Highlight: Church History and The PreBorn

But one more thing, Luke, I was excited to show you this today. So we'll end with this. I kept calling it the heresy of the pro -life establishment, the heresy of the

ERL scene. There's different ways you can talk about heresy. You can talk about heresy as something that's heretical biblically.

In a general sense, people would say, well, that's biblically heretical. The Bible doesn't teach that.

That goes against the text itself. But you can also talk about things in terms of heretical, in terms of Christian orthodoxy, in terms of what the church has taught unified.

We've had a lot of disagreements in Christian history over different areas. You even have some guys who at one point say one thing and then say another thing, and you have moments of great glory and face plants.

Christian history in some points is glorious, in other ways it's a glorious mess. However, there's a consistency in the area of the pre -born and the issue of abortion.

Heresy is defined as a belief or opinion that is contrary to orthodox belief, okay?

Traditional belief. And so that's a definition, a simple working definition. Just a couple things.

From the earliest stages of the Christian church, many people don't know this, but during the time of the

Roman Empire, abortifacients were at times a big thing, and at other times even banned.

So you went in and out of moments in the Roman Empire where it was allowed, maybe even some instances encouraged, and other times where it was discouraged and, uh -oh, where population isn't growing like it ought to, we can't do this anymore.

So abortifacients were an issue from the earliest days of the church. You have, of course, the other end of the spectrum, where you have people who were literally giving birth to children and then leaving them to die on the street, to die of exposure.

And Christians, if you guys don't know the story, it's glorious. Christians in the Roman Empire were literally picking these children up off the ground in the streets at night, and they were adopting them, calling them their own.

They didn't let them die on the streets whenever they found them. And so the Christian church was able to snatch up the kids the world didn't want and led them to Christ, and we defeated the

Roman Empire, the evil pagan Roman Empire. But abortifacients have been a thing throughout the ages, and abortifacients were something that Christians had to speak to.

So a couple quotes. I call it heresy. Their position is heresy. Saying that she's not guilty, the woman is not guilty, is heresy.

Ministers of the Gospel, pastors, I humbly ask you to pay close attention to that.

What is coming from the pro -life establishment is heretical, and it comes with major consequences.

One of the earliest things we have in Christian history that has come up to us is the

Didache. Pastor James, in our baptism series, recently went through some of the Didache.

It is amazing that we have this. It's like this early manual for the Christian church, basically extending the teachings of many of those

Christians, and it says plainly, thou shalt not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is begotten.

Notice the terminology in the Didache, one of the very earliest statements we have from the

Christian church outside of Scripture. It is, thou shalt not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is begotten.

Now I can go for a long time on this, but just a couple references here. The Epistle of Barnabas, somewhere between 70

A .D. and 132 A .D. says this, quote, thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion, nor again shalt thou destroy it after it is born.

So they're dealing with both there. Don't kill the child in the womb, slay the child, murder the child, kill the child in the womb, or after it's born, because you had to deal with that early on.

Again, you know, typical fashion, they would just take their children they didn't want, they would let them die of exposure on the streets.

And so in the Epistle of Barnabas, you have this witness that you can't slay your child in the womb or destroy it after it's born.

That's clear. There is something called the Revelation of Peter.

Again, we're not calling these Scripture, we're not even saying all of these are, you know, things that you need to invest your life in and read, we're just saying that here's some statements coming up through Christian history that are important for us to pay attention to.

Well, let me, because of we're out of time here, aren't we?

I have several I want to read here. Let me just do this one. A Plea for Christians.

This is a longer section. I'm gonna get you guys some more meaty ones. A Plea for Christians. This one is written about 177

AD. This is from an article, just pulling together some of these quotes.

This is from Athenagoras the Athenian, philosopher and Christian.

He says, or it says, And when we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder?

For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care, and when it has passed into life to kill it, and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child murder.

Second century. We can keep going. We can keep going.

Tertullian. Let's do that. Murder being once for all forbidden, we

Christians may not destroy even the fetus in the womb. While as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its substance, to hinder a birth is merely a speedier man -killing.

Nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born or destroy one that is coming to the birth.

Do we need to keep going? I mean, we could keep going and going and going, and you're going to see that it is Christian orthodoxy.

From the earliest stages of the Christian church, it is called murder. She is culpable, everybody involved is culpable, and the definition they're using, you can't slay the child, you can't murder the child, it's man -killing.