“The Value of a Life”

An Apologetics view of NY S-240

About 15 years ago I began to speak and teach on the creation account found in Genesis chapters 1-11. It wasn’t a big deal back then, more of a topic I was just interested in. I would use it to get people thinking about the authority of God’s Word in a broader and more robust manner, and it was a lot of fun. In the past 7 or 8 years, it has taken on a much more critical role in my personal life and ministry. I teach on it as often as I can and will go anywhere I’m invited to talk with believers about the importance of Genesis 1-11 in our lives and faith. Unfortunately, many Christians just blow it off as a non-issue, or worse they begin to teach extra-biblical, or more to the point, secularized, compromised theories that try to marry certain theories on life’s origin with the Biblical timeline. This forces them to teach Genesis, as well as much of the Old Testament as fable, allegory, and metaphor, but certainly not as real history. Honestly, I am not sure which one is worse. For those of us within the creation ministry, there tends to be common reasoning that drives us to teach in this area. Our goal is to preserve and uphold the authority and integrity of the Word of God. The Word of God is plainly the foundation for all that we do and are. If we reduce God’s Word to a collection of “stories” and “metaphorical moral teachings,” as many denominations and individuals try to do on a regular basis, we also remove the authority of God’s Word in the minds of man.

This slow erosion of the authority of God’s Word has been taking place in the USA for decades and has found mountains of support in recent years. Not only from atheist groups who would love to see every shred of faith removed from our once blessed nation, but also from within the church itself. For instance, ministers like Andy Stanley proclaiming from his own pulpit that the Bible is not the source of our faith (look it up yourself, the video is available on YouTube and it’s not hard to find). Or Pat Robertson, who has said on the air that “you would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that the earth is only six thousand years old.” Another big name would be John Piper. He openly supports the anti-biblical group Bio-logos. This organization’s single goal is to help ministers make peace in rejecting the teachings of Genesis in favor of a Darwinian view of origins. The frightening part of this is the number of ministers who have joined without even questioning the paradigm. Not to mention the number of believers who have walked away from the faith because of the willful compromise of those lost shepherds. I cannot even think of the judgment that awaits them.

I am sure that for many people even hearing someone speaking on the topic of Biblical Creation causes an involuntary eye-roll. I understand why, but I would challenge you to ask yourself a straightforward question: have you really looked into it, or are you just believing what someone in a white lab coat has written in a textbook? In my experience most people scoff at anyone who seems to challenge modern science. How dare we be so arrogant. What is so often overlooked is the fact that no one is questioning the science itself. The issue is the interpretation of the data. Science is not a black and white field of study. Those within the field draw conclusions from experimental data. More often than they are willing to admit, the conclusions are framed by their personal worldview. For example, in 2005 a T-Rex bone was found with intact red blood cells, soft tissue, and other biological fragments that simply should not exist in a sample supposedly 69 million years old. When the data was published, the researcher was publicly ridiculed for publishing anything that questioned the age of dinosaurs. After multiple attempts to discredit the findings, an article was published stating that, through some currently unknown process that also violates all known standards of biology, red blood cells and soft tissue can survive in a completely open system for 69 million years. For anyone to say that questioning that decision making paradigm is anti-science is just preposterous. What I have found is that when people actually begin to do the research and learn to think critically, their eyes are opened to the bias within the published scientific community to suppress anything that questions the Darwinian viewpoint. As David Burlinski once said, “you have to question any paradigm that is so violently protected against scrutiny”.

God’s Word tells us that our existence has a purpose: that we are here, on this earth, in this life, intentionally. The Darwinian view wants you to believe that we are nothing more than a cosmic accident. Your life is nothing more than the result of a random chemical spill mixed with time and chance. Your existence has no purpose, no meaning, no future, and above all no value other than what you can produce in the service of society. If you invent something useful or rise to a great place of leadership, you have value. But, if you are just an unborn fetus, you have no value, and are infinitely expendable. The unborn are nothing more than a tax on already limited resources. As Ken Ham has said, “you get rid of spare cats, why not spare kids.”

