Ideas have Consequences

Ideas have consequences

Beginning with next Sunday, Followers of Christ around the world are celebrating Advent, the season of expectation of his first coming to earth. In God’s epic plan this event was long planned out and when the set time had fully come, it took shape right before our eyes.

Let’s consider the human circumstances surrounding Creator’s Son’s coming down to earth. Mary, Jesus’ mother conceived him under questionable circumstances to say the least. She wasn’t rich or of royal origin but from a peasant family, engaged to be married to Joseph, a blue collar worker. Despite suspicious circumstances and with some angelic encouragement, Joseph decided to stick by his fiancé and the child she carried. When the day of birth came, Mary and Joseph weren’t even at their familiar home; they were traveling and couldn’t find suitable lodging. They had to resort to staying in a dungy, smelly cave, where the Son of God was born among the cattle and laid into a feeding trough.

If this story would happen today, would Jesus have had a chance to be born? See, today we have contingency plans for situations like that. Rather than bringing shame to fiancé and family, it might have been decided to do away with the life that brings disruption and embarrassment. What if Jesus would have never been born because he was aborted? Unthinkable! Thankfully God’s plan could not be foiled, but what if other well-known and influential people would have undergone the same fate as millions of unborn do every year? Think about it. No Beethoven to inspire us with great music, no Einstein to open new scientific frontiers through his discoveries. No Abraham Lincoln or William Wilberforce laboring tirelessly to rid the world of the evil and demeaning practice of slavery, just to name a few examples.

Thankfully, forgiveness and healing is possible for those who may have had abortions through Creator’s grace and Jesus’ death, however, the consequences of lives lost remain.

I heard that Mother Teresa, who cared for thousands of poor and sick people, many of them suffering from HIV/AIDS, once asked God why there was no one who had come up with a cure for this dreadful disease. The answer she discerned was that this person was conceived but never born because of abortion.

How scarily true this may be of so many other artists, scientists, musicians, and leaders? Once we open ourselves up to the idea that life is disposable or a choice that we can make based on our own value judgment, things begin to unravel.

Ideas do have consequences.