Conference Message: How to Bring Covenant Lawsuit

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We still live in a nation where it is the easiest, that probably has been in earth history, to change the law as a citizen.

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It is the easiest for you. Shame on us if we fail. I want to announce to you this, it is now

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March. I've been now involved in four different bills for abolition. If your senator and your representative do not know you by name, you have not done enough for abolition.

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That's all there is to it. Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.

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You can open your Bibles with me to the prophet Hosea. Chapter six, the prophet

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Hosea chapter six. As my brothers in arms have already remarked, we certainly do appreciate your hospitality and being able to come here and to minister to you all.

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I assure you that I have no earthly business being here today and getting to do what

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I do alongside my brothers in arms at Apologia Church and with the ministry of End Abortion Now.

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My name is Zachary Conover. I'm the director of communications for the ministry. So I'm in charge of onboarding all of our local churches to our ministry, equipping them with the resources and the materials to actually go and do this work, and then maintenancing those relationships as well and encouraging the brethren as they intercede for the unborn all across the nation.

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And as you heard, God has tremendously blessed this work. It's incredible to hear what it is now and what it first began as just a small group of people.

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I remember when there was only a handful of us out there at the mills, and now it has since grown to have teams of people that are faithfully dedicated to go out there and proclaim the truth of the gospel and all across the country now, into different nations as it were, people proclaiming the good news in this area.

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And so we're certainly grateful and humbled to be a part of it in a small way.

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And I'm certainly humbled and grateful to be in front of you today. We're gonna have a reading from the text.

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The title of this message, I titled it, How to Bring Covenant Lawsuit.

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How to Bring Covenant Lawsuit. There is a role, a function of the

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Church of Jesus Christ, of the Bride of Christ that, as my brothers alluded to, has largely been abdicated in the modern day context when it comes to the church.

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And that is the role of the church to speak with a prophetic witness to our culture and to the body of Christ and to our civil magistrates, those in civil authority.

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And I hope to open the scriptures for you today. And I pray that God would bring this word home to your heart so that you can see how critical, how important it is, and that we should be engaged in this work in a prophetic way for the

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Lord Jesus. So Hosea chapter six, starting in verse one.

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Hear now the words of the living and the true God. Come, let us return to the

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Lord, for he has torn us, that he may heal us.

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He has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days, he will revive us.

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On the third day, he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the

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Lord. His going out is sure as the dawn. He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

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What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.

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Therefore, I have hewn them by the prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light.

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For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice.

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The knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Thus far as the reading of God's word, please join me in praying.

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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity to minister your word to everyone who's gathered here today.

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I pray, Lord, that you would be glorified in it, and that you would continue to bless our time. And Lord, I pray that you would get me out of the way, and that your spirit would speak to your people today through your words,

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Lord God, and help us to understand the gravity of the adversary that we are up against, and the power that you have given us by your spirit to vanquish it,

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Lord God. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. The prophet

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Hosea went and took for himself an unfaithful wife, because he was commissioned by the

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Lord to do just that, and that relationship was meant to be a portrait, a picture of God's pursuit of unfaithful

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Israel. And if you look at the passage, it's quite astonishing. There's some imagery there that causes us to, now where we are, look back upon the resurrection of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and of course look forward to the future at our own one -day resurrection.

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So there's a very literal aspect of this. But for the nation of Israel, things were quite dark at this time, as was often the case when the prophets were commissioned to deliver the word of Yahweh to the nation.

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Thus saith the Lord, right? So the prophets are sent, and yet this text here, these words, are also referring to a national restoration, a need for a national restoration in the life of the land that has abandoned their heritage, forgotten their history, despised the word of the

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Lord, have forsaken covenant, obedience, and loyalty, allegiance to the

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God who has delivered the people. And the charge is, let us know, let us press on to know the

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Lord, yadah, right? The same verb for when Adam knew Eve, right?

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There's an intimacy there. There is a knowledge that the people of God are commanded to maintain and to further pursue, to know the

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Lord. And when we lose that, when that becomes abandoned, as it says a couple chapters prior, my people perish for a lack of knowledge.

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The faithfulness of Yahweh is compared to the unfaithfulness of His people. His going out is as sure as the sun coming up.

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You can bank on His faithfulness to His people. He will always be there to save and to restore them.

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He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. In an agrarian culture that was quite essential, that relied on these types of things to come, and God promises that He will come to His people and be that for them.

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But then He contrasts that, and He says, what shall I do with you? Through the mouth of the prophet, of course. Your love, in contrast to my love, my steadfast love, my chesed, my covenant faithfulness, my loyalty to you, my chosen, here is what your love is like, a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.

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It's fickle, it's transitory, it's unfaithful. It doesn't last, it's superficial.

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What shall I do with you? And then in verse five, therefore I have hewn them or hacked them, slain them by the prophets, right?

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As it says in another prophet, I'll put my words in your mouth. God's word, the sharp two -edged sword, and God's judgment, verse five, goes forth as the light to do what?

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What does the light do? It exposes darkness, it drives away the darkness so that what is truly there may be manifest and uncovered.

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So what is the message that is being sent through the prophet? You have been unfaithful to your first love.

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And my light, the light of my revelation is what exposes that, there's no hiding.

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And then the charge, and this is actually one of the most famous quotations in the

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New Testament by the Lord Jesus himself in particular, I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice.

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Mercy is another way of translating it.

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I desire faithfulness, love for me, which translates into obedience of my commands.

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And not sacrifice. A modern way to bring this across is, I do not want empty formalism.

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I do not want you to stand on ceremony in my presence and sing to me or just preach sermons.

