The WHO says that there are about 73 million abortions every year worldwide. The main driving force behind abortions has always been feminism (just reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, one can see that women have to be gotten out of the house and into the workforce in order to be fulfilled. For this to happen, abortion has to be an option). So, a simple syllogism yields the following:
1. Abortion is murder
2. Feminism drives the abortion train
3. Hundreds of millions of babies have been aborted in the last 50 years
4. Feminism is the most murderous worldview in history
Feminism is
very religious in nature.
Just last night I read this portion of Philip Ryken's Commentary on Jeremiah and Lamentations: from sorrow to hope.
It's a bit long for a post, but you may find his take very interesting. I also attached a PDF of this 6-page excerpt. It's titled:
The Valley of Slaughter
JEREMIAH 7:30—8:3
Placing yourself in the hands of the prophet Jeremiah is something like getting a ride from a friend who turns out to be a more reckless driver than you expected. Once you are in the car, the only thing you can do is grab on to the dashboard and pray for God’s mercy. Nowhere is this more true than in Jeremiah’s sermon on the Valley of Slaughter.
Temples of Doom
The end of chapter 7 through the beginning of chapter 8 is a horrible passage of Scripture, in the sense that it describes horrible actions and contains horrible images. It is one of the low points of Jeremiah’s book.
The way the passage begins is bad enough. “ ‘The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes,’ declares the Lord. ‘They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it’ ” (Jeremiah 7:30). They had taken idols made of stone and wood and placed them in the temple of the Lord God. “If one God is good,” they said to themselves, “two would be better, and three would be better yet.” They were hedging their bets. They were putting their trust in the Lord God of Israel, but at the same time they were trusting in Baal, the Queen of Heaven, and anyone else they could think of.
Of course, trusting in God plus any other god is not trusting in the one true God at all. The gospel is Christ plus nothing. To start adding to the gospel is not to improve it, but to destroy it. You cannot walk down two or three roads at the same time. It is either God’s way or the highway. As Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).
When the people of Judah brought their idols into the temple, they were defiling it, profaning it, and making it completely unsuitable for the worship of the one true God. What they did was detestable; it was an abomination in God’s sight. It would be like setting up a Shinto shrine or opening an adult book shop in your church fellowship hall. Even if everything else in the church remained the same—pews, Bibles, songbooks—the place of worship would still be defiled. What the people of Judah were bringing into the temple was such an affront to everything God stands for that it made the temple uninhabitable. worshipping extra gods does not enhance worship—it makes true worship impossible.
All of that was bad enough, but the other thing the people of Judah did was even worse: “They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire” (Jeremiah 7:31).
The “high places” of Biblical times were not always very high. These particular high places, for example, were down in a valley. It was an inaccessible rocky ravine south and west of the City of Jerusalem. But a “high place” is a shrine, a raised platform built out of stones for the purpose of worship.
In Jeremiah 7 the high places are called by the name “Topheth.” Topheth is not the name of a god, but means something like “fireplace” or “oven.” It is not hard to see why that name was appropriate for this place. Topheth was the place where the people of Judah took their sons and their daughters and cast them into the flames.
Child sacrifice was practiced in ancient Near Eastern places such as Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, and Tyre.1 The remains of hundreds of children have been discovered at Carthage, apparently sacrificed to Baal.2 But child sacrifice also had a long history in Israel. Already in the book of Leviticus the children of Israel had been warned not to sacrifice their children to Molech (18:21), an offense punishable by death (20:1–5). Molech, the god of the Ammonites, had a way of turning up in Israel. Ahaz, King of Israel, sacrificed his own son in the fire (2 Kings 16:3). The same thing happened in Manasseh’s day, when children were sacrificed to the gods of Canaan (21:6).
People conducted child sacrifices when Isaiah was prophet too, for he said, “you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags” (Isaiah 57:5b). When Josiah reformed temple worship in Jerusalem, one of the things he had to do was to tear down the high places of Topheth (2 Kings 23:10). But even that does not seem to have solved the problem, because the theme of child sacrifice comes up several times in the book of Jeremiah. Later Jeremiah explains that these sacrifices were offered to both Baal and Molech: “They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech” (32:35).
There is little need to press home the horror of the imagery in this passage. Understand that it describes a real fire, a literal holocaust. Down in this valley, almost within sight of the temple of the Lord, the people of God were committing their infants to the flames.
What possible justification could they have had for these unholy flames and unspeakable sacrifices? Calvin writes, “It was a horrible and prodigious madness for parents not to spare their own children, but to cast them into the fire; for they must have been seized with a diabolic fury as to divest themselves of all human feelings.”3 I am not sure Calvin is right. I do not think that we can attribute the sins of the Valley of Ben Hinnom to either insanity or demonic possession.
To understand this passage is to recognize that these people thought they were doing what God wanted them to do. Very likely, these mothers and fathers loved their children. They had the natural feelings of care and protection that made them recoil at the very thought of harming their kids. They did not commit atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities. Instead, they carried out child sacrifice as an act of misguided piety and devotion to God. The sacrifice of the child was a religious act. They were killing their children out of the very best of intentions. They thought this was what God wanted them to do to atone for their sins.
This is a theme that recurs throughout Jeremiah: False gods are always harsh taskmasters. God is the only God who actually loves his people. Other gods may promise to save your soul, but they will tear your heart out in the process.
This is also a reminder that not everything done in God’s name is pleasing to him. Not everything done out of zeal for God is acceptable to God. The people of Judah loved themselves more than they loved their kids. They were trying to buy their own salvation at the expense of their children. This is an extreme example, but it shows what happens when people try to worship God in ways that Scripture does not teach that he wants to be worshiped.
