Dennis Tuuri

Forgive me for my cold. Our sermon text today is Deuteronomy 14:21b. Just the last half of Deuteronomy 14:21. This is our second in the series of sermons on the Lord’s day or Sabbath, the fourth word of the decalogue. Please stand for reading of God’s word. Deuteronomy 14:21b. “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this your word. Help us to remember that it is your word. It’s part of the inspired Scripture, Lord God, that you give us to teach us how to live, to teach us your character and to teach us things that are very applicable to our lives. We thank you for this day in which we remember and mourn for the millions of children who’ve been aborted in this country and mourn for the millions of mothers who have suffered so much in the context of that process.

Father, we do pray that you would use your word today here in this pulpit and throughout this land to continue to move this country away from abortion toward an appropriation of human life and a blessing of it. And help us, Lord God, to seek your throne today that you would do things in the context of this week and beyond to help put an end to this killing of children. Father, we thank you for the small answer to our prayers, but a very significant one of this last week. You know, we’ve asked you to keep us from the kind of soft tyranny that the healthcare legislation proposed. And we thank you, Lord God, for moving in a way that nobody expected to answer that prayer.

So now we ask this further prayer that you would help us to understand this text that we’re studying. Our prayers would be informed as we seek, Lord God, your chastisements and judgments upon those that would kill pre-born children and rescue, Lord God, children and mothers from the insanity of what’s going on in this country in Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. This is the second in our series on the fourth word. And at the head of today’s outline I gave the little structure that I was pointing to last week in terms of the Deuteronomy version of the fourth word and as we said this doesn’t replace it builds on Exodus 20 but it is a separate set of 10 words and that’s significant for us and it’s significant because it’s closer to us historically as well in the movement of history to apply the truths of the decalogue to a new situation and in the fourth word which is more radically changed than others of the 10 words, we see that a couple of things here.

We see that there’s still the prohibition against doing certain kinds of work on the seventh day, the day of rest. But the prohibition is not based so much on getting rest as it is giving rest. And if you actually see that there’s a little structure there, the way the first and last lines kind of swing around and do it the other way, it seems obvious that there’s a couple of bookends that we’re supposed to notice to bring us into a center and I think the center may be this reason for what we do.

So there’s a couple of bookends on either side and then there’s the specific statement of what we’re supposed to do and then there’s the motive clause which is because you want to extend rest to others. And then there’s the example we’re to follow, God extended rest to us. He redeemed us. We’re supposed to have godly character and desire to redeem others. Now, Deuteronomy 14:21 is the first of a section couple of chapters long on the fourth word.

Some commentators think so I think it probably should have been 14:22 1421b leaves it with the third word stuff. And you remember that was about food and death and life. But as we’ll see in a couple of minutes, the only other two places this law is found, it’s placed in connection with Sabbaths and festivals. And that’s immediately what begins in 14:22. So I think that it’s a really one of these little things that goes at the head of a commandment.

And it makes us think and makes us kind of meditate and it’s not too hard if we recognize the centrality of the giving redemption to those who are in a weaker position to us. It begins to line up then with this first little nugget that we’re supposed to meditate on. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. And it has rather direct application to our particular historical setting where there are those who are being oppressed, who need redemption, who need to be brought out.

And so all this flows together very well, I think. And so I thought it’d be good to go ahead and start today on this second portion of preaching through God’s ten commandments in Deuteronomy. And I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing before. What we do is we look at the word in Deuteronomy. We compare it to the word in Exodus. And then we next go to a consideration of the rest of Moses’ sermon that starts in 14:21b and goes on in 15-16 about fourth word.

And we’ll look at those texts over the next couple of weeks as a further way to understand Moses’ sermon which explains to us and helps us to see fourth word as it’s applied and then we’ll eventually get back and look a little more at Exodus and Leviticus and then look at the New Testament application. Okay. So, Deuteronomy 14:21b the beginning of Moses sermon. You know, my wife as I write these Sunday school lessons, she says, “Well, do you have a hook at the beginning of the lesson? A hook. I don’t know if I got a hook. I don’t do good with hooks. Well, Moses doesn’t always have a hook, but in a way, you could say that’s what this is. As you begin to explain to us the Sabbath, he gives us a rather enigmatic statement. And you can think of it as a hook. What it gets you to listen a little bit, think about how what he’s going to say relates to it. So, in terms of a sermon or a presentation by Moses, it’s kind of effective.

