Can a True Christian Support Abortion?

Can a true Christian support abortion? That's just one of the questions we'll be answering on today's edition of Core Christianity. Hi, it's Bill Meyer, along with Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about the Bible and the Christian life every day. You can call us right now with your question at 833-THE-CORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. You can also post your question on one of our social media sites, and of course you can always email us anytime at questionsatcorechristianity.com. Well, first up today, here's a question that came in from one of our listeners named Kristen. I am curious about baptism. My son was baptized in a non-denominational church. I'm Lutheran, and I'm a little bit concerned about the church should not do communion on a regular basis. With that, do I need to have my son rebaptize Lutheran, or is his original baptism recognized in the Lutheran church? Thank you.

Hey, Kristen, thanks for that question. I can't speak for the Lutheran church—I'm not a Lutheran minister—but my assumption is that the baptism that your son received, so long as it was baptized with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that that would be accepted as a legitimate Christian baptism. In fact, it would be wrong to try and go through that all over again. You can't be baptized more than once. There's only one baptism for the remission of sins, the Bible says, and so I don't think so. Now, you mentioned that part of your concern was that the church that he was a part of didn't have frequent communion. They weren't taking the Lord's Supper every week. This is something we see in many churches, where maybe it's just a once-a-month thing, or maybe even a quarterly thing. There was a time in the medieval church where, basically, people had just stopped taking the Lord's Supper in part because they were so afraid. It was this sense of like, man, I can't even take communion, I'm not holy enough. And so essentially what happened is there was a rule that was set out there in the medieval church that basically said you have to commune at least once a year, because people weren't doing it.

And so I'm actually with you on this. I think it's important for us, if the Lord's Supper really is a means of grace, for us to partake of the Lord's Supper with frequency. I think every time the church gathers we should be taking communion.

Now, that doesn't have to be a hard and a fast rule, but I do think that that's important, as this means of grace that the Lord has given to us. And so I think one of the things you're noticing, though, is in the broader evangelical world, a lot of times these ordinances that were given to us, baptism and the Lord's Supper, they're not viewed, I think, with the same kind of respect. They're not cherished, as I think scripture talks about, as these gifts that God has given to us, these genuine means of grace. Many people view them as these old empty symbols. It's not baptism or holy communion. That's not really where the real movement of the Spirit is. It's in my personal relationship with Jesus. And those things, you can take them or leave them.

But no, we shouldn't view them in that way. We should have a high view of the Lord's Supper. We should have a high view of baptism. And if your son was baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and with water, then I don't think there's any reason to question, you know, so long as it's done again in the context of the Church.

And that way, as Jesus instituted, there's no reason to question his baptism or to say, oh, he needs to do that all over again. And so God bless you, Kristen. God bless your family, and thank you for that message.

Thanks so much, Kristen. I appreciate you listening to Core Christianity. We'd love to hear from you if you have a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Maybe there's a Bible passage that's always kind of confused you and you'd like some clarification on it.

Well, Adriel will be happy to dig into that with you. Or maybe you've got some sort of an issue coming up at your church that you're not really sure how to address. Maybe it's something confusing that's going on in your church life or something you're definitely concerned about. Hey, give us a call. 833-THE-CORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. Well, I had an interesting question come in from one of our listeners, and they say, are Christians supposed to love and pray for the salvation of all humans, including false prophets, antichrists, and then they mention, these aren't humans, demons and Satan? Yeah, interesting, right?

So you kind of got an interesting mix there. Well, I think about what Paul told Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 2. He says, first of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that they may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. That we may lead, excuse me. That's probably good for them, too, that they would lead those kinds of lives. But he's saying, pray for kings, all those who are in high positions, that we, that is, the church, may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

And then listen to what he says next. This is verse 3, 1 Timothy chapter 2 verse 3. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now, what's fascinating about this is, in, you know, the days of the apostles, a lot of times those kings and those who were in authority persecuted the church.

