Why Sanctity of Life Matters
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...”These words - one of the opening lines of America’s Declaration of Independence - are known all over the world, and by most schoolchildren in the United States, as being of fundamental importance to a free society. And so they are. But why are they important?They are a recognition of truth we once knew and overwhelmingly embraced in America; a foundational truth from which the entire structure of our Republic was built: that the reason men cannot tyrannize, persecute, and kill their fellow men merely on the basis of wielding power is that we all possess unalienable rights, first and foremost among them the right to life. Those rights spring from the fact that we are created by God — created with value and dignity because we are crafted in His image, formed by Him in our mother’s womb, and known by Him from before the moment of our conception - “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you...” (Jeremiah 1:5). This is the Biblical worldview that demands that we value human life.No other worldview in the history of the globe has produced a society where men were all understood to be equal, where laws afforded equal protection, and where men were allowed the freedom to determine their own destinies, free from arbitrary tyranny. And yet these truths are being eroded, this worldview abandoned... and our nation is slipping back into the antiquated and dangerous idea that power is the basis of value and human interaction. We MUST refuse to go along - as Georgians, as Americans, and most importantly, as Christians - with this erosion of our values and this abandonment of truth. These truths are sacred, but even more crucially, they are Biblical, given to us by divine revelation in the Scriptures. That is why we must protect them! That is why Sanctity of Life Sunday is soimportant.It is a time we can take as local churches and as believers to remind ourselves that the reason we care about protecting lives inside the womb - the reason those lives are precious and worthy of our most valiant efforts to defend them - is God. His position as the Creator and Redeemer of Life gives Him the exclusive right to determine its worth. The opposing view has justified the murder of innocent human beings in the millions. It is a dark view, denying the value of each life, and its results are a deep stain on the moral conscience of our nation. We are all Image-bearers, given life that is God-breathed, God-ordained, and divinely valuable from conception to natural death. And this Sunday is a chance to remind ourselves of that truth - of the Sanctity of EVERY Life.