Christians are the regenerate who, according to Romans 7 and 8, are to be “spiritually minded” (Romans 8:6). And that applies to how they should assess the legislation offered by those who want to end abortion now.
It seems that proponents of the legislation believe the way to do this is by authorizing a prosecutor to indict an abortive mother with a crime that would call for punishment anywhere from multiple years in prison up to seeking the death penalty. That was the legislation offered in Tennessee.
Today I want to begin taking a look at what I would offer as a spiritually minded assessment of this proposal.
Narrowing the Framework for a Proper Assessment
To narrow our assessment of this legislation, we must discern the basis for the sanction. At common law the penalty imposed on a woman was reduced over time from a felony to a misdemeanor. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England, 79. More on the possible reasons for that reduction at a later time.
But we should note that the death penalty has not brought an end to premeditated murders even in states that have carried it out. So, something else must be at play to think a long prison sentence or even the death penalty must be the punishment for an abortive mother.
I will assume the rationale is found in what A.W. Pink called the “law of Moses,” a comprehensive term for the the juridical and ceremonial law ordering Israel’s society and worship. A.W. Pink, The Law and the Saint, 11. I suspect the applicable rationale in the law of Moses is the precept of life for life, which we will also examine in a future episode.
The “judgments” of God given through Moses for society (Exodus 21:1) were particular applications of the Law of God, the creational laws summarized in the Ten Commandments. This law brings us back to the Apostle Paul’s first letter to Timothy and the very critical statements he made about those who do not agree that “the end of the commandment is [1] love from a pure heart, [2] from a good conscience, and [3] from sincere faith.”
He says these persons have “strayed,” and have “turned aside to idle talk.” Worse yet, they thought of themselves a “teachers of the law.” But Paul says they didn’t really understand the things “they say” or the things “which they affirm.”
Perhaps it was because they were not spiritually minded but employed only the natural reasoning of the unregenerate under the dominion of sin? Perhaps my testimony on that will be helpful.
What Are We to Make of Paul’s Critical Assessment?
Most of my life I was one of the persons Paul described, particularly during most of my thirty years as a state senator and leader of a Christian pro-family public policy organization in Tennessee.
The reasons are many, but this is the bottom line: The “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,” had not yet “shined in [my] heart[ ], to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6, KJV).
Without this God-revealed knowledge, I operated politically out of what all unregenerate persons have, natural wisdom only. I didn’t know the difference between natural wisdom and being “filled” by the Spirit of Christ “with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” (Colossians 1:9, KJV).
In other words, I was carnal in the sense in which Paul used that word in Romans 8:6.1 It is another way of saying I believe I was unregenerate.
But even the regenerate can live according to the flesh, and in that way, they live and think like the unregenerate.
That being said, I don’t know if Paul’s rebuke was directed to the carnal/unregenerate living and teaching among the regenerate who thought they understood the law but didn’t, as was true of the Pharisees, or to the regenerate who just didn’t yet understand all of what they said and affirmed.
Nevertheless, I have come to believe that for both natural wisdom is all that’s possible when a Biblical metaphysic and cosmology are missing in a person’s thinking. Because these subjects speak to unseen realities, such thinking is spiritual in nature. Thus, the absence of these categories of thought in Christian thinking explains why Herman Bavinck said disbelief in the metaphysical would mean “our religion is done for.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, “Prolegomena,” 256.
Today, I will offer an introduction into what I think being spiritually minded in relation to cosmology looks like in relation to the law of Moses, and we will apply it more thoroughly next week.
God’s Assessment of His Work Creating Israel Spoken through Jeremiah
In Jeremiah 2:18-21, we are told the story of God’s planting of Israel. Verses 18 through 20 explain the present “fallen” situation in Judah that alone remains among Israel’s tribes: They had formed political alliances to protect themselves. Verse 18 records God saying:
And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river?
God was wondering why the nation’s leaders thought that employing the political wisdom of their age (and all ages) — having allies, even if ungodly — would turn aside the evil of those that would come against them.
But in verse 19, God says turning to that wisdom is damnable and would bring a different result:
Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that [it is] an evil [thing] and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, and that my fear [is] not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.
To God, this “political solution” of natural reasoning is “wicked,” “backsliding,” and “evil.”
Moreover, God finds this alliance inexplicable in light of the redemption He wrought by breaking the bondage of Egypt and the people’s subsequent promise of covenant fidelity to Him (verse 20):
For of old time I have broken thy yoke, and burst thy bands; and thou saidst, I will not transgress; when upon every high hill and under every green tree thou wanderest, playing the harlot.
Then God says to His people, verse 21:
Yet I had planted (nāṭaʿ--the Hebrew will be important) thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?
God’s Assessment of His Work Creating Israel Spoken Through Isaiah
Similarly, through Isaiah, Israel is metaphorically called the “vineyard of the Lord” (Isaiah 5:1). Notably, God planted the vine for his vineyard in a garden that He had worked hard to prepare:
And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted (nāṭaʿ) it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. (Isaiah 5:2)
Despite all he did to ensure the fruitfulness of His vine, it was overrun by wild grapes, grapes that might grow naturally outside the garden, in the adjoining wilderness.
