Abolition as obedience

The five tenets can be read as a manifesto, five planks in a platform, a strategy to be adopted or declined. That is the wrong way to read them. They are not a programme. They are a description of what trusting Christ and obeying Him looks like when the nation you live in sacrifices its children. This article is about that difference, because it changes everything about how the work is done.

Rescued first

Begin where the Bible begins on this subject, which is not with a campaign but with a crime and a cross.

Scripture names child sacrifice and judges it. The law given at Sinai forbade Israel to give any of her children to Molech, and God declared He would set His face against the man who did it and against the people who looked the other way (Leviticus 18:21; 20:1-5). When Israel did it anyway, the prophets did not soften the word. “They built the high places of Topheth… to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind” (Jeremiah 7:31). The psalmist looks back on the whole catastrophe and says plainly: “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood” (Psalm 106:37-38). The land was polluted with it.

This is not a law for Israel only. Long before Sinai, God spoke to Noah and to every descendant of his: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). He will require a reckoning for every life (Genesis 9:5). Britain has not escaped that law by passing another one. A higher law stands over every statute.

And here is the thing we must not get wrong. The same cross that condemns the shedding of innocent blood is the place where the guilty are washed clean. Jesus Christ bore the wrath of God in the place of sinners, and that includes the mother, the father, the doctor, the voter and the bystander. We do not obey in order to be forgiven. We obey because we have been. An abolitionist who has not been rescued has nothing to offer the people he is trying to rescue, and an abolitionist who has been rescued cannot keep quiet about the rescue. The gospel is not a preface to the work; it is the reason there is any work to do.

Five tenets, one obedience

Read in that light, the five tenets stop looking like a strategy and start looking like a single act of trust, seen from five sides.

Biblical. The first tenet says the work is rooted in Scripture. Put more simply: we do what He said. God has said that the unborn child bears His image, that innocent blood cries out to Him, and that His people are to rescue those being taken away to death. We did not arrive at abolition by polling or by reasoning our way there from first principles; we were told. Obedience means taking Him at His word before we have seen whether it works.

Providential. The second tenet says we depend on the sovereignty of God. That is what keeps obedience from curdling into despair. The evil is enormous: around 299,000 children a year in this country, and the law, the professions and most of the churches silent. If this depended on us, the honest response would be to give up. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain” (Psalm 127:1). We labour because He is building, and we are not anxious about the outcome because it is not ours to produce. Trust is what allows us to work for forty years without seeing the end.

Gospel-centred. The third tenet says the gospel is supreme over every ideology. Abolition is a fruit, not the root. A person who has been forgiven much loves much, and love does not watch a neighbour being killed. But the order matters. Make abolition the root and you will get a political movement that uses Christ as a mascot; keep the gospel as the root and abolition grows out of it as naturally as any other good work.

Church-driven. The fourth tenet says abolition proceeds out from the local church. In programme language that sounds like a choice of delivery channel. It is not. The church is the Body of Christ, the people He has already gathered, taught, disciplined and sent. The Body is the strategy. If a pastor preaches the whole counsel of God and his congregation does what it hears, the thing is done; everything else we do is in service of that.

Immediate. The fifth tenet says we call for immediate and total abolition and refuse to regulate the killing instead. People hear this as impatience or as political naivety. It is neither. It comes straight from the command: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11). The word is deliver, not reduce. You cannot obey that verse by proposing that fewer children be taken, or that they be taken only before a certain week. And the next verse closes the exit everyone reaches for: “If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?” (Proverbs 24:12). The excuse of not knowing is gone. Immediacy is not a timetable we have set; it is the only honest shape obedience can take when the child is being taken today.

Five tenets, then, but one obedience. You could not drop one and keep the others, any more than you could trust Christ with four-fifths of yourself.

Now go in your calling

Trust and obedience are not abstract. They take the shape of the gifts and the station God has already given you. A pastor obeys from a pulpit, a mother from a kitchen table, a doctor from a ward, a designer from a desk, a labourer from the back of a van. None of these is a lesser form of the work, and none of them is optional for the person God put there. If you do not yet know what your part is, begin with the first thirty days that anyone can do; if you do, go and use your gifts. The command has been given. We have been forgiven. Now go.