Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life

John Ensor|6:00 AM CT

I have learned something in recent years. People come to cherish words like atonement and justification when you expose them to other words like bloodguilt and reckoning.

I’ve tried to teach gospel-centric words effectively as stand-alone concepts. It has produced a few amens, yet lives were not radically altered toward God and the good works he has prepared for us to do. I was serving coffee at breakfast, rather than arriving with cool water as people fled from within a burning building. Then I came to understand two things that altered my life and my preaching, two things that expose the terrible thirst that the gospel addresses.

First, I came to understand the meaning of bloodguilt according to the Bible. Bloodguilt is God’s term of indictment for the shedding of innocent blood.¹ Bloodguilt reflects God’s intention to vindicate each precious life—created in his own glorious image—and to avenge innocent lives cut down. For such things there is a reckoning (Lev. 24:17).

According to Deuteronomy 21, the shedding of innocent blood leaves everyone in the community under bloodguilt. Those who actively shed blood are guilty. Those who watch it or take no steps to stop it are guilty. Even if you can pray, “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed” (Deut. 21:7), the whole community is still under bloodguilt. An act of atonement is required (Deut. 21:8). Only then will the bloodguilt be “purged” (Deut. 21:9).

If someone you love is murdered, you have no trouble understanding the preeminent nature of this evil. Everything is affected. When a stranger is murdered (Deut. 21:1), you are apt to shrug, go to work, and believe things are not much affected. This is the corrupting lie. So God taught the Israelites that when innocent blood is shed, they should assemble on a prime piece of property, sacrifice a prime animal, and pray. This repoints the moral bricks of their community. They discover their earnest need for blood-atonement for their own bloodguilt. The blood of a heifer stands as a place marker, until God provides the better and lasting atonement.

Moral Courage

This leads to my second life-altering discovery. I came to see that abortion is the shedding of innocent blood on our own watch. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, there are 42 million induced abortions worldwide every year. This figure has held fairly constant for 30 years. In the United States, only women older than 80 have lived through some or all of their child-bearing years in a time without legal and accessible abortion. Bloodguilt is arguably the most applicable word to assign to our time.

If this is true, if this is even close to true, how can we be silent? The cross is about the shedding of innocent blood!² Why not apply it to the sin of shedding innocent blood? Why let the Devil do all the talking! “You killed your baby,” he says. “God cannot forgive you.” Or to the struggling Christian, “I know your secret! Missions? Not you!”

Today, the Devil has people by the neck with their sexual sins and abortion. If we think of abortion as a merely political issue, we fundamentally misunderstand a defining reality of our times, and we fail to see that the cross alone can satisfy the just wrath of God for the shedding of innocent blood.

We have a word for this: propitiation! There is no forgiveness for the shedding of innocent human blood, except by the shedding of Christ’s innocent blood. He is our substitutionary sacrifice. We have a word for this, too: atonement! He covers over all our sins.

The same unbreakable principle of justice that condemns you prior to faith in Christ defends you going forward. God will always act justly. If he punished you in Christ for your bloodguilt, and paid the penalty in full, it would be wrong to punish you again for the same crime. If you put your faith in Christ and look to the cross as your own just punishment, even for the sin of shedding innocent blood, then God is justified in showing you his mercy. All has been paid. We have a word for this: justification!

Conscience of this Generation

We need to bring the main thing—the cross—to bear on the one thing that most plagues the conscience of this generation and hamstrings their service to God: the disaster of sexual sin that so often ends in the death of the weak and innocent. Tragically, many addressing the bloodguilt of abortion today offer a sprinkling of gospel on a plateful of Kübler-Ross. The abortion-recovery materials now in circulation tend to be anthropocentric, therapeutic Band-Aids over the wasting disease of the soul produced by abortion.

We need you, preachers and teachers. We need theologically rigorous instruction about the sufficiency of the gospel to cleanse away the bloodguilt of abortion and to reconcile us to God. Abortion needs to be called out by name, confessed with tears, and brought under a gospel that atones, justifies, propitiates, expiates, and brings us peace. And we need to remind our people to hold on to this gospel with all their might when the accuser comes at night.

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1. Here, I do not mean innocent as a synonym for “sinless before God.” I mean harmless, pure, or free from guilt before our fellow man or the laws of man. Babies and little children, certainly, but adults too are called innocent when they are punished without due process, or on the basis of a false report, or to please the powerful, or because they have no proper defenders.
2. Christ was obviously innocent before God in ways no one else ever could be, but he was also innocent by the merely human definition.

John Ensor is author of Innocent Blood: Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life (Cruciform Press, 2011). He is a leader in the rapidly expanding pregnancy help movement, known mostly for his multiple efforts to help Christian communities establish ultrasound-equipped clinics in the neediest neighborhoods of our major cities. He serves as executive director of global initiatives for Heartbeat International—initiating pregnancy help ministries in Asia and other un-reached areas. He blogs at Innocent Blood.

Can Authentic Faith Be Awakened by a Physical Miracle?

This post can be found at Desiring God Blog 

By John Piper | Dec 06, 2011 04:00 am

Did Jesus teach that miracles are useless for those who reject the word? Here’s the story he told:

From hades the rich man implored Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers not to come to that place of torment.

But Abraham said, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.”

The rich man said, “No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”

Abraham disagreed: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” (Luke 16:31)

God Must Open Eyes

Does this mean that miracles are useless among people who have biblical truth, but don’t believe it? Sounds like it: If the prophets haven’t converted them, a miracle won’t either.

But think of it this way. Thousands of people first learn what the Bible says and only later come to believe it. So for a season they “hear Moses and the Prophets” and don’t believe.

Then something happens. God touches the eyes of their hearts and they can see the truth and beauty of what they once rejected (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Eye-Opening Agencies

What agencies — what means — does God employ to do this? Peter says that one agency is always the word of God: “You have been born again through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).

But other agents can have their part to play. Jesus said that our good works may so shine that people “give glory to our Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). He also said his miracles may have a role to play: “Believe on account of the works themselves.” (John 14:11).

So the point of Luke 16:31 (“If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead”) is not that God never uses miracles to convert sinners.

The point is that the person who remains blind to the word will remain blind to the miracle. But the person who sees the true meaning of the miracle will also see the true meaning of the word.

Some are awakened by the word alone. Others are awakened by the word confirmed by a miracle (Hebrews 2:4; Acts 14:3).

The Same Change of Heart

The key in making sense of Luke 16:31 is that the same change of heart that opens a person to the true meaning of a miracle also opens him to the true meaning of the word. So it is totally true that a person who rejects the divine meaning of the word will reject the divine meaning of the miracle.

And the test of any person who claims to believe because of a miracle will be that their heart embraces the truth of the word of God. If they love miracles and don’t love the word, they are in love with the mere power, not the purpose, of the miracle. They are what Jesus calls adulterous sign seekers (Matthew 12:39; John 6:2; 26; 7:3-5).

Always by Word, Often by Wonder

Therefore, Jesus would not discourage us from praying the way the early church did concerning the divine words and divine works:

Lord, . . . grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. (Acts 4:29–30)

God always quickens by his word (1 Peter 1:23), and often by the concomitant agency of  works.