with mud and other filth. Her legs kick, but they are slowing down. She has been abandoned there, left to die by exposure or wild animals (or anything, really). The parents who condemned her to death did not even bother to cut her umbilical cord. Wrapped around her throat, it snakes away among the stalks like a noose to the gallows.

The King drops to his knees and lifts the child in his arms, careless of the crimson staining his robe. He wipes blood off the little girl’s face. She is too new, or too exhausted, to open her eyes. Her sovereign kisses her forehead, and his words resonate in the darkness: “Live, dear one. Live!”

Ezekiel’s Vision

This haunting scene opens one of Ezekiel’s most startling visions. In Ezekiel 16, the prophet narrates an extended analogy for God’s relationship with his people. The metaphor is layered and complex, and many of the details remain uncertain. What is crystal clear in this passage is God’s heart toward the weak and vulnerable, particularly in the context of abortion.

Many and mighty are the arguments against abortion. Science, philosophy, theology, ethics, and reason all try to shake us awake. “Abortion is murder,” they say together, “the intentional killing of a person made in the image of God (Genesis 9:5–6).” This infanticide is anti-God, anti-man, anti-woman, and, of course, anti-child. We need those who will champion those arguments and make them impossible to ignore.

But one of the best ways to help us abhor abortion as deeply as God does is to expose the massive gulf between this evil act and the ways of our God. In Ezekiel 16, we find a vivid contrast between the spirit of abortion and the heart of God. It is the difference between rejection and rescue, ugliness and beauty, convenience and covenant, hate and love. It is the oil-and-water divide between the voice that cries “Die!” and the one that commands “Live!”

Meditating on some of these contrasts can help those of us who love God to hate abortion.

1. Rejection vs. Rescue

The spirit of abortion rejects the weak. Abortion takes the unheard cries of the most helpless and drowns them in their own blood. A father who is supposed to protect the powerless, a mother who is supposed to nurture the vulnerable, and a doctor who is sworn to do no harm collude to become a death squad. We see this rejection in Ezekiel 16. Israel (the child) was born to pagan parents, who refused to care for her (verses 3–5). Instead, in an act of “fourth-term” abortion, they left their child to die in the wilderness. The infant was “cast out on the open field, for [it was] abhorred, on the day [it was] born” (verse 5). When parents choose death for their children instead of life, they abhor them. Abortion rejects those who ought to be loved and protected.

The heart of God could not be more different. The King (Yahweh) recounts to the child, “When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’” (verse 6). The heart of God loves to rescue the weak and save the helpless. God owed Israel nothing, and yet he chose to treat her as a beloved child.

God delights to rescue his people. We were once enemies, and God chose to love us. We were once “sons of disobedience,” and he elected to adopt us (Ephesians 2:2). He delivered us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of light. We were dead, and he said, “Live!”

The spirit of abortion rages against those who deserve our love; the heart of God loves those who deserve his rage. Abortion calls children “unwanted” and rejects them; God calls the unwanted “children” and rescues them.

2. Uglify vs. Beautify

In a sense, there are few things uglier than a human corpse. Ugliness is a degradation of good, the disconnect in what should be beautiful and yet isn’t. And death is the ultimate agent of ugliness, leaving what should be divinely lovely and full of life bereft of both. So it is no leap to say that the spirit of abortion uglifies everything it touches. (I use an ugly word to point to an ugly reality.)

Abortion takes one of the most potent symbols of life, a baby, and reduces it to a bag of blood and viscera. It desecrates one of the loveliest things under heaven and makes it a horror, nauseating even to look at. (If you think I’m being dramatic, go pull up pictures of aborted babies. There’s a reason the pro-choice crowd doesn’t want anyone to see them.) In Ezekiel’s vision, abortion leaves the infant child wallowing in its own blood, unwashed, unclothed, uncared for (Ezekiel 16:4).

