Happy new year – for those lucky enough to be born

According to data provided by Worldometer, in 2021 there were just over 42.6 million abortions worldwide, making it the leading cause of death across the globe.  This contrasts with 8.2 million deaths from cancer, 5 million from smoking, 1.7 million from HIV / AIDS, 1.3 million from traffic accidents, and 1 million from suicide.  On top of this, according to data released by the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of deaths worldwide from coronovirus in 2012 totalled around 3.5 million.

That last number might well be grossly inaccurate, of course, depending on how the numbers are calculated, but what is probable is that by the time you read this article, worldwide in 2022 there will already have been around  600,000 abortions (https://www.worldometers.info).

Climate change activists may well herald this as a victory, claiming that reduced numbers of human beings can only curb our exploitation of the planet’s already depleted resources and encourage environmental sustainability, but there are clear signs people are at last beginning to wake up to the apocalyptic horrors set in train by our unrestrained and unthinking slaughter of the unborn.   Even Elon Musk has now gone on record as saying that the greatest threat to humanity is under-population, and that the only way now to avert disaster is for people to have more babies (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/12/07/elon-musk-declining-birthrate-threatens-human-civilization/6414749001/).

But the real question we should all perhaps be asking is how does God view humanity’s genocide of the unborn?    The Bible, after all, says that life is God’s gift, and that we are each one of us special – made in His image.  In fact, it goes farther than that, and says we each one of us have a unique destiny, known to God from before we are even conceived, and that only we can fulfil (cf. Jeremiah 1:5; Luke 1: 26f.).  In which case, is it really credible to say that each one of those 42.6 million unborn children was destined to be aborted?  Or, through the exercise of free will – something which is again God’s gift to each one of us – have we interfered with the divine plan for mankind?

We do well to remember that all actions have consequences – some good, some bad, some predictable … and some wholly unforeseen.  Our self-interested and careless decisions to terminate the lives of the unborn inevitably carry consequences.  We see some of those consequences in the catastrophic decline in population currently affecting almost every nation in the world, causing increased and unsustainable economic pressure, cultural disintegration, social decay, and escalating violence.

Yet there are other consequences too, and what many fail to understand is that taking the life of the unborn is an affront to the father-heart of God.  It is, in a nutshell, sin.

At Sinai, God gave the recently enslaved Israelites ten commandments or laws by which they were to live, now they were free.   The sixth of these commandments simply stated, ‘You shall not murder’ (Exodus 20:13).  In God’s eyes, that is what abortion surely is – state-sanctioned murder.  And, without repentance, it incurs judgement.

At the time of writing, we are seeing in the UK over 200,000 new Covid infections a day, and, though the Omicron variant appears less severe, the world is in crisis, with hospital admissions and death rates rising across the globe.   Our leaders and scientific advisors nevertheless claim to be cautiously optimistic: vaccination, they say, is the key, and infections will shortly start to come down.  They hope.

But what next?  Will there be a new variant that plunges the world into renewed chaos?  Will Russia invade Ukraine and catapult the world into war?  Will China seize Taiwan and enter into a pact with Russia against the West?  Will the global economy collapse?  Will civil war break out in America …?

The truth is, God is urgently calling the world to repent; and remorse for the billions of lives we have so casually ended over the last century is a very good place to start.

Only with recognition and acknowledgment of sin can there be forgiveness and restoration.   God calls out to us in love, ever ready to help – but only when we repent will He act to deliver us from the evils bedevilling the world … and threatening our very existence.