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I want action. I want you to correct the oppression among you as the prophet

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Isaiah says. In chapter one, he comes to his people, and he says, hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom.

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Not a very positive reference in history, wouldn't you agree? And yet he applies it to his people.

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And then he starts hacking away at their unfaithfulness because they are calling holy convocations, they are coming together with singing, they are offering up their worship to Yahweh, and he says,

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I don't want it. Because there's bloodshed in your midst.

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Leave the offering. It's not that those things are bad in and of themselves, it's that as Jesus says, you are neglecting the weightier measures of the law.

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And offering up this to me, who has required this of you, meanwhile, innocent blood is being shed.

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So go correct that oppression. Bring justice to the fatherless in particular.

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Same idea here on display in the text. Now, as we've been talking to you today, we've really been harping on this point.

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Pastor Zach, of course, brought a wonderful message in terms of the practical nature of ministering at the abortion mills, and Pastor Luke touched on this, so the themes that I'm bringing to you in the message will overlap some.

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But this idea, one of the pillars of our ministry, as end abortion now, we believe that abortion is murder because God is the creator of all human life, amen?

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Everyone is made in the image of God. Everyone is in the imago dei. And so to unjustly take that human life is murder.

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Abortion will only end by the gospel and the proclamation of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

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It is not as the modern contemporary landscape paints this issue.

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Abortion is a fundamental human right. It is just a choice.

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Can you believe that we're actually hearing that in our culture today? This is what it means to be human.

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You must allow us the right to kill our children. That's what it means to be human in our modern context.

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It's framed as an issue of reproductive justice, women's rights, a matter of human rights.

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When God says, you shall not murder, the unchangeableness of that command.

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So that will only end when hearts are made new, right?

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The pro -life movement talks a great deal about changing hearts and minds, don't they? We've got to use this information.

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We've got to use these facts. We have to talk about the development of life in the womb in order to get people to see.

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And if they just see, they will make this unthinkable. It will not happen again.

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We have more ability to look into the womb. We were just at Brother's Pregnancy Center yesterday and we saw an ultrasound machine.

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And what we have, the ability to have, as he called it, the window to the womb. We have more revelation about what is there than ever before at any time in history.

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And we are still killing our children. It's not an issue of education, brothers and sisters.

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It's not an issue of facts. It's not brute factuality. It's a heart that is at war with God, set on murder.

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And the only way to change that heart is if you have a heart of stone exchanged for a heart of flesh.

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And the only way that that happens is if the spirit of God comes into a man or woman and raises them from death to life.

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And God puts his spirit within them and causes them to observe his statutes and to hate that sort of thing and to love and pursue righteousness.

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But that only happens if we proclaim the one message that will do that, that will accomplish that, that will make that effectual.

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Abortion is murder. The only hope, the only prayer for us on an individual scale in our churches when we talk about this at the abortion mills, to the culture, to the magistrates, the only hope, let's make this clear at the outset, to end abortion is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of the kingdom in particular.

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But the good news of repentance and faith in Jesus. And then of course, another one of our pillars is we wanna be there to help mothers and fathers.

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Pastor Zach talked about this already, being there, going the extra mile. And then of course, the issue of justice, another pillar.

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We want equal protection under the law for every pre -born image bearer. No more half measures, no more compromises, no more showing partiality to this group while we protect these ones over here.

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No more of it. God says, this is when life begins. The psalmist, we all know the verse.

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I'll bet we can even quote it. We even sing it in the Psalter. Fearfully and wonderfully made, right?

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You knit me together in my mother's womb. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. It's amazing, the word there in the original is actually gulmi, which has to do with embryo, right?

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A little life being knit together there that has not yet reached full development. And God says, that's the safest place to be.

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And it's also the place that ought to have the utmost protection. God's law, when it comes to the protection of the family and life in the womb in particular is second to none.

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So abortion must be outlawed. This is a premier issue of justice.

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We've said it before and we will continue to say it. Justice, justice for the pre -born.

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But what I wanna talk to you about today in particular is this pillar of our ministry. And that is abortion is an issue of national sin.

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It's a national security issue. And what I mean by that is that historically and in scripture, any nation that condones, allows for and in the case of our nation celebrates this sort of rampant evil and wickedness and injustice is a ticking time bomb.

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In terms of God's long suffering before he actually takes up vengeance and answers every drop of innocent blood that we have spilled.

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It's important to say at the outset that although we have abdicated this calling largely to demonstrate a prophetic witness.

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And I wanna talk to you about what that means. What is that exactly? The way that we naturally conceive of the prophetic office or role if you will, in the scriptures and what it is in an application for us today.

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In order to understand this topic, we have to assume at the outset here, a high view of God's Lordship.

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It might sound elementary, but we worship the God who is transcendent, who is not like us, who is other, he is the creator, we are his creatures.

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He creates us and then he directs and upholds and governs every aspect of history in terms of his sovereign decree.

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We are not like him, he is not dependent on something outside of himself to keep him going, as are we, right?

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We are dependent, utterly dependent. God is not like that, he is not like us.

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He chastises his people over and over again in scripture by saying, here's the mistake you made, you thought

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I was like you. And so this is the transcendent

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Lord of scripture, but he is also the imminent one. He is the

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God who is far off, high and lifted up and holy and throned on the praises of his people and yet he draws near for judgment.

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The imminent one, the one who is close, the one who draws near to bless and judge or curse in terms of obedience or disobedience to his commands.

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So something we have to understand, that God draws near. He's not a God that simply created this world and then stepped away and left it to run under its own power.

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What does Romans chapter 11 say? For from him and through him and to him are all things.