They were quote-unquote enemies of the people of God. And so for Paul to say, you know, pray for them, God desires them to be saved. Pray for them that they might come to the knowledge of the truth as well. And so, you know, a lot of times, especially with those who have hurt us or those who persecute us, I think it's easy to want to just say, oh man, I just can't wait for them to get what they deserve. Well, that's in God's hands.

Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord for us. I think it's important for us as believers to seek the salvation of all people, even our enemies. Now, you asked the question about, well, what about false teachers and false prophets?

I mean, certainly. What a terrifying thing it is for someone to be a false prophet, to speak on behalf of God presumptuously, or to abuse the Word of God, to twist it. There is a real spiritual darkness and blindness there, and so I think one thing we can do as believers is, one, pray that their ministry diminishes, pray that they really do come to the light. You think of the false teachers that are out there today, and Peter says in 2 Peter, they're going to be there.

Just as there were false prophets in prior times, there will be false teachers in your day who secretly introduced destructive heresies. And again, you know, the judgment of God is upon them, unless they repent of their error. And so you can pray for them as well. Now, with regard to the angels, the fallen angels, and Satan, we're not told anywhere to pray for them. The redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ isn't applied to them. Christ assumes humanity so that he might redeem human beings, sinners, the children of Abraham. And so, no, we don't pray for the repentance of Satan, that kind of thing.

His fate is sealed, but we do pray against the evil one and against his influence in the world, that the claws that he sunk into people, those who are blind, even false prophets, that those claws would be loosened by the grace of God, and that all people everywhere would turn to Jesus. I appreciate this question, and God, I mean, here, you know, it's such a challenge for us, especially when, you know, it's personal, when we've been hurt, or when our faith has been ridiculed and mocked, and we just get frustrated at others. Again, remember the words of Timothy there in 1 Timothy 2, pray. You know, those political leaders that frustrate you, that make you mad? Pray for them.

Your enemies? Pray for them. Love them, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount.

And boy, do we need to hear that today. Just a follow-up question for you, Adriel. How then do we deal with some of those verses we find in the Old Testament, like David in the Psalms, where he is asking, you know, God to cast judgment and, you know, destroy those who are his enemies? Yeah, those are called the Psalms of Imprecation in particular, where the psalmist is crying out for judgment, and there's a sense in which we can and do. I mean, anytime we pray, come Lord Jesus, Maranatha, or your kingdom come, we're saying, God, bring an end to the evil and the wickedness in the world. But I think where we have to be careful is we don't want to pray, we don't want to have this bloodlust in our prayers.

Oh God, just stick it to that person. I can't wait to see them suffer. No, I think lovingly we can say, God, bring an end to the evil that these individuals or this person is causing. You know, they're trampling upon the innocent. And so in one sense, we're offering up those prayers in love, saying, God, protect and defend the innocent from wolves, from those who are seeking to harm your people and the vulnerable.

And so I do think, you know, there's debate about this. I do think there's a place, there's a right way to pray those prayers, but there's also a wrong way to pray them for believers under the new covenant. And certainly we are commanded by the Lord Jesus to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us and who spitefully use us, treat us spitefully. So it's understanding, I think, those texts and their context and the whole flow of redemptive history where we are right now at this present moment as God is calling all people, all the nations to himself.

That's really good counsel. Thanks for that, Adriel. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. Love to hear from you if you have a question about the Bible, the Christian life, doctrine, or theology. Our number is 833-THE-CORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. Let's go to one of our younger callers. This is Genesis. Genesis, where are you calling us from? I'm from Massachusetts, and my question is regarding Matthew 22 14, and it says, for many are called but few are chosen. I just wanted to know what that means. Thank you. Hey, Genesis from Massachusetts. Thank you so much for giving us a call, and I love that you're studying the Bible and asking questions about it.

It's so important. Continue to do that, because that's one of the ways that we grow in our relationship with Jesus and in our faith and understanding of God's Word. And so the passage that you've brought up, this one, Matthew 22 verse 14, comes in the context of the parable of the wedding feast. Again, Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. Now, this is a parable Jesus is telling a story that's illustrating something for us. Jesus is the bridegroom. Here we could think of the Father, the one who's throwing this wedding feast, as God the Father, and he's calling people to come to the wedding feast, but some don't want to come. Again, verse 4, he sent other servants saying, Tell those who are invited. See, I have prepared my dinner.

My oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast. But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.

Oh, wow. Now, the king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. And he said to his servants, The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go, therefore, to the main roads, and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.

And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all who they found, both the bad and the good. And so the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?

And he was speechless. And the king said to the attendants, Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, for many are called, but few are chosen. Now, first, Genesis, the whole context of this story that Jesus is telling, this parable, when Jesus came into the world, sent into the world by the Father for our salvation, he came to his own, the Jews. You think of the religious leaders there at that time, the scribes and the Pharisees.

What did they do? They turned away from him. They weren't interested in his offer of salvation. They didn't want to participate in the wedding feast.

In fact, for many years, this was a pattern. What they would do is God would send them prophets, and then they would treat them very poorly. They would persecute them and even kill them at times. And this is what Jesus is highlighting here. And so the Father says, okay, fine, you don't want to come to the wedding feast? Let's open up the doors.

Let's send out invitations to everybody in the town. And they just gathered everybody. That's what's happening here, the good and the bad. And in the parables, you see this sometimes, Genesis, the kingdom of God. This is this great big gathering of all these people who are going to be separated on the last day. You think of another story that Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew a little bit later. He's talking about the sheep and the goats being separated on the day of judgment. So you're getting a lot of that here in this parable. And then at last, at the end, everybody's there, and there's one guy who isn't clothed in a wedding garment. In other words, he's not properly dressed for the wedding party.

And when confronted, he doesn't know what to say. And that's where you have that final statement in verse 14, many are called. And we've seen that calling throughout this story, throughout this parable, God inviting everyone, but few are chosen.

Well, who are the chosen ones? Those welcomed to the wedding feast and enabled to celebrate, to party there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's those who are properly clothed, Genesis. Now, what does it mean to be properly clothed in the sight of God?

It means to be clothed in the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who have faith in Jesus. Those are the ones who are enabled, allowed to participate. Those are the ones who are chosen and belong to God. Young, old, rich, poor. It's those who trust in Jesus. And so that's what's being highlighted here in Matthew chapter 22. Those who trust in Jesus.

And here's the amazing thing is you don't have to be super smart. You don't have to be of noble birth. I think of what the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 26.

Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful.

Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no human being might boast in His presence. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. And so look, we come to God not in our own righteousness, not because we're of noble birth, not because we're strong. It's not something in me. It's purely the grace of God that welcomes us in, and that's what this individual there was missing.

He wasn't clothed in that grace and mercy that comes solely through Jesus. Genesis, thank you so much for your question. Genesis, we appreciate you and the fact that you are listening to Core Christianity. Love to hear from our younger listeners, and we have a lot of them. Sometimes they listen with their mom and dad.

Sometimes they listen by themselves, and they're learning a lot from Adriel each day, so that is just a real blessing. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. We'd love to hear from you if you have a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Our number is 833-THE-CORE.

That's 833-843-2673. I also want to mention a great free resource we have available to you. It's called Five Names of God You Should Know. Yeah, it's just a short devotional resource that will introduce you to some of those names that we find in the Bible, names like Emmanuel, Abba, ways in which God has identified Himself, and things that are helpful for us to know when we think about our relationship with God and how He relates to us as His children. And so get a hold of this free resource, as Bill said, over at corechristianity.com. Got a lot of great free resources available to you at our website, and by the way, if you're a regular Core Christianity listener, I want to tell you that we are listener-supported. We don't receive money from church or denomination.

We don't play commercials on this program. So we count on people just like you to make donations to keep this show on the air. So if you believe in what we do, we'd ask you to prayerfully consider perhaps making a gift, and you can do that at corechristianity.com. Well, we do receive emails and voicemails here at the Core, and you can write to us anytime at questions at corechristianity.com, or you can leave your voicemail 24 hours a day on our system here, 833-THE-CORE is the number.