Now, it’s an important commandment. I want to go quickly through our outline today and then make take some time on the application at the end. There are evidences of the importance of this obscure commandment. This is not the only place where this verse is given. It’s given twice in Exodus. Exodus 23:19 is one of the verses. It says this, “The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young kid in its mother’s milk.” Same verse. And notice that what it’s tied to is first fruits coming into God’s house. Sabbatical observations and festivals is what it’s tied to. It kind of concludes that section here. Well, in Deuteronomy, we’ll see next week that it opens the whole section, but again, it’s placed in the context of sabbatical feasts and festivals. Deuteronomy’s structured that way and it’s the introduction to it.

But that’s the other place. And then in Exodus 34:26, we read “The first fruits of your land you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” So there’s a three-fold repetition of what seems to be a rather obscure command. Well, so you know, it’s everything God says is important, but if he bothers to repeat something three times, then it seems like it’s something we’re tempted maybe not to pay attention to and should.

Secondly, it’s the closing or the capstone law of the law of the covenant. In Exodus 23:19, its first use, it’s the last law. Verse 20 goes on to talk about how God’s going to send this angel with you to go ahead and go in conquering the land. It’s kind of a postscript to all the case laws. So if we have these case laws that describe how to apply the four the ten words, the very capstone of them, the conclusion is this command. So it isn’t just squirreled away in some, you know, little place somewhere. No, it’s a capstone piece of legislation in the code laid out in Exodus 20 to 23.

It’s also central to our festivals. Its relationship is seen to the feast of tabernacles and in gathering and the tithing cycle. And again, I just kind of mentioned this, but the runup to it to the last verse in law of the covenant in Exodus 23:14-19 is about the three annual feasts. And even in Exodus 34:26, it’s tied to the feast of in gathering. So there’s a relationship, an important relationship between this thrice repeated command and our festivities, our feasts together, our holy times or consecrated time to come together and praise God.

So, this verse has application to that and that’s pretty important stuff. So, it’s kind of core to our festivities and as I just said in Deuteronomy 14:21 following what follows are Sabbaths and festivals and so the introduction to Sabbaths and festivals our festivities our importance of our the fourth word in keeping etc. We talked about that last week. The fourth word is sort of seen as the emblematic sign of whether you kept the covenant or not.

And Doug H. mentioned to me last week Exodus or Ezekiel 20. Read it tonight. It’s a long chapter, but Ezekiel 20 he tells them, “Well, you’re supposed to keep my commandments and statutes and my Sabbaths, and you didn’t keep my commandments and my statutes, and you didn’t keep my Sabbaths.” And this phrasing is repeated probably four or five times over in that chapter. So the idea is that the Sabbath is seen as kind of a symbol of the whole of God’s word.

And as a result of that, by the way, he goes on to say in Ezekiel 20 that they then ended up passing their children through the fire to Molech. So they actually end up destroying their children, maybe literally or at least consecrating them to foreign gods as a direct result of them walking away from Sabbath, holy time and by walking away from his word. So I guess by implication, you know, we’re probably not going to do a whole lot to recover kids out of the public school system until we recover Lord’s Day.

So in any event, it’s a very significant commandment placed in very significant pieces of text, what seems to be an obscure commandment to us, and yet it’s placed in the context of our rejoicing times. On your handout, I note there that here in the fourth word we have this introduced by a symbolic commandment and as we work through the ten commandments later on this year we’ll see in commandments 7, 9 and 10 Moses does the same thing he has hooks in four of these parts of the sermon where he gives us something that isn’t easily understood and maybe you sort of say what the heck does that mean and it’s a way to get you thinking about and by way of symbol picturing the importance of that particular commandment And I have on your outlines that it comes just before Sabbaths and festivals.