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In other words, nothing originates in itself nothing can keep itself going by its own power and nothing ultimately was created for itself.

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Rather from him through him and to him are all things.

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We exist for him and he draws near to judge.

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He is not absent. We don't believe in a God of deism that is somehow disconnected from the affairs of the world.

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He directs, governs and upholds and controls and as the author of Hebrews says, carries the universe along to its intended destination.

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He's intimately involved in every detail. He's not a far off spectator and that matters because our nation has such bloodstained hands and we think to ourselves that somehow he will overlook the offense.

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That somehow he will turn a blind eye. Brothers and sisters, he sees it all and he's not fooled.

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He's not fooled about it happening in our churches and in our culture and in our nation.

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In scripture we see that persistent and habitual transgressions of God's holy law which is really just the transcript of his character which is unchanging are avenged when he dispossesses entire nations for their practice of such things.

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Now evangelicals today in the West, we've largely lost this concept altogether, right?

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We say that was just for this group of people. God entered into covenant with them. He judged them but God doesn't do that with all nations.

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It's just this group of people over here but that would make foolishness out of what we see so many times in the

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New Testament, yes, but in the Older Testament in particular in order to understand what it means, the necessity of having a prophetic witness, we must understand the concept of covenant and in particular national and social covenants, right?

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God is the covenantal God. He condescends. The only way that we would have any knowledge of him whatsoever is if he condescended and revealed himself to us, amen?

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And that is what he does all throughout history. He's blessing and he is judging.

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God condescends and deals with man on the basis of covenant. However, throughout history, entire peoples, entire nations formed national and social covenants that shaped the very fabric of their land.

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This is what our forebears understood about the Great Commission that we have largely lost and it must be recovered.

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The call of the gospel is to not merely win souls for heaven, which is a part of it.

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If you don't have that, you don't have the gospel but it's not only that. It is about disciplining the nations, about teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded.

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Why? Matthew 28, 18 through 20, the Great Commission, our marching orders as the church, are we going or are we going therefore?

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Because Christ says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me and that's why you go because it's all mine in heaven and on earth.

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We're not merely looking to win a few souls for heaven but teaching entire nations to obey the king of kings.

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God deals with men covenantally. While the law of God was given in an explicit way to the people of God of old, the apostle

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Paul of course tells us that unbelievers themselves in Romans chapter two have the work of God's law written on their hearts.

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There is a function that the law has. All of us have been given a conscience. All of us know inherently right and wrong and God has gifted us with that but that of course knowledge is only sufficient to condemn us.

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It's not sufficient to save us and that is why we need the gospel and the proclamation of the word to give us new hearts.

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But think about it for a moment and I was really pleased to see this when I came in the sanctuary. My eyes were immediately drawn to it based on what

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I was gonna talk about today but if you think about this concept of covenant, we understand it in everyday life.

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We understand what it means to take a vow of marriage to one woman and to be faithful, don't we? That's a covenant.

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And what happens if in the course of that marriage either party is unfaithful to the covenant?

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Do we really think that there will not be consequences and judgment from God and sanctions that are placed for that disobedience upon the responsible parties?

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Do we really believe that? No, of course we understand that. How about church covenants?

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If you understand what this is, a covenant, right? A solemn oath, an agreement.

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Scripture talks a great deal about oaths. We don't care about those so much anymore because we've forgotten God. When United States presidents were sworn into office, not anymore, but when they used to be sworn into office, they placed their hand on an open

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Bible. And where was the open Bible turned to? Deuteronomy, specifically the covenantal curses.

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So you understand what they were saying when they did that, right? They were saying, if I am not obedient to this oath that I'm taking, may these curses come upon this nation.

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That is the continuity of the covenant, right?

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We recognize it in terms of baptism, when you're baptized into a church, when you take the

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Lord's Supper, what does the Apostle Paul say? Do not partake of the table in an unworthy manner in a way that is what?

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Covenantally unfaithful. Or what does he say might happen? You might get sick and you might die. We understand that when entire denominations covenant together to take responsibility for one another and to propagate the

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Christian gospel and purport to uphold the Christian faith and then they are unfaithful to that covenant and unfaithful to that oath, are we so surprised to see entire denominations going the way of hell in terms of their doctrine, their practice and being thrown into judgment?

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We understand this today. I love that, by the way,

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I think that's wonderful. I think it's a wonderful commitment to the body and to reaching the lost.

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But this concept of covenant, we understand what it means to sanction.

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We understand what it means for God to sanction us, for unfaithfulness to his law word.

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And brothers and sisters, that is what our nation is laboring under. If you look and you examine, we just celebrated

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Thanksgiving. If you haven't read this before, I challenge you to go read the document, the Mayflower Compact. I challenge you to go read it.

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When the settlers were first coming here to the East Coast of the United States and then the resultant first Thanksgiving that happened shortly after, all those events that transpired, read the text of it.

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What were they coming to do in this new world? How does it start? We undertake this for the glory of God and the advancement of the

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Christian faith. We covenant together. This is a civil body politic.

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And we're doing it specifically for Christ. You look at nations in the history of the world, you look at the islands of Hawaii, for example, in their original constitution of 1820, what does it have written in it?

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It says that no law written can be at variant with the laws of Jehovah God.

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That is a covenant. That's an agreement to uphold the laws of which

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God? Some other God? No, the God of Scripture. If you look at the coronation oath of Queen Elizabeth, go read that sometime,

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Queen Elizabeth II. Her oath explicitly traces its continuity back to the oath of coronation taken by the kings of Israel.

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And what was the oath? What was detailed in that oath? To uphold the laws of God and the

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Christian gospel in the nation. That's our heritage, okay?