In light of this, God has a question for what’s left of Israel about His vine and vineyard:
And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? (Isaiah 5:3-4, KJV)
What Might God’s Complaints About His Garden Vineyard Mean?
To this question I can only offer what the Holy Spirit has impressed on me the last few years. And it relates only to the sphere of law and public policy that God has called me to. I’m sure there are other applications, but, in general, I see in the creation of Israel the story of Adam writ large.
In other words, I believe there is a spiritual truth being revealed in this story beyond the facts, meaning something metaphysical, and it reveals a fundamental truth being worked out in time and space, meaning something cosmological.
My reason follows.
The Creation and Formation of Adam and Israel Compared
The Story Behind the Creation of Adam - Genesis 1:27; 2:7-8 (KJV):
So God created (bārā’) man in his own image, in the image of God created (bārā’) he him; male and female created (bārā’) he them. . . . And the LORD God formed (yāṣar) man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted (nāṭaʿ - Isaiah 5:2) a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed (yāṣar).
The Story Behind the Creation of God’s People - Isaiah 43:1 (KJV):
But now thus saith the LORD that created (bārā’) thee, O Jacob, and he that formed (yāṣar) thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.
My Understanding of the Two Creation Stories
God says He created (bārā’) and formed (yāṣar) both Adam and His people. And he put Adam in a garden He had planted (nāṭaʿ) even as he placed His people as a vine in a garden he planted (nāṭaʿ).
God created Adam “upright” (Ecclesiastes 7:29) and, metaphorically, He created Israel as a “wholly right seed” (Jeremiah 2:21)
Thus, I believe God is giving us a picture in Israel’s creation, formation, and planting of what would have happened had the First Adam multiplied, filled the earth, and exercised dominion over it. Adam and Eve’s descendants would have become a “holy nation” (Cf. Exodus 19:6 and Peter 2:9) and a people for God’s own possession (Cf Deuteronomy 4:30, Jeremiah 13:11 and Hebrews 8:11).
I believe this is the cosmology of God’s ultimate purpose for creation being worked out behind and beyond the recitation of the facts in these stories. This cosmology is a product of the Christian’s metaphysic concerning the nature and attributes of the Triune God.
The Beautiful Conclusion to the Two Earlier Stories
I believe the Apostle Paul corroborates this interpretation. Consider what he wrote about the Last Adam and the ultimate conclusion to the covenant promises we have in Him. It is found in 1 Corinthians 15:19-28. I will only quote verses 23-25, 28 (KJV),
But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. ... And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.
These verses seem to me to be a more detailed description of Romans 11:36, “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”
My Initial Application to Ending Abortion Now
In 1 Corinthians 15:19-28 I believe the regenerate find a God-ordained cosmologically-ordered purpose for which they have a covenant promise they can, by faith, “order their loves” toward. (See “On Being Carnally or Spiritually Minded”) The substance of that purpose is revealed only by a supernaturally bestowed faith that alone can provide evidence of it (Hebrews 11:1).
What is that purpose? “[T]o shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9, KJV).
But I don’t see in Scripture any covenant promises about the future of the geopolitical state presently known as the United States or its constitutive states, their more immediate futures, or what their respective enacted laws regarding abortion will accomplish, particularly on a timetable that seems suitable to us: Now.
To think we have promises on these matters would seem to me to be the sin of presumption. See Psalm 19:13. Its root is usually pride. Pride can be believing God for what He has not promised.
God hates pride, and those political types like Nebuchadnezzar who “walk in pride, he is able to abase.”(Daniel 4:37). I know, because I was such a person.
Applying My Application to Me
For several years I presented to Christian legal and public policy organization, Christian legislators, denominational leaders in my state, and some Christian “influencers” in media, a constitutionally viable way for states to recognize as lawful a martial relation once again defined exclusively and exhaustively in terms of male and female. It would have overcome the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in Obergefell that the marital relation is lawful because it exists by virtue of state statutes.
I just knew they would rejoice and embrace it. None did nor have they now.
I was humbled. God’s timetable was not mine.
Next week I will provide another application of these two creation stories to the legislation being offered on the supposition that it will end abortion now.
See Robert Haldane, Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, 444. Haldane writes that Romans 8:6 “contrasts . . . opposite states and conditions. These two states of carnal and spiritual mindedness include and divide the whole world. All men belong either to the one or the other. They are either in the flesh or in the Spirit; in a state of nature or in a state of grace. For to be carnally minded is death. — This is the awful state of the carnal mind — the mind of the flesh without faith in Christ, and renovation of the Spirit of God. It is death spiritual and eternal. All the works of those who are in this state are ‘dead works,’ Hebrews 9:14.” John Owen is to the same effect in his treatise, The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, 14. He says carnally minded and spiritually minded “constitute two states of mankind, unto the one of which every individual person in the world doth belong; and it is of the highest concernment unto the souls of men to know whether of them they appertain unto.”
