Reading Reflection:

Innocent Blood, John Ensor (CruciformPress, 2011) This is the September release for CruciformPress. It is a very motivating and eye-awakening book on the horror of abortion. For instance, this statistic makes me want to puke:

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion business, there are 42 million induced abortions worldwide every year. The figure has held fairly constant for 30 years. In the US, a woman has to be at least 80 years of age not to have gone through some or all of her child-bearing years with abortion legal and accessible. At current rates, one-third of all American women have had or will have at least one abortion by age 45 (63).

How can we read something like this and not be outraged? And yet, there is such carefully manipulated word-play associated with killing unborn children that it has been made to sound like a mature decision. Women who have bought into this reasoning are statistically far more likely to become depressed, and suffer from other medical issues. One important point Ensor keeps bringing up in his book is that abortion is far more than just a political issue:

Do you believe there are spiritual forces arrayed against the purposes of God in this world, by which I mean the gospel and all it entails? Do you believe that those gospel-opposing spiritual forces will place particular emphasis on particular areas? And will not those areas be “wedge issues,” issues especially capable of dividing human beings from God, the gospel, and one another by targeting our greatest vulnerabilities (96)?

Ensor believes that it is one of the enemy’s biggest weapons against the gospel.

Abortion targets the gospel by eliminating many who would spread it. In exactly the same way, as horrific and wicked as abortion is in itself, for the enemy of our souls it is primarily a means to a greater end—the delay of the spread of the gospel (97)… Now, knowing that Christ won an inevitable victory at the cross, Satan is driven by a single terrifying reality—the culmination of his own fatal bruising approaches. God is sovereign over time. To him it is a trivial matter. “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). But Satan is bound to time and obsessed with it. All that he does, all his schemes and devices, are calculated now to buy more of it: “because he knows his time is short” (Revelation 12:12). Today, and every day until the return of Christ, Satan combines his hatred and his genius, not merely to fight against God and his people, but to fight in a way that delays the gospel from reaching its global and historic fullness (100).

I found the line about Satan being obsessed with time interesting. His time is short. Yet my days go by so fast. If close to one-third of the women around me have had or are thinking about having abortions; that is a lot of hurting women. Many of them still need the gospel. This is another way Satan would work to avoid its spread—making these women feel unworthy of the One who truly was innocent and shed his blood for the guilty. There are so many ways we can be more active in this spiritual battle. I have been involved, and highly encourage others, in some of the more formal ways. But I particularly felt convicted about the regular people I interact with everyday. How much time do I spend really listening and observing those God puts right in front of me?