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We have an illustrious heritage behind us of faithful forebearers that knew that if they were disobedient to God, if they broke faithfulness, as the text says, that there would be sanctions.

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God is the imminent God who draws near for judgment. Now, how does this intersect with child sacrifice and the shedding of innocent blood and abortion?

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Well, you heard the text earlier, but I will read it again in Leviticus 18, verse 21. God is giving them, and by the way, just to harp on this point, because I really wanna try to hammer this out.

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Many people will say, that was for Israel. It's no longer the case that God works in this way. However, once again, it makes a mockery out of text just like this one, because it says that when

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Israel was in slavery, they were specifically in slavery for 400 years because the sins of the pagans had not yet reached their full measure.

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And what were the sins among some of the sins that were being practiced by the Canaanites? Let me read it to you.

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Leviticus 18, 21. You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Moloch. And so profane the name of your

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God. I am the Lord. And of course, that's intimately connected and related to homosexuality and sodomy and the other things listed in the text there that are awful, bestiality, of course, as the text goes on.

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But the point is that God displaced the

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Canaanites and then right before he does that, he says, do not practice the same things that these pagans have or I will spit you out just like I'm spitting them out.

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So here's the point I wanna try to bring home to you today here is that God has one law for the native and the stranger and he will not spare good old

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USA. And he will judge according to the same standard whether it is his people or whether it is pagans.

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All are accountable to it. He promised that if his people practice the same things, they would be vomited out and guess what?

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They were. That's what the exile is all about. That's what being sent off into exile at the hands of other nations are about.

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God is invoking covenant sanctions against Israel for their unfaithfulness to his word.

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And that is why brothers and sisters, as it says in Isaiah 24, the inhabitants of the earth have transgressed the commandments, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant.

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All men, all nations everywhere by virtue of their creation by God are implicitly in covenant relationship to him and accountable to him for violating his statutes.

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Does that mean that everyone's accountable to God? Is that what you're telling me? Well, did God create them? Pretty simple question, right?

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Do they owe their existence to their maker? Yes, then they're accountable to him. That's what

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Romans chapter one is all about, isn't it? What does the apostle Paul say?

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The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.

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His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

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So they are unapologetus, without a reason defense. No excuse.

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And what do they do? They suppress the truth and they substitute God for idols, for created things.

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This is the MO of humanity. We won't worship God. We won't have his ways. We want our way.

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So we suppress the truth about God that has been clearly perceived by us, that revelation actually gets through, but we don't want it.

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So we hold that beach ball down underneath the surface of the swimming pool, but sooner or later it has to come up.

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We suppress and substitute what our creator is constantly shouting at us.

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Does anybody need to be told that what's in the womb is a baby? Does anybody need to be told that, that when a woman is pregnant, that she's carrying a human life inside of her?

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Is that obvious? Could it be any more obvious? But we suppress and we substitute the truth and we are accountable.

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Oh, are we accountable? The shedding of innocent blood, which is among the sins listed in the prophets here, defiles the land, right?

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It brings a curse upon the inhabitants that practice it. You remember the story, of course, of Cain and Abel when he slays his brother, innocent

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Abel. What does it say about Abel's blood? It cries out to God from the ground. That's one innocent life. We're 60 to 70 million children deep in our nation.

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Since Roe versus Wade. That, we can't even fathom. We can't quantify that amount. It's too heavy.

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It's too far beyond us to even fathom that. But the shedding of innocent blood, it's even a

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New Testament concept. What happens when the apostles are brought before the Jewish leadership? They said, you've shed innocent blood.

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Jesus is innocent blood, of course. And they say, you're trying to bring this man's blood upon us.

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What blood is that? Innocent blood. The only blood that is innocent that there ever has been in terms of sufficient to save sinners.

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But God has instituted for us civil government in the world.

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Government is a good thing, amen? It is not inherently evil. Government is good.

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There are jurisdictions. There are spheres of government, spheres of authority. God has instituted civil government, as it says in Romans 13, to be his deacon, his servant.

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The servant of which God? God of the Bible. He has instituted the magistrate to be his servant and bear the sword of justice against the evildoer.

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What's the call of the civil magistrate? To punish evil and to reward good. At a most basic level.

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Now, in a nation like ours that exchanges good for evil, light for darkness, as the prophet

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Isaiah says, that pollutes the cause of justice for a bribe, what is the response of that?

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Who is accountable? Well, the magistrate, of course, that will not do justice, that will not apply justice speedily, but furthermore, the people.

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In the context there in the prophet, it says that the people are the ones that have God's judgment poured out on them.

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What does that say to us? It says that when our magistrates fail, the onus is on us. We failed to properly discipline the nations, to teach them what

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Christ requires, what justice requires in the office, in the seat that they sit in.

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We're the ones that have failed. And in a nation like ours, light is exchanged for darkness, good is traded for evil, and evil becomes an injustice that is actually framed by statute, right?

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We're codifying it. We're attempting to make it law. And then, that in turn disciples the conscience of the nation as to what is actually acceptable.

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You can do this. And not only is it acceptable, but it's something to be celebrated and protected by law.

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So now you have the innocent being led away to death, and you have laws in place to actually protect that act that sacrifices their life.

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It is a horrible inversion of the design of God, and it is detestable in his sight.

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Abortion is not merely a sin that individuals are accountable for, although they are, but it is an abomination for which

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God judges all peoples who practice it. It has corporate implications. Every individual, of course, will stand before God on the day of judgment, and they will give an account.

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But we must acknowledge that there are temporal manifestations of God's judgment on a people. Nations cannot be punished in the life to come.

