[ JBEM Index / Volume 4 / Number 2 ]

Editor’s Note*

Then the king said to her, ‘What is troubling you?’ And she answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. ‘ So we boiled my son, and ate him. And 1 said to her on the next day, ‘Give me your son, that we may eat him’; but she has hidden her son. ” 11 Kings 6:28, 29

The passage tells of the awful famine in Samaria under siege by Syria. The king tears hi clothes at the woman’s awful petition and straightaway blamed God’s prophet Elisha! Though the passage is not intended to teach on the destruction of children, per se, it does contain an illustration pertinent to a contemporary trend. Children are being eaten today in the US. Not literally, but through abortion and in other ways. How often abortion is “justified” by appeal to the disruption an infant would cause a girl’s education. “To get a good job, get a good education.” A good job means more money and more things. As an aborted teenager lunches between her college classes, paying with money that might have supported the baby, is she not in some sense eating her child? At least in Samaria they were faced with true famine.

Fast increasing in our land is a pagan form of environmentalism which would eat your children. It holds all life to be equally valuable, with humans often being deemed a less-valuable exception. Some environmentalists behold the globe as a living organism upon which the human species has become like parasites threatening the whole. Many who hold this view would like to see the earth’s human population drastically lessened, so that large areas can be returned to their wild state. They have aborted or contracepted their own children, and now, like the woman petitioning the king, they want to eat yours, too. Using the strong arm of the civil government, coerced abortion, parental licensing, or forced sterilization are means to the environment some of them seek.

Far-fetched? Are not many children already, in a sense, being “eaten” intellectually and morally in school systems which eschew the Bible, the beginning of wisdom? Is your biblical authority to raise your children being devoured as an appetizer before the consumption of the children themselves? Is not the dominant, state-supported form of “sex education” understandable in part as an attempt to keep the earth from being cluttered with people by eating them through “free sex” couple with contraception and abortion? That’s what the enviro-pagans have taught. Having thus eaten their own progeny, they demand the king assist them in taking yours, and blame God’s prophet for the whole dilemma.

We do have a famine, worse than Samaria’s – a famine of hearing the word of God.

[ JBEM Index / Volume 4 / Number 2 ]