When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers. —Proverbs 21:15
When I teach ethics courses, one of our class topics is abortion. I show these four short videos to the students to inform them how abortion works: (1) pills, (2) dilation and curettage with suction, (3) dilation and evacuation, and (4) injection and stillbirth.
Those videos are painful to watch. But I think it’s important to understand what abortion is. It’s monstrous. It’s cold-blooded murder. And it’s murdering human persons at the earliest stages of their development—when they are most vulnerable and when they most need nurture and protection.
Over the past nearly fifty years, over 63 million babies were legally killed in our country. Sixty-three million.
For decades, justice-loving people have strategized about how to rescue unborn babies from premature deaths. There are many good strategies, but a primary obstacle was Roe v. Wade, a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 that the Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s freedom to have an abortion. Roe v. Wade was a massive barrier to justice for unborn babies. It needed to be overturned.
Nearly half a century later, God saw to it. On Friday morning June 24, the Supreme Court struck down an evil law that legalized murdering babies in the wombs of their mothers. Now we are talking about the standing of Roe v. Wade in the past tense. Now more babies are alive. Now more babies will live. Hallelujah!
President Joe Biden has declared the entire month of June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month. But while the world was celebrating rebellious perversion last month, “Pride Month” became “LIFE Month!”—as Abigail Dodds, a graduate of Bethlehem College & Seminary, argues in WORLD Opinions.
There’s a lot to say about all this, and there’s still more work to do. (See Crossway’s helpful interview with Scott Klusendorf.) But I’d like to emphasize this: I am so grateful to God! This is a momentous occasion for us to give thanks to God and to celebrate what God has done in his meticulous and purposeful sovereignty.
Don’t let social progressives steal your joy by making you feel sad or guilty about the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Kevin DeYoung wrote some brilliant satire about this. He recalls the climactic scene of the original Star Wars movie when Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star. DeYoung humorously explains that this is not how people responded:
Many friends of the Alliance questioned Han’s character. He was a smuggler and a cynic, and many wondered whether he was only motivated by the promise of a reward. Throughout the Rebel fleet, they gave thanks for the work R2-D2 and C-3PO had done, but they also said it would all be for naught if they didn’t do something about the oppressive Jawa droid ring they had left behind. Some concerned voices asked Princess Leia whether she thought the Rebels had the maturity to receive this victory or whether the problem in the galaxy might really lie with her own people. And Chewbacca? People weren’t sure what he was saying, but he seemed angry.
As we all know, the obliteration of the Death Star was not the happy event the Rebels thought it would be. To be sure, all of their energies had been directed toward this one end (there was something about removing an imminent threat to their very existence that concentrated their efforts). But when the time came to rejoice in the removal of the Death Star, wise leaders reminded the Rebels that the Death Star could always be rebuilt. Until the very idea of the Death Star became unthinkable, the Rebels had no reason to rejoice. Senior officials patiently explained to Luke and Leia that it was their responsibility to remove all conditions throughout the galaxy that might lead someone in the future to want the Death Star again.
No, when Luke destroyed the Death Star, the good guys cheered with relief and joy. Yes, “the good guys” were imperfect. Yes, there was still more work to do. But at that moment it was fitting to cheer with relief and joy. It would be wrong not to be thankful. “Christians should rejoice over Dobbs,” as Carl Trueman argues.
Brothers and sisters, Roe v. Wade was a Death Star. It’s overturned. This is a time to celebrate with deep gratitude what God has done!
Andy Naselli, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament
Prayer Requests
- Thank the Lord for thwarting our adversary the Snake and Dragon, who hates babies, by seeing to it that Roe v. Wade was overturned.
- Pray that our leaders and faculty would faithfully love what God loves and hate what God hates.
- Pray that our students would not waste their lives—that they would be faithful stewards and not be captured by worldly ideologies or enslaved to sexual sin or any other sin.