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So if injustice is persistent and habitual in a land, penalties don't just disappear, they're simply transferred from the guilty parties to the broader society.

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And God is merciful, and he is long -suffering, and he relents from sending calamity, but there comes a day when the hammer will drop.

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Now, if you're tempted to doubt, let me give you just one more example from the Old Testament, the prophet Amos in chapter one.

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He's speaking to the pagan nations around Israel, and listen to what he says in verse 13.

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Thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of the Ammonites and for four, that just means this is ongoing, this is habitual, this is not a one -off thing, you're doing this continually.

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For three transgressions of the Ammonites and for four, I will not revoke the punishment because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead that they might enlarge their border.

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This is the prophet speaking to pagans. So I will kindle a fire in the wall of Rabbah, and it shall devour her strongholds with shouting on the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind, and their king shall go into exile, he and his princes together, says the

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Lord. Brothers and sisters, if the Lord did not even spare the pagan nations for slaughtering the unborn, how is it that we will believe that we can escape his vengeance?

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This is what we're up against. Child sacrifice is not just an issue of national sin and personal responsibility for those who commit the bloodshed, but it is, at a deeper level, the bitter fruit of a nation's spiritual apostasy.

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It is not the root of the problem, it is the fruit of the problem. We have rejected

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God, but we are created inherently to be worshipers.

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So what will we do, not worship now because we've rejected God? No, we will just exchange something and put it in the place of the one who has the throne.

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Or we will attempt to, I should say. Now, one more place in the prophets here.

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Jeremiah chapter 32, I want you to go there with me if you have your Bibles. Jeremiah chapter 32 and verse 31.

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Now it says a little bit earlier here, it asks the question about the Lord.

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The Lord is asking, is anything too hard for me? In Jeremiah, the prophet is preaching to God's people about to be taken off into exile and the sanctions of the covenant are about to be invoked.

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But here's what the prophet says. This city has aroused my anger and wrath from the day it was built to this day so that I will remove it from my sight because of all the evil of the children of Israel and the children of Judah that they did to provoke me to anger their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

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They have turned to me their back and not their face. They won't repent. That's what that means. And though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instructions.

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How has he taught them? Through the prophets, right? What did we read in Hosea? He sent a prophet to them to hew them, to hack them, to slay them with the word and they wouldn't listen.

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So what did they do? Though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instruction.

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They set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name to defile it. They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom to offer up their sons and daughters to Moloch, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind that they should do this abomination.

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This is what one of the pastors was referring to earlier, that this is so far outside the realm of what

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God will entertain. It's that grave. It's that wicked.

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God will not justify it with any sense of rationality. It's not that he doesn't know.

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The omniscient God knows all, but he will not entertain it. It is so abhorrent to him.

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And that abomination with the high places refers to an act of worship, the worship of Baal.

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And of course, in historical cultures, cultic prostitution, sex, sexual prostitution, that was the worship of Baal, but Baal and Asherah, who was specifically the female consort of Moloch.

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Now, if you have never heard this before, I just wanna take a moment here. I don't wanna dwell too much on this, but in Moloch worship, you had a giant brass statue with the head of a bull, and it had arms outstretched like this, and there was an empty hole in the belly, and the belly was heated to terrific heat, flames, and the statue was heated up.

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And what the people would do was they were required to offer up at those high places their own babies to the statue and place it in the arms of the demon god.

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Moloch just means king. But they were required to offer up in the high places their own babies, and this is key, without tears or signs of protest.

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It had to be freely given. It had to be a love offering. In order to appease the wrath of the god, they couldn't show any signs of remorse about what they were doing, and there couldn't be any protest.

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So think about this. When you're outside of an abortion mill and you have law enforcement, you have pro -abortion death squirts that escort the women into the clinic, when you have every force under heaven arrayed against you to keep you from protesting on that sidewalk, what is happening there?

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It is an act of worship, and this act of worship must be offered up freely. It cannot be with protest.

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That is why you must be there. It had to be silent.

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Meanwhile, the instruments, the drums, were played by the people to drown out the cries of the children, to help the parents look on it without losing their composure.

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Now, according to scripture, this same geographical location, the Valley of Hinnom, is an earthly type of an eternal danger.

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Jesus warns us about this. He refers to the same geographical location in Hinnom as Gehenna, which is hell, right, where the trash was burnt, where people burnt their garbage.

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However, he attaches, of course, the spiritual element to this by telling us that this is a place where both body and soul can be destroyed, right?

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Don't fear man, but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul and cast them into hell. So yes, it is a place where trash was burnt, but it was also the place, with the geographical connection here, where the babies were burnt, where they were thrown into the flames, and so the acts associated with that place have a spiritual significance, a spiritual importance.

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Think of it this way. Wherever child sacrifice goes on and transpires, that place, when you step foot at that place, you are stepping foot in hell on earth, and as we've been told already, those gates will not prevail.

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Moloch worship was essentially statist in nature.

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If you look at the great empires of the world, in history, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, the state was seen as priestly and saving, right?

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Rulers were viewed and worshiped as God. They were the ones that manifested the divine from heaven to man.

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They were that bridge between heaven and earth, if you will. Now, what does that say about what's been going on in our nation for the past several months now?

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You have a priestly state that is full of experts and philosopher kings that are desperately trying to plan every area of your life to do what?

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To save you, save you from dying, save you from your own shortcomings, to save you from yourself.

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That's the role of God, though, right? This is where we get the idea of a political savior, so one of my children's favorite stories is

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Nebuchadnezzar and the giant statue and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they won't bow.

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They love that, and I do too, but think of this in this way.

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This is how they viewed themselves in statism. You have a totalitarian system of government where the state arrogates to itself all power.

