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You can see the King walking through the field. Silver moonlight glimmers off his golden crown. The singing stars harmonize with the sigh of wind through wheat. All is calm.

But then a cry breaks the peace — the desperate sound of a dying child. The King hears it and runs to find the source before the little life blinks out. After several minutes frantically searching through the waist-high wheat, he stumbles across the baby, naked in the dirt. Wallowing in her own blood, she is sticky with mud and other filth. Her legs kick, but they are slowing down. She has been abandoned there, left to die by exposure or wild animals (or anything, really). The parents who condemned her to death did not even bother to cut her umbilical cord. Wrapped around her throat, it snakes away among the stalks like a noose to the gallows.

The King drops to his knees and lifts the child in his arms, careless of the crimson staining his robe. He wipes blood off the little girl’s face. She is too new, or too exhausted, to open her eyes. Her sovereign kisses her forehead, and his words resonate in the darkness: “Live, dear one. Live!”

Ezekiel’s Vision

This haunting scene opens one of Ezekiel’s most startling visions. In Ezekiel 16, the prophet narrates an extended analogy for God’s relationship with his people. The metaphor is layered and complex, and many of the details remain uncertain. What is crystal clear in this passage is God’s heart toward the weak and vulnerable, particularly in the context of abortion.

Many and mighty are the arguments against abortion. Science, philosophy, theology, ethics, and reason all try to shake us awake. “Abortion is murder,” they say together, “the intentional killing of a person made in the image of God (Genesis 9:5–6).” This infanticide is anti-God, anti-man, anti-woman, and, of course, anti-child. We need those who will champion those arguments and make them impossible to ignore.

But one of the best ways to help us abhor abortion as deeply as God does is to expose the massive gulf between this evil act and the ways of our God. In Ezekiel 16, we find a vivid contrast between the spirit of abortion and the heart of God. It is the difference between rejection and rescue, ugliness and beauty, convenience and covenant, hate and love. It is the oil-and-water divide between the voice that cries “Die!” and the one that commands “Live!”

Meditating on some of these contrasts can help those of us who love God to hate abortion.

1. Rejection vs. Rescue

The spirit of abortion rejects the weak. Abortion takes the unheard cries of the most helpless and drowns them in their own blood. A father who is supposed to protect the powerless, a mother who is supposed to nurture the vulnerable, and a doctor who is sworn to do no harm collude to become a death squad. We see this rejection in Ezekiel 16. Israel (the child) was born to pagan parents, who refused to care for her (verses 3–5). Instead, in an act of “fourth-term” abortion, they left their child to die in the wilderness. The infant was “cast out on the open field, for [it was] abhorred, on the day [it was] born” (verse 5). When parents choose death for their children instead of life, they abhor them. Abortion rejects those who ought to be loved and protected.

The heart of God could not be more different. The King (Yahweh) recounts to the child, “When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’” (verse 6). The heart of God loves to rescue the weak and save the helpless. God owed Israel nothing, and yet he chose to treat her as a beloved child.

God delights to rescue his people. We were once enemies, and God chose to love us. We were once “sons of disobedience,” and he elected to adopt us (Ephesians 2:2). He delivered us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of light. We were dead, and he said, “Live!”

The spirit of abortion rages against those who deserve our love; the heart of God loves those who deserve his rage. Abortion calls children “unwanted” and rejects them; God calls the unwanted “children” and rescues them.

2. Uglify vs. Beautify

In a sense, there are few things uglier than a human corpse. Ugliness is a degradation of good, the disconnect in what should be beautiful and yet isn’t. And death is the ultimate agent of ugliness, leaving what should be divinely lovely and full of life bereft of both. So it is no leap to say that the spirit of abortion uglifies everything it touches. (I use an ugly word to point to an ugly reality.)

Abortion takes one of the most potent symbols of life, a baby, and reduces it to a bag of blood and viscera. It desecrates one of the loveliest things under heaven and makes it a horror, nauseating even to look at. (If you think I’m being dramatic, go pull up pictures of aborted babies. There’s a reason the pro-choice crowd doesn’t want anyone to see them.) In Ezekiel’s vision, abortion leaves the infant child wallowing in its own blood, unwashed, unclothed, uncared for (Ezekiel 16:4).

But our King loves loveliness; his Spirit delights to beautify. Abortion discarded the child like chaff; the King made her to “flourish like a plant of the field” (verse 7). God takes what is ugly and makes it beautiful. Notice all the active verbs in verses 8–14. The King cleans and anoints the child, clothes and adorns her, crowns and banquets her until he can say, “Your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you” (verse 14). In a striking shift of the metaphor, the King takes an abhorred child, glorifies her into a splendid bride, and makes her his queen (verse 8).

