If there is anyone left in America who marvels at God’s power over life in the womb, it should be those who preside over the births of our little ones.  Instead, again and again I find this profession leading our nation, front and center, in praising the pelvis and rejecting God the Father. Sure, if an OB doc gets the impression that a new mother is religious, he may toss in a trite comment here or there about “God’s little angels.”  But nothing more than that may ever be said, for fear that it might detract from the immaculacy of the mother.  Since the bloody and tyrannical decision of Roe v. Wade was handed down 37 years ago it has been clear that everything, literally everything, is about the mother.  Feminism reigns and God is dead in the conscience of America when it comes to the womb.  The war is against God, and Dr. Johnson’s comment is simply the dutiful response of an indoctrinated officer.

But of course, the American mind was not spontaneously taken captive the night before that infamous Supreme Court decision. Centuries before Satan had been slowly but surely killing our awareness of God’s work and image in the womb.  Rationalism and empiricism had taught us that there’s nothing wondrous or miraculous about childbirth.  Nothing to be amazed at, childbirth became a simple physiological and mechanical process that we can engage in and manipulate at will. Then, with God’s majesty out of the picture, preachers and theologians got rid of God’s holiness and justice as well.  First Satan stole our awe, then he stole our fear of the Lord.  At that point, we weren’t even sure we needed the virgin birth anymore.

In the mid-1900s, under the pretense of concern for the fairer sex, we swallowed, without so much as a belch of indigestion, Margaret Sanger’s birth control campaign—really a campaign of eugenics and bondage to perversity.  Conveniently, at the time no one noticed that birth control pills also effectively kill newly conceived babies.  With birth control firmly established as an American institution, the deceiver was just a step away from his bloodier attack on the image of God: abortion. And so America was reassured on January 22, 1973 that we no longer need to fear a holy God.

God placed His image in man and promised that all those who shed man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.  But Genesis Chapter 9 was written a long time ago, and by 1973 the only true crime was standing in the way of so-called reproductive rights. Now it’s the “Johnson pelvis” we praise.  Now it’s the woman we fear.  We don’t know the marvelous God who made the baby, and we certainly do not dread His perfect judgment.

Satan’s attack on God and His image has been relentless, and has come from every direction.  Looking back it’s easy to connect the dots, if we want to.  But our tendency as soldiers of Christ’s Church is to shake our heads, wonder how we got to this point, and then go back to the Super Bowl. On the rare occasion that a prophet does rise up to warn us of the enemy’s next move, we either laugh him off the stage, or tell him that he needs to preach more grace. We don’t even realize we’re supposed to be fighting.

But make no mistake about it: Satan, that deceiver and murderer, won’t be content with the murders of 1.3 million American babies a year.  No, he has been a murderer from the beginning, and his bloodlust will never be satisfied until every member of your church is slaughtered, both spiritually and physically.  He’s already secured a way to kill millions more through so-called emergency contraception. Physician-assisted suicide is commonplace, too—even The New York Times admits it.  And our top ethicists are fighting for a woman’s legal right to kill “defective” babies after they’re born.  These issues rarely catch our attention, and they grieve our hearts even less; yet the battle rages on.

Men, we are commanded to “snatch others from the fire and save them” (Jude 23), but we don’t even feel the fire.  We are to imitate those who “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,” to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” and “to punish every act of disobedience, once [our] obedience is complete” (2 Corinthians 10:5-6).   Most of the time, though, we don’t even recognize the arguments and the disobedience, let alone feel the torment of righteous Lot, demolish the arguments, or punish the disobedience. Our enemy, the devil, “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8, but instead of being “self-controlled and alert,” we’ve grown too fat and sleepy to even think about an enemy, let alone fight back or anticipate his next move.

Brothers, our churches are filled with men and women who think just like my ob/gyn friend from school.  She attended an evangelical church in our hometown long before I ever became a Christian.  She’s vocal, but boringly common in Christian circles.  You don’t need me to tell you how to pull your head out of the sand; you just need to do it.  If the wonder and fear of the Lord is ever to be restored to our culture, we must start with the church.  I know that standing firm in the current battle seems hard enough, and regaining lost ground seems impossible.  Yet we know that “greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).  May God grant us repentance, faith, and strength to resist him who is in the world, and to proclaim God’s surpassing glory and holiness in the creation and birth of every child.