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It's centralized there within the state. These men who lay the ultimate claim of authority over every aspect of life, and this, by the way, is the context in which the early church was ministering, and do you know that?

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That's how Caesar viewed himself. Caesar viewed himself as the savior. It was on the coins.

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Caesar Augustus, he was considered to be divine. He would save everybody through politics.

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And what does the apostle Peter say in Acts chapter four?

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He says, there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved but Jesus Christ.

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That was a direct refutation because that is what people said about Caesar, and so as you see in the book of Acts, for example, you have the apostle saying, no, there's another king,

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Jesus, and we have to obey him. We have to obey God rather than man. We use these verses for personal evangelism oftentimes.

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How about this one? There is one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus. That is a verse that tells us that there is only one bridge between heaven and earth.

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One mediator. It's not just for Roman Catholic evangelism. Right? There's one mediating

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Lord that can bridge that gap. So why is it bad to have a state that wants to claim ultimate authority over every aspect of life?

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Well, if the state is God, then there's no appeal higher than the state. But in Jesus, who is divine and human, the true

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God king, what Caesar wanted to be, he pretended to be,

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Jesus is 100 % God and 100 % man. This was decided at the

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Council of Chalcedon, right? In 451 AD, they were ironing out their Christology.

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Jesus has two natures. What are they? He is fully divine and he is fully human. Little did they know that this would become the foundation for all of Western liberty.

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Because salvation cannot be found in one man or a group of men or a governing body or institution because there's only one

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God man. There's only one God king, one mediator,

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Jesus Christ. You can't bring the divine and the human together in a man or institution because the gap between heaven and earth has already been bridged.

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The gospel is not that man can ascend to godhood, it's that God became a man. So in statist

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Moloch worship, for example, a God king can demand the wholesale slaughter of the innocent.

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We see this in two places, you'll know what they are right away. Think of the Exodus, think of Pharaoh.

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What was he doing with the firstborn of Israel? He was sanctioning a wholesale mass genocide and slaughter of an entire people group because he was afraid.

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He was afraid. How about Herod? Context in which

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Jesus came into the world, you have a king who is desperately attempting to clutch his crumbling throne because he knows that there is a rival king that is about to emerge and so what does he do?

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He orders a slaughter of all the baby boys. And in both contexts,

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God delivers, right? In the Exodus and then of course in the Messiah himself when he comes, this is the context, by the way, of what

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Jesus comes into. Jesus comes into the world as a baby while babies are being murdered.

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In the statist view, the state is ultimate and demands total sacrifice, which from ancient paganism until now includes child sacrifice and the shedding of innocent blood and that's what we have today, by the way.

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It's state -sanctioned child sacrifice. They are clawing to protect it.

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And this is what happens when man rejects God, his will becomes absolute. He is a worshiper by nature but without God, he will still hold on to something as the ultimate reality.

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What's our ultimate reality? Christians, the triune God. But when man has rejected that God, he will still attempt to redefine the world around him.

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If in the beginning was the word and man wants a new beginning without God, then he will try to subvert the created order with a new word.

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What in the world are you talking about? Well, let me put it in terms where all of us can understand.

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It's not a baby unless I say so. See it? No, I'm not a man,

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I'm a woman. This is what marriage looks like, two men.

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Do you see? It's an attempt to re -enchant the world through an alternative word.

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It's magic. It's sorcery, which by the way, is listed among child sacrifice.

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They're right together in those passages that I read to you. Why is that? How can those two things be brought together like that?

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Well, because both child sacrifice and magic arts, sorcery, divination, the attempt to re -enchant the world, they are all attempts to control and direct the future apart from the sovereign

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Lord of history. Man will attempt to provide an explanation for the universe, but without God and his will, his man's will as absolute becomes the template to explain everything.

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Abortion is obeying the will as absolute. Whereas Christians submit to the will of God, man in his autonomy submits to the

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God of will. God of will. You are autonomous.

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Write your own story. Be the captain of your soul. You are self -creating.

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Be whatever you wanna be. Take it upon yourself to be the arbiter of good and evil in your own eyes.

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Does that sound like every Disney movie message you've ever watched? You can trace that back to Genesis three with the serpent's tongue.

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That's why when you're standing outside of an abortion mill, they're protecting choice. That's the goal, to protect choice.

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It doesn't matter what the choice is, so they say, even though they want them to go in and kill their baby.

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But what matters most of all is the choice. That is what has to be protected and retained because it's not defined by God and his word in their mind.

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What is ultimate, the ultimate reality is not God and his word. It's their choice, whether one way or the other.

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It doesn't matter what the choice is. What matters is the bare expression of the will.

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Our society worships death because it reveals its choice to be its own God.

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That's Scott Mason. Our society worships death because it reveals its choice to be its own

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God. The worship of self is the love of death. Those that hate me love death.

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It's the chief value of our society and its adherence to man that it be protected, demonstrating what they worship.

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Abortion is an act of false worship. That's why the gospel is the only answer for it because only the gospel restores us to true worship of the true

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God. Let me put it to you this way.

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Men and women are shedding the blood of their own children, offering up the fruit of their body for the sins of their soul so that all will be well with them.

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They're looking for a way of deliverance as are all of us. It's a human condition.

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We're all looking for a way to be delivered. We're all looking for that.

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We're all trying to deliver ourselves from the certainty of divine judgment because we know that we've sinned against God, broken his law, and we're all trying to repair that broken relationship with our creator through an alternative sacrifice.

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And the woman that does this is trusting in that sacrifice, that shed blood. She's trusting in the shed blood of her own son or daughter when there has been an execution already.