One final point here in terms of the importance of this command and that is that this command seems to be maybe the flip side of our duty to authorities and the Exodus decalogue the case laws of Exodus are broken into two halves. The second half begins at verse 22:8 and this is a command relative to honor God by honoring rulers. And then at the other end of this, and there’s a little structure I’ve laid out in your handouts, but the last commandment that kind of matches up with that chiastically, is this one we’re talking about to not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

So, it seems like if we take those two commandments together, the Christian life has these responsibilities to authorities and then it has responsibilities to inferiors, to this kid that’s going to be boiled to death. Now, this is kind of fourth commandment notions. The fourth commandment, the day, the holy day, the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day, this is a day that we become sanctified to God. And again, in that Ezekiel text, he says that we weren’t going to be sanctified to him because we haven’t obeyed the Sabbaths.

There’s a sense in which God is sanctified to us and we to him by this day that he’s established for us to focus in a particular way on him. Okay? And what we focus on in this day is he’s our Father. He’s our Ruler, right? He’s brought us into rest, the beginning of the second half of the law of the covenant, honor God, the rulers. And also then that we’re supposed to extend rest to those under our covenantal oversight.

So we’re supposed to help people. We’re supposed to bless rulers and we’re supposed to bless inferiors and even the kid that could potentially be hurt by its mother’s source of nutrition is somebody we’re supposed to help and bring redemption to. So, those four elements of this. So, we have this obligation. One other thing before we move on, it’s not in your outline, but Leviticus 19:3, remember we’ve talked about this several times here at the beginning of Leviticus commandments that are a sermon on the ten words.

“Every one of you shall revere his father and mother and keep my Sabbaths.” So the two points are revere your parents, keep the Sabbaths. The two halves of the law, the covenant, the second half of it rather the two bookends are to reverence God and to honor the king and then to keep the Sabbath which is related to festivities and not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk. Some no. Okay. So, those two things, all this stuff line up together.

It may look a little abstract at first, but once you get to know your Bible and start to look up where these verses are, things start to come together. So, it’s an important commandment. It’s related to Sabbaths and festivals, and it’s one that is like the opener and in a way kind of pictures everything that is involved with Sabbath, Sabbath observance. Okay. Now, so that shows the importance and how do we react to this kind of a text.

There are four tests here that are presented by this obscure commandment. One, it’s a test of our attitude toward God’s word. And on your outline, I have, do we have a bowed knee or a raised eyebrow? You know, it’s one of those verses that people like to make fun of. And you talk to people about you’re a Christian, they’ll bring up several weird verses. And this may be one of the weird verses. They say, “Oh, they raised the eyebrow at that verse because it think it’s stupid.

Well, what do we do with it? Well, it’s a test of if we’re going to reverence God’s word or not. Can’t understand it. Are we going to bow the knee to it in an attempt to understand or at least obey it? Or are we going to kind of mock it? Don’t let people mock the word of God. Don’t be tempted to do it. As we’ll see, it has a great deal of significance. What you might have intended to just kind of pay no attention to.

Secondly, it’s a test of our obedience to the omniscient Father and his sovereignty. When these people got this law, for the next 40 years, they weren’t supposed to boil kids in the mother’s milk, literally. Now, I think that’s a not really what it’s primarily about, but it’s about that anyway. It is a symbol for other things clearly, but it is about that. And so, if you were part of that wilderness wandering group, it was a law you got.

And yeah, God wanted you to meditate on stuff that’s kind of difficult to understand but your meditation may happen as you don’t do what you might have done otherwise right I mean it’s a cooking principle and cooking happens all the time and you know you don’t have a lot of other stuff out there sauces and stuff and so you got the mother’s milk you get some cream and make a nice little goat stew and God said don’t do it and you just shouldn’t do it well I don’t understand it must mean something yeah that’s right but here in the wilderness where these laws are directly given to them, don’t do it.

Now, it’s not the same for us because it’s not in our cultural context, but whatever it means today to us, we have to obey it.

Third, it’s a test of our commitment to mature in knowledge by meditation. You know, it’s one of those verses you can sort of mutter about, ouch, I can’t have goat stew with mom’s cream with, you know, I that’s just a silly law. You kind of mutter about it, you know, and people do this all the time. And of course, the real thing these kind of verses are meant to do is to produce a muttering that is meditation.