This is still how God deals with his people. He takes sinners and makes them saints. He takes denizens of the dark and makes them stars in the sky. He takes outcasts and crowns them with glory.

Abortion takes what is beautiful and leaves it ugly; God takes what is ugly and makes it beautiful. Abortion desecrates; God makes holy. Abortion extinguishes life; God kindles it. Abortion takes a new creation and makes it a corpse; God takes a corpse and makes it a new creation.

3. Convenience vs. Covenant

Perhaps the most striking difference between the spirit of abortion and the heart of God is the kind of love each offers. The former is a “love” of convenience, merit, and others-sacrifice; the latter is a love of covenant, grace, and self-sacrifice.

The spirit of abortion sacrifices the weak to purchase comfort. It would rather murder than risk inconvenient love. Incredibly, we see rescued Israel do this very thing later in Ezekiel’s vision. After marrying her, the King confronts his wayward bride: “You took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to [idols] to be devoured” (Ezekiel 16:20). There is a reason that idolatry and abortion are so closely linked in Scripture: abortion is idolatry full-grown. Both transactions build on a worldview of anti-grace, a system of barter and exchange where favor can be purchased. In idolatry, the weak sacrifice to move the will of the strong; in abortion, the weak are sacrificed to the will of the strong. Both idolatry and abortion sacrifice what it takes to get what they want.

For all its posturing and pride, the spirit of abortion is really a ghost of fear — fear of self-sacrifice, fear of discomfort, fear of hurt. God’s hesed love is worlds away from this. In Ezekiel’s vision, the child has no merit, no desert, no claim on the King’s kindness. His love is pure grace. But more than that, he rescues, raises, and enters into a covenant with her — catch this — fully knowing she will commit unspeakable sins against him. She not only aborts his children (as mentioned above); she also commits adultery with any stranger on the street (verse 25). She becomes worse than a prostitute because she pays others to sleep with her (verse 34). Her sins are so heinous that they make pagans blush and appear like saints by contrast (verse 52).

God knew she would do all this, and yet he set his covenant love on her. Even after being grieved and angered by all her sins, the King says, “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant” (verse 60). What love! And oh so costly. The final verse of the chapter looks forward to the unfathomable cost the King would pay to establish this everlasting covenant, “when I atone for you for all that you have done” (verse 63). The King sets his covenant love on those who cannot earn it, who don’t deserve it, who cannot keep it — and it cost him his life to do so.

The spirit of abortion sacrifices children because they will require pain and discomfort. The heart of God sacrifices himself to save his people in the full knowledge that they will still sin and grieve him. The spirit of abortion is moved by fear; the heart of God by faithfulness.

Love and Hate

Even with all this said, we’ve only just set foot on the continent that divides the spirit of abortion from the heart of God.

• Abortion says, Die! God says, Live!
• Abortion says, Not mine! God says, Mine!
• Abortion says, Abhorred! God says, Beloved!
• Abortion says, I won’t! God says, I will!
• Abortion says, Cut off! God says, Grafted in!
• Abortion says, I own my body! God says, I give my body!
• Abortion says, I hate! God says, I love!

We who treasure the King and love all that is in his heart, how could we not hate something so antithetical to him? We who have received his Spirit of adoption, how can we not oppose the spirit of abortion? We who have heard his command, “Live!” how could we not seek to silence the voice that says, “Die!”?

As Paul discipled the Corinthian church, he never intended to be their celebrity pastor. He aimed at something far greater: preaching a powerful cross.

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In Jules Verne’s Round the Moon (1870), a group of nineteenth-century gun enthusiasts creates a bullet-shaped rocket that takes them to the moon. Unfortunately, the astronauts’ pet dog dies on the way, and they need to dispose of the body. Their space expert assures them that as long as they move fast, they can shove it out the window and all will be well. They accomplish a quick open and shut of the hatch, and the dog floats away into space.

We understand the vacuum of space better today. The result of such an error would be more like what happened to Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann in the film Interstellar. He releases the airlock despite an imperfect seal to the hatch, and catastrophic results follow. As the other characters in the film remark, “What happens when you blow the airlock?” “Nothing good.”

There are certain mistakes that undermine an entire system and leave it vulnerable to collapse. The extremes of space, or of deep-sea exploration, make this clear to earthbound creatures such as us. There is no “small” crack in a spaceship or “insignificant” leak in a submarine.