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The perfect righteous blood of the son of God has been shed so you don't need to offer up the false sacrifice, you have the real sacrifice to take away your sins.

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This is the message that we have to be proclaiming. This is what we're speaking into.

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Here it is, abortion is murder. God commands you not to murder, turn from sin, come to Christ for life and obey his word.

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In our society, human autonomy has become the ultimate reality and we have become complicit with the bloodshed that has resulted from the church to the culture and especially in the realm of civil government and calling on our representatives to protect innocent life and punish evildoers which leads me to the role of the church as God's prophetic witness and here we are.

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This is the historical pattern as I read to you in Hosea. When a people and its leaders violate God's commands, he sends them, the offending nations, his messengers to warn them that the

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Lord of the covenant will enforce the sanctions if they do not repent. Now a prophet was a reformer.

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He was calling the people back to right belief, right worship and heartfelt obedience, heartfelt obedience and he warned the people not to abandon their history.

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Once again, think about our own nation. Think about where we come from.

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If you want a taste of it, let me quote something here for you from David Klinghoffer, Jewish scholar. He says, the earliest legal codes of colonial

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Massachusetts and Connecticut were based explicitly on the Pentateuch's legislative system. American law similarly assumes that right and wrong are a matter of objective reality.

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The 10 commandments are at the foundation of our moral and legal culture. It's for this good reason that Moses carrying the two tablets of the

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Decalogue is carved on the wall of the US Supreme Court. The United States has long regarded itself as the continuation of the history of ancient

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Israel, an extension of the Jewish church as the pilgrims put it in 1620.

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That's our heritage. That's where we come from. We understood these things for a long, long time but we have become rootless.

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That's what it means to be a barbarian, by the way, to have no root. We're disconnected from our history.

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We're disconnected from these things that made us what we are. And for the prophets, the one wanting to exercise prophetic witness, by the way, all that means is not foretelling the future.

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The call of a prophet primarily was to foretell the word of God, to speak the word of the

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Lord to the people. Their concern was ethical conduct, not merely prediction of the future.

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Prophets were God's prosecuting attorneys, right? It says that in Hosea. There's a charge, there's a dispute.

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There's a controversy that he's bringing before them. That means they're on trial. Prophets were

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God's messengers sent to the people and leaders to file suit against them and warn them of the judgment to come.

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They were to be the conscience of their nation, which involved pricking the consciences of the people and those in authority, which was a very, and it is today, a very risky endeavor.

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Just ask John the Baptist. It is not lawful for you to have her.

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Off with the head. It requires a considerable amount of risk to tell kings and magistrates in authority that they must obey the word of the

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Lord. It's risky. But prophets are called to represent

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God and speak boldly in the face of opposition. And in Christ, all Christians are now prophets.

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This does not mean that we hold the prophetic office. It just means that there is a prophetic witness and calling that we are to exercise in that now that we have this completed canon of revelation, that is our thus saith the

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Lord. We are taking this, not getting direct revelation from God. We have the revelation in our hands, brothers and sisters, and we are taking that and we are applying it.

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Thus saith the Lord. We are being conformed to the image of God's son, who is the true prophet.

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Priest and king, he is the true prophet and we're being conformed into his image.

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So we're being made to be more prophetic in the sense. It's our responsibility to hold cultures and kings accountable when they fail.

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Yet again, it's because we fail. We are the ecclesia. All right, you've heard that,

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I'm sure, the Greek word for the church. It's the called out citizens of a new kingdom, priests to the royal nation, ambassadors of Jesus Christ.

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That's what you are. You're an ambassador of Christ. You represent him and the affairs of heaven on earth.

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That's what it means to be an ambassador, right? You have dual citizenship. The earth belongs to man, who

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God made it for. We belong to God. We have dual citizenship. We're seated with Christ in the heavenly places and God is doing what?

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What's he doing with us? He saved us from sin and he is saving us unto good works.

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Right, Ephesians 2, 8, 9, Titus 2, 11 through 14. He has saved us unto good works that he's prepared for us to walk in, but he is preparing us for, brothers and sisters, government.

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He is preparing us to govern ourselves. He is preparing us to govern our homes.

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He is preparing officers in the church to govern the body of Christ. He is preparing men in positions of legislation and politics to govern righteously because why?

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The saints will judge the angels. God is preparing us. He's bringing us and leading us to maturity to govern this world.

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This word, ekklesia, it's taken from the polis in Greek thought, right, where we get politics.

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And it refers in its most basic sense to a citizenry called out from their homes and gathered into a public place.

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So the prophet Isaiah says that justice is turned back and righteousness stands far off for truth has stumbled in the public square.

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So when Christians aren't speaking truth to the public square, in the public square, justice and uprightness cannot enter is what the text says.

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So part and parcel of our role as this new citizenry, which is taken from a word having to do with Hellenic politics in Greek thought, right, the very term for the church is taken from this term.

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We understand that our calling is to declare and assert the crown rights of King Jesus in every sphere of our lives and to apply the word of God there.

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And it is we who must, as the psalmist says, take up the two -edged sword, binding our kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron, restraining them.

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That's what that means, by the way, the chains of the constitution that our founders referred to, right?

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Same kind of picture in your mind here. There's a restraining influence that the church is to have, to preserve, right?

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Where the salt of the earth, what does salt do? Salt preserves things from decaying, from spoiling.

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We're the light of the world. So if there's so much darkness here, where's our light? Where's our salt?

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If our land is to be cleansed of blood guiltiness, the call is for justice and equal protection for the pre -born.

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I want you to turn, I'll finish on this in Matthew's gospel, chapter 12.