“Can’t boil a kid in its mother’s stew. Festivities, commandments, helping younger people helping those under our authority the way that we are helped by those in authority over us. Imaging God’s redemptive action toward…” Can’t boil a kid in its mother’s stew. Meditation. That’s a correct kind of muttering. That’s what you should be doing. Saying it under your breath, thinking it through, contemplating it, not muttering against it.

Joshua 1:8, he was told, “The book of the law shall not depart from your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night that you may observe to do according to all that is in it.” Then you’ll make your way prosperous. You’re supposed to meditate on it day and night. Think it over. Chew it up. Think about it. It’s not to be rejected, but to be meditated upon.

Psalm 63. “When I remember you on my bed, I meditate on you in the night watches.” Again, see, meditating, muttering, thinking about God’s word. What does it mean? Proverbs 15:26, “The heart of the righteous studies how to answer. But the mouth of the wicked pours forth evil.” So you got to study. Think. This is an interesting commandment repeated three times. Three times. Put in special places. What does it mean? Meditation.

Psalm 19:14. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” That’s the sort of thing we’re supposed to be doing with tough commandments. Meditate. Think it over.

So, finally, it’s a test of our learning to think biblically about imagery. You know, one of the most important things that we’re trying to do in Sunday school is to teach kids how to think about the Bible, how to study the Bible, how to think in imagery that the scriptures use as opposed to just approaching it as a text written to 21st century man. It’s written to all areas of history of men but it has a particular way of using imagery that you got to begin to understand right I mean if you think about it a little bit there’s stuff and going on there are elements of a possible interpretation that come from this meditation on what the scriptures say the analogy of Scripture letting Scripture interpret itself what’s the thing the kid. What’s the thing with the goat? The kid being a child of a goat. What’s the milk boiling? You know, begin to meditate through the images that God puts before us.

Is this just a, you know, a law for animals? God had particular concern about goats. Didn’t give it to us about deer, dogs. Is it okay to cook them in their own mom’s milk? I don’t know. Animals. Is that what it’s about? Well, no. Probably not. And I don’t say that just because I don’t want it to look that way. I say it because there’s texts in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 9, he says, “It was written in the law of Moses, you shall not muzzle out an ox as it treads out the grain. Is it oxen God is concerned about? Or does he say it all together for our sakes? For our sakes, he answers.”

His question implies all of his creation but he’s saying relatively speaking does God care for oxen did he write that verse about oxen you can say the same thing about this verse does god care for goats no did he write it altogether for our sake and when he says that he says for our sake he means that preachers of the word should get paid and he has no problem and in fact he sort of saying it sort of implies that all of us should understand Oh, yeah. We’re supposed to know that. That’s a text that’s related to preachers and the paying of the tithe. And we get to that, by the way, as we get later on in the book of Deuteronomy. It comes up there. And that’s what it comes up to. It’s tied to the paying of your tithe to fund Levitical ministers.

And if we know our Bibles well enough, we’ll realize, oh yeah, that was a hook. That was an illustration. That was a symbol to get us to think about things about how we shouldn’t muzzle preachers. They should get paid in the context of their ministry. Paul makes that quite clear. So Paul understands how to interpret strange laws about muzzling oxes, right? He knew one element of understanding it is to realize that these things are symbolic and have reference usually to human relationships.

You know, we could talk about 2 Corinthians 6, don’t be unequally yoked. Same thing people I say, “Well, why would you unequally yolk two? Why would you have two different kinds of animals trying to yoke them together when they pull at different speeds?” Well, you know, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t. God’s saying it’s probably not going to be very efficient. But God’s not concerned about the efficiency of plowing. He’s concerned to produce an image of how to go about joint work with other people that don’t have the same views that you do on Christ’s lordship and money and all that stuff.

So, one element is we got to think God’s way. Second then, well, what do we know about kids and children? Well, it’s interesting because this term kid there are two occurrences of the term prior to these case laws. And one of the first occurrence is Jacob who takes a kid, skins it and then puts it on him. And he’s the kid to his old father. Feels his arms. He’s like Esau. Kid is related to person. Kid is related to son.

