Who do you say that He is when a culture learns to call the sacrifice of its children an option — or a right?
That is the door. Sit with it. You do not need a campaign button to walk through it. You need a Person. A courtroom this week may keep the news cycle busy; the headlines will move. The lesson will not. The plate is older and larger than any single tragedy. The plate is this: why fallen humanity keeps offering its children — and what the Lord of life says about the trade.
Hear the pastoral word before the hard word. Mental illness is real. Postpartum crisis is real. A broken person in a storm is not the same thing as a culture that legally and casually trades children for autonomy, career, fear, or convenience. Both matter. This lesson is not a stone at the despairing or the mentally ill. The gospel is for the crushed. Christ does not mock the bruised reed. If you are reading this under the weight of an abortion already past, forgiveness in Christ is real — not cheap shame theater, but blood-bought mercy. Come to Him. Tell someone safe. Let the church carry you. The discipleship question for the porch is the millions-scale fact: what is it about humans that we devolve into sacrificing our own children?
Scripture will not let you pretend this is new.
God made humanity in His image — male and female (Genesis 1:27). After the flood He tied the weight of that image to the neighbor’s blood: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). A child is not a cluster of cells waiting for wantedness to confer worth. A child is a bearer of the image. Dignity is bestowed, not earned by viability rhetoric or parental preference.
The pattern of killing the next generation shows up early. Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys into the Nile (Exodus 1). Herod slaughtered the little ones in Bethlehem to protect his throne (Matthew 2). Power has always been willing to spend children to keep itself comfortable. The Lord saw it then. He sees it now.
Then Scripture names the altar by name. “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). The penalty passages are severe because the crime is severe (Leviticus 20:2–5). Israel was warned not to imitate the nations who burned their sons and daughters in the fire — “for every abomination to the Lord that he hates they have done for their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31; see also 18:10). The psalmist confessed the nation’s guilt without soft language: “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood” (Psalm 106:37–38). Jeremiah records the Lord’s own horror: they built high places to burn their sons and daughters — “which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind” (Jeremiah 7:31; 19:5; 32:35). Kings of Judah walked the same dark road — Ahaz, Manasseh — until Josiah defiled Topheth so no one could make a son or daughter pass through the fire to Molech again (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6; 23:10).
God did not invent that altar. He hated it.
Hold that beside how He speaks of children. “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3). David marvels that he was knit together in his mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13–14). Jesus puts a child in the middle of the disciples’ status contest and warns anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble (Matthew 18:1–6). When the disciples tried to shoo the children away, He was indignant: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:13–15). Little ones are precious to Christ. That is not sentiment. That is the King.
So what happened between Molech and the clinic?
The altar changed clothes. The fire became a procedure. The idol shifted from a bronze statue to the quieter gods of our age — self as sovereign, fear as counselor, convenience as mercy, career as ultimate good. Romans 1 still diagnoses the exchange: humanity suppresses the truth, exchanges the glory of the immortal God for images, and with darkened minds calls the trade wisdom (Romans 1:18–32). Use that passage carefully. It is not a club for the porch. It is a mirror. When a culture learns to rename the ending of a child’s life as healthcare, something older than any statute has already gone soft: the sense that life is received from God, not inventoried by us.
The early church refused the soft rename. The Didache, a first-or-second-century AD Christian handbook, put it plainly among the ways of death: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” The disciples who inherited the apostles’ teaching did not treat the womb as morally empty space. They knew whose image was there.
Calvin, with a light touch and a different angle than comfort-in-death, insisted that life belongs to God — we are not free to dispose of what is His. The Reformed instinct is not cruelty. It is stewardship. The child is not finally the mother’s project or the father’s property or the state’s option. The child is the Lord’s.
Care is not the same as killing — whether at life’s end or at its beginning. Accompaniment of a mother in crisis is not the same as assisting the altar. Learn the difference while your conscience is awake, and teach it gently.
What is it about humans, then?
Sin. Idolatry. Fear. We exchange the Creator’s gift for a counterfeit good and call the counterfeit compassion. We want control more than we want trust. We want the future without the cost of another life leaning on ours. Ancient Topheth and the modern clinic are not identical in every detail — but they rhyme in the deepest place: the willingness to offer the child so that the adult can remain undisturbed as god.
That is the plate. Not a stump speech. Not a call to leave your church. Hunger for Christ. The One who welcomed the little children is the same One who still asks the first question.
So put it back where Jesus put it. Not first, “What does the culture call reproductive freedom?” First: Who do you say that He is — when the brochure calls the sacrifice an option, when the numbers run into the millions, when your own heart wants an easier story?
Is a child’s dignity the gift of the image-bearing God — or a status we confer when we are ready?
NewGrapes Ministries. Making disciples, not pew-fillers. Soli Deo Gloria.
Sources
- Genesis 1:27; 9:6; Exodus 1; Leviticus 18:21; 20:2–5; Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:10; Psalm 106:37–38; 127:3; 139:13–14; Jeremiah 7:31; 19:5; 32:35; 2 Kings 16:3; 21:6; 23:10; Matthew 2; 18:1–6; 19:13–15; Romans 1:18–32
- Didache 2.2 (ANF 7 / public-domain translations) — “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten”
- John Calvin — life belonging to God / stewardship of life (light touch; cf. Institutes on not being our own — different angle from Heidelberg Q1 in the sibling Solid on dying under the Lord of life)
- Occasion only (not the plate): Lindsay Clancy murder trial, Plymouth Superior Court / Duxbury, MA — jury deliberations reported around Sept. 4, 2026 (day 7; reports of deadlock / holdout / reasonable-doubt dispute); defense involves mental health / criminal responsibility. Cited only as cultural air that raises a larger discipleship question. Do not try the case here.