What happens when a nation begins to believe that life is nothing more than chemistry? Existence becomes meaningless and death is without consequence, penalty, or judgment. Death is just the end result of a meaningless, undirected, chemical process of electrical impulse. You get a generation without conscience, without remorse, without a sense of self-worth, and that cares only for its own selfish pursuit of pleasure. If life is all there is, live it up while you can. As for the unborn, they become an inconvenience to the pursuit of happiness. They are the unfortunate side effect of the pursuit of sexual fulfillment. You can have a child if you want, but if you do not feel like you are ready, or change your mind in the middle, and now even at the end of the process, just abort. It’s not like the child was doing anything useful, and according to some in the medical sciences it’s not even a real person, so there is no reason to feel bad. If that makes your skin crawl you should look up the 2013 article from the “Journal of Medical Ethics” titled “After Birth Abortion.” It’s available online and I will place the full text on my FB ministry page, “First Five Ministries.”

The unborn rely on the rest of us to be their voice and protection. A responsibility that, sadly, we have not lived up to. The unborn in our nation have had a consistently diminishing voice for many decades. In the last five years, that voice has thankfully grown louder than ever across our nation. The problem is that our nation’s leadership has grown tired of that voice and now just refuses to listen. The majority have lost their voice and the minority opinion now rules our political system. A nation that has historically valued and protected life has now become a nation that values and protects the wants and desires of the most offended. Nowhere is this more apparent than in New York State’s recent passage S-240, which they are calling a “Women’s Healthcare Act.”

After reading the entire text of the new legislation, it is apparent that opportunity for the pursuit of happiness is being made for every person except the unborn child. Even the term “person” has been redefined in this new law as “A human being who has been born and is alive.” The key term being “who has been born.” If the birthing process is not allowed to conclude, then a child has not been born. Therefore, life has not been terminated because the fetus was not an actual person. The matter of fetal viability is not a factor in this equation. The law is disturbing at many levels, but not surprising. As I have said, when you reduce life to chemistry then life has no real value. As I was reading the law, I noticed a few things that I did find interesting. To become a person one must be born, but the process of birth has not been defined. Traditional birth is an obvious option, but what about a C-section. This is considered a medically assisted birth. In a manner of speaking you are not “born naturally”, a medical professional has to assist. This brings up the question of botched, late-term abortions where the child is actually alive after the abortion attempt. The new law allows for the child to be literally left to die, because that was the original intent of the procedure. Interestingly NYS homicide laws state that medical negligence resulting in the death of a person is murder. This is why the definition of “person” was adjusted for this law. Our state’s legal system has redefined what it is to be a person in order to justify murder by a failed abortion procedure and medical neglect. A procedure that no longer needs to be carried out by a licensed medical doctor.

The disturbing part of this is not that it happened in NY. Anyone who thought Cuomo would act in a moral, ethical, or in any way resembling the faith he claims to have, is fooling themselves. The part that bewilders me is the response I am seeing from around the state: anger and frustration from one side of the state to the other. I am sure that rallies and protests will come up to show our disapproval of this legal travesty and, in the end, they will accomplish nothing. People’s frustration will eventually fade and this law, just like many others, will become a regular part of life. I am always saddened by our willingness to protest what has already been done without giving a second thought to how we got here in the first place. How did we get to a place where life no longer has value? How did we get to a place where sex is viewed as a simple physical transaction? How did we get to a place where sexual fidelity has become a prison and immorality has become a personal freedom? How did we go from being a nation that cared about the sanctity of life, to becoming a nation that can turn a blind eye to the over 1 billion global abortions since 1980 alone? The answer is surprisingly simple. It begins in every public school in our nation around 5th grade. This is when your child begins to be taught that life is an accident. Taught that they are nothing more than complicated pond scum, the result of random chance. Taught that their life does not, and could not, have meaning or purpose. In a world where we allow our future generations to be taught a doctrine of hopelessness for 12 of the first 18 years of their life, what more should we expect? How can we be surprised by the immorality of our world and not examine how we got here in the first place.