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Gospel according to Matthew chapter 12. Bringing it all full circle now in terms of the prophet

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Hosea, what was he getting at? Mercy, not sacrifice. I don't want empty formalism.

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I don't want ritual observance. While there's bloodshed and injustice going on in your midst, I don't want it.

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Just take it and go. I want justice. I want you to correct oppression, right? I want you to do the right thing, the right way, the prescribed action.

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That's what I want you to do. The Lord Jesus picks up on this in Matthew chapter 12.

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And you remember the Pharisees were giving him a hard time because he was allowing the disciples to eat the grain as they walked through the fields.

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And Jesus is going around doing good works on the Sabbath. He's healing people, right? And then he chastises them.

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He says, if an animal falls into the ground, are you not gonna get the animal? How much more is this a good work that I'm doing on the

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Sabbath? That's what they were doing. They were holding externals as the greatest thing while the heart was unchanged, right?

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They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. That's what Hosea is talking about.

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You draw near to me with your lips, but the heart is not there.

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There's no change. There's no repentance. There's no true and genuine effectual transformation.

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And listen to what Jesus says here, verse seven of chapter 12. And if you had known what this means,

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I desire what? Mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.

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If you knew what this meant, if you knew God, in other words, if you knew what

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God prized, what he desired, you would not have condemned the innocent.

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If you understood what mercy is and how valued it is and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.

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If you knew that. And then a few verses later, there's a quotation from Isaiah chapter 42, which is a premier text in all of scripture.

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But if you look at the prophecy of Isaiah, starting in verse 18, listen.

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Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well -pleased, I will put my spirit upon him and he will proclaim justice to the nations or the

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Gentiles. He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.

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A bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not quench until he brings justice to victory.

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And in his name, the Gentiles will hope. So Jesus has chastised his contemporaries for not understanding matters of the heart.

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They had all of the formalism, all of the externals down pat, but they lacked the main thing, circumcision of the heart, if you will.

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They weren't changed, right? They took God's law, missed the heart of it and reinterpreted it to justify their own legalism and externalism.

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The traditions of men were opposed to the laws of God. That's how

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Jesus puts it in Mark chapter seven. But I just wanna end on this point right here.

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Listen to verse 20. A bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not quench.

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Reeds and wicks, they were very commonplace in that culture.

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They were very expendable. They were a dime a dozen. They served a variety of different functions and getting rid of one was no big deal.

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Right? And yet there's something on display here in this text that tells us about the love of Christ, that he manifests.

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And if you notice, the passage, the quotation from Isaiah is about justice. He's coming to proclaim justice and yet we have this in the context of you need to understand mercy.

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These concepts are not as far apart as we believe them to be. Justice and mercy.

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What do I mean by that? Well, here's what I mean. When it comes to, let's apply this now to the unborn.

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When it comes to the unborn, every single human life that is in the mother's womb created in the image of God is a bruised reed, statistically speaking.

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Especially if you belong to the black community. The context in particular is talking about the marginalized, the oppressed, if you will.

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Those who are looked down upon in society. The bruised reed, the broken, the shattered, the ones on the verge of just crumbling underneath the way.

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And that's why in chapter 11, he says, come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I'll give you rest.

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The baby in the womb, the smoldering wick. The one that's in danger of being blown out.

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That is the unborn in our nation. And the son of God is giving us a picture of his love here that communicates to us in the context of all of this that the way

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Christ loves those who are truly oppressed, those who are not getting their due before God, that's what justice is.

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To give someone their due before God. What God prescribes is the rightful act for them.

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Jesus says, a bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not quench.

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The victim that is suffering injustice in our day, in the case of an abortion, is the child that must be protected and we are to give

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God his due by establishing justice for the fatherless. And here's how we do it.

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We plead for mercy for the unborn by calling on those in authority to uphold justice on their behalf.

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Have mercy on these children. Do justice and show these babies mercy because they are in danger of having their wick extinguished.

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So brothers and sisters, I hope this has been a blessing to you. Let us leave this evening when this is all said and done and think about what it means to live in the context that God has called us to minister in.

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He's put each of you in a position to speak prophetically. To be the voice of God in your families, in your churches, in the realms of authority, civil magistrates in attendance here.

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He has created all of you with a role to play in this. Understand this is not going away.

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God will not turn a blind eye to this, but yet he uses fallen sinful people like you and like me to speak his word into the world and that is the very means that he uses to change things.

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To stand in the gap, right? The prophet Ezekiel talks about that in chapter 22.

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God is looking for a man to interpose. He's looking for a man to stand in the gap and abate that judgment that's coming.

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He's looking and he didn't find one. And so destruction is coming. Will you be that man?

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Will you be that woman? Will we do it together as families? Because that's the vision that we need to win our nation back, right?

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Evangelism, familial discipleship, faithfulness in our homes and our churches. That's how we get it back.

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That's how we restore. God has no obligation to bless us, but let us be found faithful no matter what in the sphere that we have been called to minister in and fight for these children in order to abate what should be rightfully ours because God does grant repentance.

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He does restore, he does save and the message of Hosea at the end, if you read the end of that book is, that's what it ends on.

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God will not be angry forever. He will restore, he will heal, he will save.

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But will our nation be saved? Will we be raised up?

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Will we be given a national resurrection? I don't know, but let us be found either way, faithful to the

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King of Kings because he promises to preserve and to protect his people and to be with us always.

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Amen? All right, let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much,

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God. Thank you for the words that went out today. It's all for your glory. I pray that it made contact and that you,

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God, would do what I cannot and that is cut your people, that you would hack them with the words of your mouth and that you would show us all the meaning of mercy and not sacrifice.