They sacrificed their sons
    and their daughters to false gods.
They shed innocent blood,
    the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
    and the land was desecrated by their blood.

Psalm 106:37-38

In ancient Canaan, the worship of the god moloch was accompanied by the sacrifice of children. This barbarism was rightly condemned in the Bible as a desecration. We might like to think we have outgrown such practices, however, this cult is alive and well in the West and with satanic efficiency we have got much better at it – the sacrifice of millions: hidden, unseen, sanitised mass killing of the weakest and most helpless of us all.

Now Ireland have got in on the act.  After all, what is the cost of death, dismemberment, pain, anguish and regret against the blessing of personal autonomy?  My body, my choice.  It’s the woman’s right to choose….though it’s telling that this is a sentence that is never completed.  The right to choose…what?  Where to work?  Where to live? Who to marry?

The ever hanging sentence can’t be finished, because the full sentence reads “It’s a woman’s right to choose to kill her baby”.  And that is a little less palatable said out loud.

It was somewhat different in Ireland’s case – rather than abortion by court ordered fiat, this was abortion chosen and approved by the majority of the country.  No hiding behind another organisation or structure – this time the blood is on the hands of those who voted for it. Truly, we are barbarians, savages hiding behind our technology and supposed enlightenment.

So, where does it leave us?  Are we to expect the judgment of God, wrath poured from the skies?  Well maybe….but rather it seems to me that the real judgment is self-inflicted.  You choose death, and death chooses you.  A culture that once valued life, no longer does.  And it will not end well.

So what is the right response?  Anger to some degree yes, but it’s very hard for humans to be righteously angry – better to leave that to God.  I think better to receive something of God’s heart in this – the deep sense of grief for a people marching into the night, away from what was good, what was holy.  Away to a future where the strong will increasingly tyrannise the weak.  Because the value of a person will be assigned by what the strong command.  All good…while you are yet one of the strong.

Better to realise our real state and become one of the weak.  Better to trust in the One who “will never leave you nor forsake you” Deut. 31v6b.  Better to remember that, even in this, we are more than conquerors.

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.  Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?  As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,  neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8 v31-39