Isaac was going to boil his kid in his mother’s milk. Isaac was going to take away the inheritance of the kid Jacob. Whether you go with that or not, it’s obvious that kid there and its first use in the Bible is related to two children either old kids. Yeah. But their kids, their children nonetheless. That’s how the word is used. The next word use of the term has to do with Judah and Tamar. That story. Judah was supposed to give Tamar a child. He didn’t. And so when he goes back after his sin, he goes back to Tamar and he’s carrying a kid. He doesn’t have a son. He’s got a kid instead as he meets up with Tamar. So first two images where this word is specifically used puts it in the context of thinking about it as a son.

And then we have these three occurrences here. A three-fold repetition of the law that we’re talking about. And then in the next section of scripture it’s used in Samson wants to visit his wife with a kid. So again there it’s reference to a desired marriage and offspring from the marriage. So the Bible, if we just know our Bibles a little bit, that says when you think of this kid, this baby goat, you’re supposed to be thinking kid, child. It’s a symbol for a child. So you don’t take a child and kill it in its mother’s milk.

So that helps us to begin to think about it a little bit. Well, milk, this also is a term that’s used in the scriptures with particular meaning. Milk is given as physical and spiritual nourishment. And I’ve got some references there for you. 1 Corinthians 3:2, “I fed you with milk, not with solid food. For until now, you were not able to receive it. Even now, you are still not able.” So, he’s not talking about literal milk. He’s talking about doctrine. So, you nourish up a person in the faith first with the milk of the word and get to solid food.

Hebrews, remember, he says the same thing. You should have been doing solid food. You should have been teaching others, but we got to go with milk. Although I want to go back to all that milk, but he uses milk as an analogy of first sustenance, right? In the Old Testament, it’s when kids are weaned that they’re then presented to God or presented to their fathers. While the child is being breastfed, he’s very much related to mom. And after that weaning is when he kind of comes into his maturity somewhat and is then presented to God. And so milk is of sustenance. It’s also spiritual sustenance or relating to spiritual immaturity. And so how we go about ministering God’s word to children could be seen as a proper subject of this verse as well.

The mother of course the image of mother in the scriptures is that the mother is the dispenser of nurture. Right? So, mom nurtures up kids and kids grow up with milk and then they get to solid food and then they’re usable to be presented to God in a special way to be used. They’re also more tightly linked to their fathers and all this is kind of comes into this analogy. So, instead of mother’s milk which is an essential nourishment of the child, that milk is now being used as the device that the kid is actually being killed in.

Killed in. So the baby goat is being boiled to death in what should have been life to him. So you know one big principle here is we’re people of life and not people of death and don’t use what’s lifegiving to produce death. But very pointedly very pointedly here mothers are warned not to minister things to their children in a way that doesn’t produce life in them but rather produces their death.

Okay. So that image is all there. The four possible applications of the obscure text on your outline. As feasters we are prohibited from mixing life and death in our festivities. Rejoice. God is a God of life. So as I said this commandment are related when it shows up it’s related to feasting and our festivities. And what it says is we’re people of life. Don’t use life for death. Okay? And by way of application of that, we could say that when we enter bring our children into the festivity of the Lord’s day or family camp if you want to do that, but Lord’s day is the culmination of all the festive days of the Old Testament.

Our job as parents is to get them to call the day a delight. It’s a thing of nurturing. Nourishment. It’s a thing of life. It’s a thing that’ll be good for them. But we can, I think, if we’re not careful, and sometimes we do, we can minister a perspective of the Lord’s day that is dreary and drab and is all don’ts and doesn’t have any dos. And we can get our children to grow up, you know, and for a while they’ll be okay. They’ll do what you want. And then when they get to be 18, they’ll just take off.

And you know, it’s very important that as a church and as families, we continue to think about how to take the Lord’s day and make it celebratory, to make it feasting so that we don’t take the good stuff, mother’s milk of the Lord’s day that he uses to nourish us with and make it difficult on our kids. May it make it have a tendency to produce death as opposed to life, turning away from God and his people rather than a turning toward God and his people. That’s a big topic. It’s the same one I sort of talked about last week. It’s exceedingly important and I think as we look forward to this next year as a church and as a community, this should be high on our list. How we can do this in our homes, how we can do this in the church.