“The spirit of abortion rages against those who deserve our love; the heart of God loves those who deserve his rage.”

But our King loves loveliness; his Spirit delights to beautify. Abortion discarded the child like chaff; the King made her to “flourish like a plant of the field” (verse 7). God takes what is ugly and makes it beautiful. Notice all the active verbs in verses 8–14. The King cleans and anoints the child, clothes and adorns her, crowns and banquets her until he can say, “Your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you” (verse 14). In a striking shift of the metaphor, the King takes an abhorred child, glorifies her into a splendid bride, and makes her his queen (verse 8).

This is still how God deals with his people. He takes sinners and makes them saints. He takes denizens of the dark and makes them stars in the sky. He takes outcasts and crowns them with glory.

Abortion takes what is beautiful and leaves it ugly; God takes what is ugly and makes it beautiful. Abortion desecrates; God makes holy. Abortion extinguishes life; God kindles it. Abortion takes a new creation and makes it a corpse; God takes a corpse and makes it a new creation.

3. Convenience vs. Covenant

Perhaps the most striking difference between the spirit of abortion and the heart of God is the kind of love each offers. The former is a “love” of convenience, merit, and others-sacrifice; the latter is a love of covenant, grace, and self-sacrifice.

The spirit of abortion sacrifices the weak to purchase comfort. It would rather murder than risk inconvenient love. Incredibly, we see rescued Israel do this very thing later in Ezekiel’s vision. After marrying her, the King confronts his wayward bride: “You took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to [idols] to be devoured” (Ezekiel 16:20). There is a reason that idolatry and abortion are so closely linked in Scripture: abortion is idolatry full-grown. Both transactions build on a worldview of anti-grace, a system of barter and exchange where favor can be purchased. In idolatry, the weak sacrifice to move the will of the strong; in abortion, the weak are sacrificed to the will of the strong. Both idolatry and abortion sacrifice what it takes to get what they want.

For all its posturing and pride, the spirit of abortion is really a ghost of fear — fear of self-sacrifice, fear of discomfort, fear of hurt. God’s hesed love is worlds away from this. In Ezekiel’s vision, the child has no merit, no desert, no claim on the King’s kindness. His love is pure grace. But more than that, he rescues, raises, and enters into a covenant with her — catch this — fully knowing she will commit unspeakable sins against him. She not only aborts his children (as mentioned above); she also commits adultery with any stranger on the street (verse 25). She becomes worse than a prostitute because she pays others to sleep with her (verse 34). Her sins are so heinous that they make pagans blush and appear like saints by contrast (verse 52).

God knew she would do all this, and yet he set his covenant love on her. Even after being grieved and angered by all her sins, the King says, “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant” (verse 60). What love! And oh so costly. The final verse of the chapter looks forward to the unfathomable cost the King would pay to establish this everlasting covenant, “when I atone for you for all that you have done” (verse 63). The King sets his covenant love on those who cannot earn it, who don’t deserve it, who cannot keep it — and it cost him his life to do so.

The spirit of abortion sacrifices children because they will require pain and discomfort. The heart of God sacrifices himself to save his people in the full knowledge that they will still sin and grieve him. The spirit of abortion is moved by fear; the heart of God by faithfulness.

Love and Hate

Even with all this said, we’ve only just set foot on the continent that divides the spirit of abortion from the heart of God.

• Abortion says, Die! God says, Live!
• Abortion says, Not mine! God says, Mine!
• Abortion says, Abhorred! God says, Beloved!
• Abortion says, I won’t! God says, I will!
• Abortion says, Cut off! God says, Grafted in!
• Abortion says, I own my body! God says, I give my body!
• Abortion says, I hate! God says, I love!

We who treasure the King and love all that is in his heart, how could we not hate something so antithetical to him? We who have received his Spirit of adoption, how can we not oppose the spirit of abortion? We who have heard his command, “Live!” how could we not seek to silence the voice that says, “Die!”?