The Christian gospel asserts that every other religion comes up short. But how do the errors in world religions affect their integrity? Are these shortcomings disposable elements that can be replaced, or are they integral parts of a system in danger of collapse? Paul’s choice to engage the Athenians on the altar to the “unknown god” indicates the latter. By paying attention to his approach, we learn how best to engage with friends and neighbors of other religions.

Unknown Gods

If we had visited Athens in the first century, we could not have missed its devotion to the Greek gods. Contemporary accounts speak of temples and altars in every direction, and there exists today both literary and archaeological evidence for altars dedicated to the “unknown” god or gods.

When the apostle Paul arrived in Athens, he discussed the gospel in the synagogue, in the marketplace, and with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers (Acts 17:17–18). When the Areopagus council then called on him to declare his intentions and the god(s) he proclaimed (Acts 17:19–20), he began with Athenian religion.

In his speech to the Areopagus, he points out this “unknown god”:

As I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: “To the unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. (Acts 17:23)

We might feel inclined to see this altar as a bridge (or perhaps an airlock) connecting the Greek mythological idea of god to the Christian God — as if the Greeks had come halfway to God already. Indeed, Paul draws on hints from Greek philosophy about the true nature of God. He quotes conventional Greek wisdom — “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28a) — to show that most people acknowledge a transcendent realm of god or of the gods. “We are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28b) points to our origin as creatures. Thoughtful Greeks here recognized God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20). And even today, though neither Confucianism nor Buddhism explicitly affirms a supreme deity, most people in Vietnam acknowledge “Ông Trời,” or Grandfather Heaven, above everything else.

But while the Greeks understood something real about the divine realm, Paul asserts that Greek religion cannot come close to describing God in his fullness. Rather than a docking station linking Greek religion to Christianity, the “unknown god” points to an open window and a catastrophic failure in the Greek system.

Unknown Gods Leave Unknown Gaps

The unknown god indicates that pagan religion contains a gap of unknown size and unknown significance. “How big of a deal is it that there are gods we do not know?” The honest answer among pre-Christian pagans had to be, “We don’t know.”

By choosing to highlight the unknown god, Paul draws a decisive picture of the religious world. “This whole pantheon,” he seems to say, “gives the impression of a comprehensive knowledge of the divine. Surely this multitude of gods is sufficient for knowing the supernatural, right? And yet, within your own system, there is a chink in the armor, a camel’s nose under the tent.” Or there is a window left open to the vacuum of space.

To worship an unknown god indicates that your system is incomplete, that this religion has not attained a true knowledge of divinity, not even halfway.

This insight is confirmed when we consider that Paul had plenty of other gods or goddesses to choose from for his comparison. He could have picked any of the other altars. Why not the altar to Zeus? He could have said, “You worship Zeus as the head of the gods, but I proclaim to you the true Zeus, the real head of all the gods.” Why not an altar to Apollo, who speaks the truth? Or to Athena, who gives wisdom?

Instead, he picks a gap in their knowledge and exploits it. If the Athenians had drawn the realm of the divine as a pie chart, they might have left a 1 percent sliver for the unknown god. But Paul announces that by leaving the unknown god in their system, they revealed that they really had no idea how much of the pie chart he occupies, no idea who or what that god is. They may have thought of this unknown god as confined to one area of life, such as the time Athenians made offerings to a god called “Fever.” But, says Paul, this unknown god may be the God over all, the transcendent God who is not served by human hands, the God who cannot be placed in the same category as the other so-called gods.

Not Halfway There

The Athenians may have been living on a prayer to the unknown god, but they were not, as Paul explains, halfway there. While their quest for the divine was genuine, their religious system had no place for the true God who transcends all others. And the same should be said about contemporary world religions. The quest to engage with other religions and worldviews as a Christian witness is not primarily a quest to find common ground but a quest to show how the gospel undermines the certainty, or exposes the compromised airlock, of those worldviews.

While Paul uses Athenian religious vocabulary to point to God, the burden of his speech in Acts 17 is to show that the Christian God undoes other ideas about God. When Christians approach Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, they would be wise to remember Paul’s conclusions: that unbelievers are “alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them” (Ephesians 4:18). There is an ignorance of the true God in unbelievers, “who do not know God” (1 Thessalonians 4:5). One task of the Christian evangelist is to bring this ignorance to light.

This leads to an evangelistic practice that looks for how a person might see and feel an inconsistency in their own beliefs. For example, Nabeel Qureshi felt a contrast between Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet of peace and his actual practice. This let the air out of Qureshi’s confidence in Islam.

If we use Paul’s speech at Athens as a model, we will view world religions as flawed systems vulnerable to collapse. Though they may have glimmers of truth, their errors and unresolved questions cannot be solved by simply duct-taping the open spaceship window. An entirely new spaceship is needed.