That is why God takes great pains in this passage to make it clear that what the people of Judah were doing was not pleasing to him, that in fact they were doing the very opposite of what he intended them to do. It is something, God says, “I did not command nor did it enter my mind” (Jeremiah 7:31).
The way this is phrased suggests that some of the religious leaders in Judah were claiming that child sacrifice had entered the mind of God, that he did command it. Some scholars point out that the priests of Topheth may have used the Torah to justify child sacrifice: “You must give me the firstborn of your sons… on the eighth day” (Exodus 22:29–30). They were taking that verse out of context; it had nothing to do with child sacrifice. This is why we need to be careful not to tear Bible verses out of their Biblical contexts, especially when we are talking about the way of salvation. What the verse actually meant was that God wanted his people to circumcise their sons on the eighth day, not that he wanted them to kill their sons.
Topheth in America
That way of misreading the Bible sounds utterly foolish. But be careful not to write Jeremiah off. The practices he describes in this passage are so primitive and barbaric, and the reasoning behind them is so unconscionable, that it is tempting to think that they have nothing to do with life in these postmodern times. Where can the Valley of Ben Hinnom be found in America? Where are the high places of Topheth? Where do parents burn their sons and daughters in the fire?
One might go to the Planned Parenthood office at Market East, on the corner of 11th and Filbert in Center City Philadelphia. Some years ago I saw a couple of young girls walk in the door of Planned Parenthood, wearing bobby socks and plaid school uniforms, carrying their books and their lunches. In my mind’s eye, I could see them going down into the Valley of Ben Hinnom.
Jeremiah’s sermon on the Valley of Slaughter suggests important parallels between child sacrifice and abortion-on-demand. The more barbaric Jeremiah’s culture seems, the more obvious the barbarities of our own culture become. Scholars such as M.I.T. psychologist Steven Pinker have gone beyond abortion to argue in favor of infanticide. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Pinker accepts that “the right to life must come … from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess.” However, he goes on to say that babies “don’t possess these traits any more than mice do.”4 This is the postmodern barbarism of America.
One does not have to be a Christian to see that abortion is immoral. Anyone who has ever prepared to welcome an infant home knows how a fetus becomes a member of the household as soon as his existence is known, affecting virtually every family decision. Anyone who has ever carried a child in her womb knows how intimate a relationship forms between mother and child, how a fetus responds to the moods and schedules of her mother. Anyone who has ever seen pictures, videotapes, or ultrasounds of children in the womb knows how early the human heart forms, and how the fetus can respond to pleasure and pain. To know those things is to know instantly and instinctively that abortion is the murder of an unborn child. There is no substantive moral difference between the child sacrifices offered in the Valley of Ben Hinnom and abortion as practiced in America.
It is easy to think of the people involved in the abortion industry as barbarians, as cruel and malicious murderers. But thinking about things in this way will not win anyone to Jesus Christ. Jeremiah teaches that abortion is a spiritual problem. The act of abortion is a religious ritual, a form of idol worship. The high priests of the abortion industry tell women that their physical comfort, their economic status, and their career plans are all more important than the life of their unborn child. Every abortion is a sacrifice to those ungodly gods.
Realizing that abortion is an essentially religious activity makes sense of the pro-choice movement. The pro-choice movement believes that pro-lifers are immoral, even wicked. Why is that? It is because the pro-choice position is a religious belief, and people always have a sense of moral outrage when you attack their religious beliefs. For abortion advocates, an abortion is an act of piety, an act of religious devotion. It is a ritual sacrifice to the gods of materialism and pleasure.
That kind of thinking is completely immoral, but the only way to combat it is to recognize that it is a spiritual problem. It is the kind of spiritual problem Paul describes in his letter to the Romans: “Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (1:28).
The evil of abortion must be attacked on spiritual terms. It would be good and right if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, or if the President agreed to ban partial-birth abortions, or if the states adopted a constitutional amendment banning abortion. But the issues at the heart of the abortion debate cannot be solved judicially or legislatively. The battle is a spiritual battle, and our weapons are spiritual weapons: prayer, the Word of God, the peace of the gospel, and the love of Christ.
Norma McCorvey, who was the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, has become a born-again Christian. How was she won for Christ? Not by pro-life advertisements or by pickets and protests (although those things may have their place), but simply by the love and friendship of a pro-life family.
There is one more place to see a connection between the Valley of Ben Hinnom and contemporary American culture, and that is in your own home. Christian parents should consider whether there are any ways in which they are guilty of the sins of the Valley of Ben Hinnom.
Abortion is not the only form of child sacrifice in our culture. Many parents are guilty of lesser forms of child sacrifice. What Jeremiah teaches is that it is a wicked thing for parents to put their own needs and desires ahead of the needs and desires of their children. Obviously the Valley of Ben Hinnom is an extreme example. But every time a career is put ahead of a family, every time anger prevents the exercise of loving discipline, and every time children must adjust to their parents’ interests rather than the other way around, parents display the same heart-attitude that the people of Judah displayed when they went down to Ben Hinnom.
Parents who love themselves more than they love their children are not parenting the way God intends. How you spend your money, how you discipline your children, and how you use your time all reveal whether you make sacrifices for your children, or whether you offer them up as sacrifices for yourself.
1 Philip J. King, Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), p. 139.
2 L. E. Stager and S. R. Wolff, Biblical Archaeology Review (October 1, 1984), pp. 31–51. See also A. R. W. Green, The Role of Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975).
3 John Calvin, A Commentary on Jeremiah, 5 vols., Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1989), p. 412.
4 Steven Pinker, quoted in LifeLines (Vol. 6, No. 6), p. 8.
Ryken, P. G. (2001). Jeremiah and Lamentations: from sorrow to hope. Crossway Books.
Exported from
Logos Bible Software, 6:43 AM September 9, 2022.