Here's a voicemail that came in from one of our listeners named Scott. Do you think the people that supposedly call themselves Christian will go to heaven or not if the way they vote does not line up the way the Bible teaches? How can you claim to be a Christian and support abortion?

Thank you. It's got a relevant question considering the fact that we've got an election coming up in the near future, and you brought up in particular the issue of abortion. I just want to say that abortion is a heinous evil, a terrible stain upon our nation, and that you can't be a Christian and support this practice or view it as a small thing.

No, it isn't a small thing. I think about in the Old Testament, you know, when God called His people to inherit the Promised Land and told them to purge, essentially, the land of Canaan, in part because one of the things that the Canaanite people were doing was sacrificing their children to idols, to pagan idols. It was just absolutely horrific, and there's a psalm, Psalm 106, where God is essentially saying, look, you guys didn't do what I called you to do. Instead, you embraced these pagan practices.

This is Psalm 106, verse 34. They did not destroy the peoples as the Lord commanded them, but they mixed with the nations and learned to do as they did, and they did not do as they did. They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons. They poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts. Now, it's really a horrific scene, but God is highlighting my people.

They were tainted by the idolatry of the world, and one of the ways in which they were tainted by the idolatry of the world is doing the very things that the world did, and here in particular it was sacrificing their children. Now, that's what abortion is today. It might be on a different altar.

Maybe it's not the altar of Baal or some other Canaanite deity. It might be the altar of convenience or pursuing my career, whatever it might be, but it's still sin and evil, and one of the things that distinguished the Christian church throughout history, especially thinking about the early days in the Roman Empire, is exposing your children to the elements. Say you had a child, maybe a daughter, and that was just not as good at that time in society.

You might just leave your baby on a trash heap, expose them to the elements, and leave them to die. That was a general practice in the ancient world, and the Christians, instead of doing that, would adopt children, would rescue them, would care for them, because they recognized how important it is to be made in the image of God, that we as the people of God should value life and care for life and defend life, protecting the vulnerable. This is what Jesus taught us, and so, again, this is why it's not just a sort of a minor issue, and I know that this topic in particular plays prominently in the whole political discussion and debate as well, that there are politicians, they platform themselves on this very thing, we want to give you the right to do this, and it should grieve us, it should break our hearts, and we should pray, God. We were talking about this earlier in 1 Timothy 2, praying for rulers governing officials that they might repent and come to know the Lord and walk in truth and in true justice, because right now that's not happening. Abortion is a great injustice, and again, it stains the land with blood, and so, God, be merciful to us, and God, help us as the Church to not reflect, not look like the world, but instead to truly value life and care for life, the life of the unborn, but all life as well, and help us to be an example of that kind of community, the kind of community that protects the vulnerable. And so, again, appreciate this question, and really, just such a tragedy in our country today.

So well said. Thank you for that, Adriel. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. This email came in from one of our listeners, Frida in Mexico City, and she says, When I read through the Bible, I see different names designated for the afterlife, like hell, Sheol, the lake of fire, and Hades. Are all of these referring to the same place?

Hey, Frida, thanks for that question. Not necessarily. So Sheol, a lot of times in the Old Testament, just the grave, or Hades, sometimes just a picture of death. And so, I wouldn't necessarily draw a correlation between that and, let's say, the lake of fire at the end of the book of Revelation, where all the wicked, the evil angels, and those who didn't receive Christ are cast. Hell in the New Testament, that's often the translation of the Greek word gehenna, which was this burning ash heap, this picture of torment and suffering. And so, I think you just have to look at the context in order to determine what's being spoken about here specifically. Is the psalmist just talking about the grave? Are we talking about a place of judgment and eternal suffering?

And again, context is key in determining that. Thanks for listening to Core Christianity. To request your copy of today's special offer, go to corechristianity.com forward slash radio, or you can call us at 1-833-843-2673. That's 833-THE-CORE. When you contact us, let us know how we can be praying for you. And be sure to join us next time as we explore the truth of God's word together.