By Brent Smith
[Brent is the preaching minister of the Trenton Church of Christ in Trenton, TN.]
Ben-Hadad, king of Syria, besieged Samaria, the capital of Israel. The siege cut off the city’s food supplies, and its inhabitants began to starve. One of the women of the city called out to the king for help. She went on to tell him her predicament: “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him;’ but she has hidden her son” (2 Kings 6.28-29).
The story turns our stomachs. How could a mother, no matter how hungry, kill her own child? Starving to death would be a much better alternative. We are so thankful that such barbarism doesn’t take place in our own land. Or does it?
Every day in sterile and “respectable” clinics, thousands of mothers who are not starving to death elect to have their babies poisoned, crushed, ripped apart — their skulls cracked and their brains vacuumed out. Why? Oh, for a number of reasons: they want to pursue their careers, to hide adultery, to protect their figures, to keep their immorality secret from mom and dad. The babies are not eaten, but in some cases body parts are harvested and sold.
Even the wicked king Jehoram was horrified (2 Kings 6.30). How, we wonder, could German citizens during the Holocaust have been so oblivious and silent while innocent men, women and children were being systematically exterminated in their own back yards? Are we not horrified by our own atrocities against the unborn?? Are we desensitized? In love, we must speak the truth (Eph. 4.15). In love, we must continue to expose the horrors of abortion. In love we must continue to warn that God hates hands that shed innocent blood (Prov. 6.16-17). In love, we must allow ourselves to feel the pain of these innocent children and to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.