Can you imagine a perfect place? I am thankful for the sustaining hope of a new creation but a place with no more tears, death, mourning, crying or pain seems so foreign to me from the vantage point of this very broken world.
We live in very broken creation that is inhabited by broken people. In The Oklahoman from February 20th there was an article about a pro-life or anti-abortion law that was ruled unconstitutional. Oklahoma County District Judge Dan Owens struck down a law that “made it illegal for a doctor to do the procedure (destroying a baby person) if the doctor knew the woman’s sole reason was she wanted a baby of a different sex.”
Was this judicial activism? Was it a case where the judge tried to adhere too strictly to the Oklahoma Constitution at the expense of unborn life? I don’t know but Owens said himself, “Its pretty disturbing we have to pass a statute to prevent people from doing that. It’s uncivilized.” Exactly! It is uncivilized and so much more. That a woman, with or without the consent of the father, can abort a baby because the baby is not the right sex is unfair to the baby and inconsistent with so much of the pro-choice defense and mostly it is simply disturbing.
It is disturbing because someone saw the need to pass such a law in the first place. People have apparently aborted babies and want to abort babies because they are undesirable in some way, and it just so happens that in this case it is because the child, at no fault of his or her own, has the wrong chromosomes. That is not fair.
Not only are children selectively destroyed because of gender in Oklahoma and the United States, but worldwide most abortions done for gender reasons involve female babies. (From The Oklahoman) Oddly enough it is groups who supposedly fight for the rights of women that end up defending the right to destroy little women. In a country that aborts over one million babies a year in the name of reproductive rights to protect the health of women, the United States legally protects the destruction of roughly 500,000 women who apparently have no rights. That is horribly inconsistent.
It is as though we have regressed two thousand years to the time of ancient Rome when children, especially baby girls, were discarded on the trash heap because they weren’t the male heir that was hoped for. (This was just one of the reasons for infanticide in the ancient world, though a common one.) I don’t care if a baby is born and then discarded or never gets the chance to be born because of abortion, either way it is just wrong.
This world is broken and the evidence is everywhere. Lack of civility, unfair treatment, and inconsistent thinking toward the unborn only makes me long for the new creation that I have such a hard time imagining. May both the current brokenness and the promised perfection to come lead us to trust in Jesus and cause us to press on with the gospel and say with John in Revelation 22:20, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”