You know, planning for Shemitah. Several folks brought up pretty tough to have young kids here after the meal. You know, before we bought this place, we had this great old school down there in Gladstone, big cafeteria, play volleyball afterwards. Go out and they had a nice playground fenced. We had playground monitor. All the little kids play down there with one adult watching them. We had a football or a softball field, had a tennis, had basketball courts. It was good times and people want a little playground.

You know, it sounds like it isn’t as important as ministry work, right? But if putting up a little playground here enhances the joy and celebration of what the Lord’s Day is supposed to be about, we’re way ahead of the game. Probably one of the most important things we can do. I don’t know if that’s what we’re going to do, but I’m saying that’s what we should be thinking about now. Thinking about this particular law is trying to focus on how we can minister festivity times in a way that is lifegiving and not deathgiving, in a way that causes kids to rejoice and enjoy the fact that God is a God of life. God is not a god of death.

So that’s one application. Secondly, as feasters, we are prohibited from eating up our selfishly or selfishly consuming our first fruits or other things. Well, here the idea is that maybe why it’s placed with festivities is you’re supposed to bring your first fruits and you could be tempted to eat up your first fruits before you bring them to the festival. You could be tempted to take your tithe and eat it up. And what you’re doing there is you’re sort of eating the future. You’re eating what you’re supposed to have produced. We raise children, present them to the Lord. We do our work, present them to the Lord. And so if you don’t have anything to present to the Lord in terms of your tithes and your offerings, then instead you’ve eaten them up, maybe that’s part of what’s going on here as well. The commandment is a reminder to let things come to fruition and presentation rather than being cut off prematurely.

As authorities, we are warned against using the source of nurture to kill, the source of maturation to innervate. Now, that’s close to what I just said about the Sabbath, but it goes a little beyond that, doesn’t it? What it’s talking about now is in our homes, as authorities in our homes, don’t use mother’s nurture, father’s oversight and direction in ways that will produce elements of death in your children’s life, right? And you know, you can discipline kids one way, you can discipline them another way. And you know, one way is to do it too soft and they can end up doing bad things and you minister death to them. The other way to be too harsh, boiling them with your words.

And you know, we don’t want to do that. We want to use the nurture. I mean, milk is the symbol of how parents nurture children. And we want to minister the nurture of our children in a way that doesn’t innervate. Innervate means weakens them. We ought to minister that nurture in a way that builds them up. Now, you say, “Yeah, I know I don’t do that very well, and your little sermon here today isn’t going to help a whole lot.” Well, that’s right. It won’t help a whole lot, but it does. I think what it can do is to help you see what a big priority it is.

And I know you don’t like to think about it. I know you many of you many of you sin against your kids. We all do in varying ways and some of you feel worse than others right now about what you did this last week. You don’t want to think about it. But we got to think about it. We got to make changes because we want our children growing up delighted in as recipients of the lifegiving nurture of God’s word and his family.

You know, C.S. Lewis said the family can be the worst place on earth because people think they’re free to be themselves, which means they’re free to sin. And we say things to our kids and our wives and our husbands. If we sent them to anybody else outside, they hit us right in the nose. So, you know, yeah, we’re going to talk about abortion a little bit, but let’s keep this in our own homes as well, right?

We bring them to term after nine months, but we got to bring him to term after 20 years. And may the Lord God grant us a continuing reminder of this image that the way we’re trying to nurture these kids could actually hurt them, kill them, or at least weaken them, innervate them. And God wants us to nurture his truth to them in a way that is lifegiving, joyous, and builds them up. So that’s a proper application as well.

Finally, as authorities, we are warned by the horrific counter examples Samaritan and Jerusalem mothers in 2 Kings 6:29, Lamentations 4:10. Jerusalem herself an abortionist. So, okay, what’s all this about? Well, in actuality, the Bible does tell us in a couple of verses that women actually do this kind of horrible thing to their children. 2 Kings 6:29, “So we boiled my son and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, give your son that we may eat him.” But she has hidden him, hidden the son there. We have a time of fasting. People actually boiling their own sons so that they can eat them for food. This is literally possible.

