There are times when people tolerate an evil for so long that they cease to recognize its enormity. The evil acquires procedures, professional language, political constituencies, legal protections, and respectable explanations. Eventually, bloodshed receives a clinical name, partiality becomes public policy, and injustice—once sufficiently regulated—begins to look almost ordinary.
But Scripture has a way of stripping away the respectable names men give their sins.
Governments may legalize the killing. Courts may protect it. Religious people may learn to live with it. But innocent blood has a voice, and God hears it. We will come back to this.
Now consider the story of Jabesh-Gilead in 1 Samuel 11.
A city faces impending capture, slavery, humiliation, and seeks deliverance. Their countrymen understood and were grieved. But their tears delivered no one.
When Saul came in from the field behind his oxen and asked why the people were crying, they told him something had happened. The NIV renders 1 Samuel 11:6 with striking force:
“When Saul heard their words, the Spirit of God came powerfully upon him, and he burned with anger.”
Righteous indignation is a fruit of the Spirit. The Word of God does not commend His people if and when they remain perpetually pleasant, agreeable and emotionally undisturbed in the presence of wickedness. Paul can therefore command, “Be ye angry, and sin not.” The question is not whether anger exists but whether it is governed by righteousness, truth, justice and compassion.
A magistrate who loves justice should be angered by the oppression of the innocent. A Church that loves its defenseless neighbors should not be morally neutral when their blood is shed. That is what happens in this inspired account. Saul burns with anger, and his indignation becomes action. Saul slew his oxen. They were his livelihood, and Saul cut them into pieces, sending those pieces throughout the land with a terrifying message: “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen.”
Imagine receiving that message. A bloody piece of an ox arrives at your door. Suddenly Jabesh is no longer somebody else’s problem. Whether Saul literally intended to destroy the livestock of every Israelite who refused his summons, or whether the mutilated oxen dramatically pictured what Israel itself would eventually suffer if her enemies were allowed to advance unchecked, the effect was the same. Saul made the cost of doing nothing visible.
There was a cost to obedience. But there would also be a cost to disobedience. Staying home would not be free.
Then comes the sentence upon which the entire story turns:
“Then the terror of the LORD fell on the people, and they came out together as one.”
But Scripture does not say that the fear of invasion, slavery, or even Saul finally moved Israel. It was the fear of the LORD. And suddenly Israel rose as one man. This is a distinction the American Church needs to recover.
We fear many things: foreign powers, war, terrorism, ideological movements, economic collapse, crime, political defeat, and the loss of our freedoms. But Scripture asks a more fundamental question:
Whom should we ultimately fear?
Jesus told His disciples not to fear those who can kill the body and after that can do no more. There is a greater Judge.
We have become highly skilled at calculating earthly threats while giving remarkably little thought to the moral government of a holy God.
And God hears innocent blood.
That brings us to our own Jabesh-Gilead.
We have spent decades talking about abortion. We have condemned it, regulated it, voted concerning it, organized around it, preached against it, and supported ministries seeking to rescue children from it. Some good has been done. Many children have been saved. But abortion is not merely an unfortunate social problem masquerading as a woman’s choice. It is genocide. Innocent blood is being shed. Scripture gives us another disturbing description- child sacrifice- and it calls for God’s judgment on our land.
Modern abortion is not historically identical to the ancient worship of Molech. But a powerless child bears the ultimate cost for something desired by those possessing greater power. This heinous act becomes even more serious when man-made laws excuse it.
Isaiah pronounced woe upon those “that decree unrighteous decrees.”
When the law protects one innocent child from murder while withholding that same protection from another because of age, location, or dependency, that is partiality.
This is where the issue becomes particularly uncomfortable for the Church, because the prophets repeatedly warned religious people against imagining that worship could substitute for justice.
Isaiah addressed people who prayed, sacrificed and assembled for worship, yet God told them, “Your hands are full of blood.” His command was not that they become more religious. It was that they “cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment.”
Amos delivered the same message. God rejected religious festivals and songs while demanding that justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Scripture therefore presents a frightening possibility.
Religious people can become accustomed to injustice, and eventually come to accept its continued existence as just an unfortunate reality.
Now imagine the messenger from Jabesh walking into an American church.
Do we believe abortion is wrong? Is the preborn child a living human? Does he or she deserve protection against intentional killing?
Because the child is an image bearer of God, and since God condemns murder, why should equal justice depend upon pragmatic or political convenience?
Remember Saul’s oxen? We have oxen too. Tax exemptions. Denominational respectability. Donor relationships. Friendships. Businesses. Reputations. Access to powerful people. We naturally ask what demanding justice might cost us.
But what makes us think not demanding justice will cost nothing?
Scripture does not treat innocent blood as morally inconsequential. The prophets condemned rulers who institutionalized injustice and religious leaders who maintained worship while neglecting righteousness.
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
Perhaps, then, the great question facing the American Church is not simply: What will it cost us to abolish abortion, but what will it cost us not to abolish it? Will candidates lose elections or organizations lose influence? Will pastors lose members, or Christians be called extremists and be treated as social outcasts?
Those are our oxen.
Saul’s severed oxen destroyed the illusion that there was a cost-free choice. There was a cost to marching, but there was also a cost to staying home. The question was never whether Israel would pay a price. The question was which price Israel feared more. Then the fear of the LORD fell upon them. Only THEN did they turn out as one man.
Innocent blood calls out for the judgment of God upon a people; it’s time for the Spirit-produced righteous indignation that sees evil and refuses to make peace with or tolerate it. There is a cost to demanding equal justice, to putting aside our doctrinal and denominational differences, organizing, strategizing, and standing as one man between the strong and the weak and saying, “No further.”
But there is also a cost to silence, to partiality, to proposing iniquitous decrees, to practicing a religion that ignores injustice. What will it take for the fear of the LORD to fall collectively upon us, and for us to rise up as one man, to rescue the Jabesh Gilead of our day? There will be a cost to confronting and destroying the evil of child sacrifice. But there is also a cost of doing nothing.
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