Lamentations 4:10. “The hands of the compassionate women have cooked their own children. They became food for them in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” The hands of the compassionate people. So first of all, you know, people do strange things in strange times. We have to be warned that, you know, and under certain circumstances, people can be tempted to eat their own children. I mean, it’s horrific. And God wants us then to think about this not just by way of symbol or analogy to our children. He wants us to think about this application to what we’re doing in abortion in this land.

Mothers, mothers who are the nurturers, you know, I really see I was going to say I really like women. That would be bad to say. You could get the wrong idea. But I realized the last month or two what I really mean by that is I really like femininity. Femininity is such a wonderful blessing to our world as is masculinity. But you know femininity is different than masculinity and it brings a tremendous blessing to the world.

Moms are the ones that have kids in the providence of God, that femininity at least in part finds a great expression in nurturing children, in having them, having them grow up in the context of their own body for nine months, bringing them out and loving them and cooing to them and tickling them under the chin and changing all those diapers and all that other stuff. Women are just It’s an astonishing thing. God has chosen to begin teaching us, every person, who he is through a loving, caring mother.

Now, that’s true 95% of the time. Now, sometimes it’s not, but that’s how it works. How important are mothers then? I mean, you know, well begun is half done. God begins the process by giving every boy and girl born somebody that dotes on them. That’s interesting to me, right?

And when that person who is given all that maternal care and instinct can be deceived, fooled, tricked by the propagandists of the day, by the state, by Planned Parenthood, by abortion counselors when that woman can be tricked into handing her child over to be killed. What is supposed to be nurturing her decisions about her child becomes death to the child. She in essence boils her own child in the means of her nurture. Her care, her supervision of that child is now one that’s exploited and turned into something just horrible. It’s a horrible thing.

You know, we all weep, as we should have, over Haiti. 50,000 people some children will 80,000 might be 150,000. Oh, we’re overwhelmed by it in the pictures as we should be. But you know what I’m going to say next. Every year nearly one million babies killed in this country. A million. Not 100,000. Not 150,000. A million. Planned Parenthood alone does probably about 300,000 abortions a year. That’s three times the Haiti thing. Do we weep for those people? Do we weep for those babies? Do we weep for those mothers?

Wired by God, hardwired to love their kids and to feel a sense of awe about the ability to bring forth life. You know, I was talking last week about creation and how the Lord’s day, a day to thank God for creation, rejoice in it. You know, I love those pictures, as I mentioned last week, of the of the world from outer space. And you know, for some reason, when my first daughter was born, Lana, and as her she began to crown, you know, starting to emerge, I immediately thought of that globe. Having kids is the greatest recreative act that man does. And watching this child come into the world is almost like watching a universe being born. It is astonishing.

And now think of all those children since Roe v. Wade in 1973. Millions, millions, millions dead. And think of all those mothers whose every instinct given to them from God, Christian and non-Christian, is to mother those kids, to do well to them, to love them, to nurture them, to give them their mother’s milk. What’s their mental state? Apart from the grace of God, pretty bad. So, you know, we come together every year on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. We call it anti-abortion day of the Lord because, you know, there is a proper taking of human life when they kill people.

But, we’re against abortion, the killing of pre-born infants. The scriptures make it quite clear that the baby in the womb is a full adult, a full person, is a baby. And so, we just are just, we mourn over the butchery of that. And we mourn over the mothers who have become different, who have lost some of that important femininity through the process, who have had to harden themselves, their psyches, and their souls because of what they’ve been essentially coerced, fooled into.

You know, I taught out that they’re still given that Margaret Sanger award, Planned Parenthood. It’s their highest honor. They say they give it every year. This great movie came out this last year or two, Expelled. And boy, I thought, you know, you know, okay, at our church, we knew who Margaret Sanger was, 1983, 1845, whatever it was. We sort of got the deal and did the research. You know, she was this woman in Brooklyn, New York. And she was the titular head of Planned Parenthood. We could say the mother of Planned Parenthood eventually.

She was into reproductive stuff and everything. But she wasn’t what you might think she was. She was into eugenics. Eugenics was like Darwinism gone wild. In eugenics, you know, we want to give a super race. She wanted to build a race of thoroughbreds. She wanted to kill via abortion people that were poor, that weren’t very smart, black people. She wanted to abort a lot of black people. She was afraid that everybody would know that she’s kind of trying to kill off most negroes in the country. So, she wanted to hire four or five black pastors who could talk well and try to be a PR device as they go about killing all these poor black kids in the ghetto.

That’s what it was. And Margaret Sanger’s work was carried on by Rockefeller funding eugenics councils here in America in the early 1900s. That work went over to Germany and helped fund a couple of major psychiatric centers there all geared at eugenics. The idea that we want to control make a better human race by selective breeding by killing off poor children. Sanger said the best thing a poor woman could do for her child was to kill it because they wanted a super race.

And you know the rest of the story that eugenics movement found its great hero Adolf Hitler and he began with all the mental defectives and then it was the Jews. There were all kind what was he trying to do? Aryan race. It was eugenics. That’s all it was. Hitler over there, Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood here. Milder, kinder version, but still a version of the same thing.

In two weeks, the new Planned Parenthood clinic opens down on MLK, right in the middle of poor black people. The new clinic just opened in Houston. It might be the biggest clinic in the country. Not sure. Planned Parenthood, where is it at? Right in the middle of the ghetto where they can bring people in who don’t have much education. They can appeal to their fears. They can get them to give up their own children to be killed by abortion. It is diabolic. It’s demonic. You know, the demons hated children. They’d possess them. And in this country, the demonic Planned Parenthood is killing 300,000 babies every year.

And it does it by going after the poor black and Hispanic women who don’t know any better. Truth is, white abortion is way down. The truth is, black abortion continues to explode because Planned Parenthood is out there with his exploitive clinics fooling black women, scaring him. It’s so sad. When Hillary gave her speech for accepting the Planned Parenthood award last year, she talked about the importance that government agencies can make you know for reproductive health for all women and girls and safety for all women and girls. Well, half of those aborted babies were girls.

Of these projects they’re setting up increase funding for abortion all around the world killing girls in China particularly girls right there’s much of the modern feminist movement that’s good and proper and I thank God for a lot of it but this part of it is wicked it’s diabolic and it’s a violation of Deuteronomy 14:21b it’s using mother’s milk twisting it around in her head to think the most compassionate act she can do for her child is to kill it.

To kill it. Now, Sabbath is about redemption. We’re supposed to rest, not so we can just have a good old time, but we’re supposed to think of ways that this is related to bringing redemption, lifting oppression. That’s what we’re doing today. We’re coming together and saying, “Well, here’s what the Bible says, and here’s how it relates to our particular day and age. Boiling a calf in its mother’s milk is a commandment against abortions. Surely the killing of pre-born children. And we have an obligation to seek release and redemption from those oppressed by Egypt, from those oppressed by governmental structures that convince women that violence is the best thing to happen in the context of their womb.

We come together. We pray to God that he would end this nightmare. We pray to God that he would minister grace to all those moms who have been so devastated by either themselves directly or friends they know engaging in abortions. We, I we have to be a church that has understood that at the core of what we’re doing here is a desire to have compassion and mercy and to redeem people out of situations. That’s what the Lord’s day is.

Ultimately, the law of God is a reflection of the character of God. God’s character is the opposite of a mother’s milk boiling a kid alive to death. God is a God of compassion. God is a God of life. God is a God of redemption. Our job as Christians is to pray at Lord’s Day services that God would redeem these mothers and their children from the hands of the oppressive state, the hands of the horrific abortion counselors of Planned Parenthood, that he’d bring their policies down and that we would see the redemption of mothers and children in this land. That’s what our job is to do on Sunday. We pray God hears our prayers and starts to do things different in the next part of the week.

And then we as well should engage ourselves in actions to combat this to see ourselves at our core identified with the Sabbath day those that go out there six days a week and try in some small ways but significant ones to affect redemption from oppression. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this obscure law and the tremendous significance it has in our lives. Bless us Lord God today in our prayers. Hear our prayers Lord God and thwart the policies of this administration of Planned Parenthood about the abortion counseling that our taxes fund around this country. Lord God, those elements of that are committed to abortion killing children, we pray for your judgments against. We pray Lord God that you would bring their efforts to naught and we pray that you would redeem mothers and children in Jesus name we ask it. Amen.