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As women in Christ, God has set forth plentiful opportunities to minister for his glory. But like Eve in the garden, we can sometimes fixate on what God has forbidden. Slowly, the garden grows dimmer, and the goodness and beauty of God’s design become clouded in our eyes. And still Satan repeats his age-old question: “Did God really say . . . ?”

What if we endeavored to swap Satan’s seduction song for this holy anthem: How may I serve God in ways that make him happy while deepening my joy?

Even in an age where discontentment is often championed and sly rebellion normalized, Christian women can revel in God’s appointed design. When we serve our church with a heart aimed toward biblical fidelity, God will receive glory, and the bride of Christ will glow.

As Oswald Chambers said, “Get into the habit of saying ‘Speak, Lord,’ and life will become a romance.”

God speaks through the Bible, and a woman with a humble disposition, asking, “Speak, Lord,” will live to employ God’s design. No longer entangled by worldly passions, she is free to rise and do good in her church.

The romance? Savoring the magnificent, lifelong dance of serving Christ and bolstering his church as a helper, spiritual mother, and teacher.

Helpers of Abundant Ministry

When God the potter formed Eve from Adam’s side, he created a precious and essential gift for man: “a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).

The Hebrew word for “fit” — kenegdo — literally means “according to the opposite of him.” Men and women are equally beloved by God as his image-bearers, yet God created us with distinct, interdependent callings. We are interlocking puzzle pieces that connect to form an exquisite mural that honors Christ.

What a sacred privilege to be a woman, made to bear the image of God, who is our greatest helper (Psalm 115:9–11). The word “helper” applies most directly to wives, but this calling also gives us a clue as to how God created women to function in the church. Regardless of our age or marital status, we have been chosen by God to come alongside and assist the church beneath the oversight of elders.

The opportunities to minister are like the fruit in Eden’s garden: abundant, ripe, and ours to enjoy. Rather than wasting time reaching for the branch reserved for men (1 Timothy 2:12), as many have previously done, let us seek to pluck sanctioned fruit, serving our Lord in the many realms he has appointed: women’s ministry, hospitality, food preparation, administration, facility upkeep, nursery, children’s ministry, prayer ministry, community outreach, music, missions, and more.

Spiritual Mothers of Many

Biblical womanhood produces a nurturing, compassionate, maternal ministry. As women, we are meant to breathe life and hope into people. Just as a mother displays tenderness toward her children, we have an opportunity to demonstrate nurturing compassion in our local churches.

Such gentleness exudes warmth: a hand resting on a slumped shoulder; a heartfelt welcome that floods the sanctuary; lips offering compassionate wisdom, tenderness, and prayer in times of suffering and confusion. Embedded within our sanctified XX chromosomes is a sensitivity to the neglected, the hurting, and the outcasts, a touchpoint to share the good news of our Redeemer.

A spiritual mother is eager and grateful to be shepherded by her church’s elders. Rather than seeking to push her personal agenda, she happily serves alongside, strengthening God’s people through loving kindness. Spiritual mothering exudes,

• “I see you. I am praying for you.”
• “You are not alone.”
• “Let me show you the wisdom of God’s ways displayed in his word.”

In Titus 2:3–5, Paul adjures older women to train younger women, tutoring them to honor God as wives, mothers, and stewards of their homes so that Scripture might not be scorned. This same passage implies that younger women show wisdom by following instruction with a spirit of humility.

This type of training grows women of godly character, yielding a vibrant congregation. Mature women of faith are God’s chosen instruments to develop women of spiritual depth who in turn bolster God’s kingdom here on earth. By their modeling and nurturing, spiritual mothers are invaluable to the heart of the church.

Teachers of Sincere Faith

God has given some women the ability to teach the Bible. The wise woman able to instruct will fear God’s word and hold fast to the divine, unchanging order of creation, stewarding her ability by teaching children and other women in the church (1 Timothy 2:12–14).

What a joy and high calling to plant seeds of truth in young minds. Those patient, kind words, unapologetically spoken with respect and authenticity, cradled in love, will bear fruit for eternity.

Many Christian missionaries, pastors, theologians, schoolteachers, stay-at-home mothers, blue-collar workers, and businesspeople speak highly of their childhood Sunday school teachers, attributing their vibrant faith to the women who taught them the Bible each Sunday morning long ago. Likewise, when the apostle Paul praised Timothy’s sincere faith, he credited Timothy’s mother and grandmother for instilling truth into this young protégé (2 Timothy 1:5).

The ability and opportunity to teach women sound doctrine is also a grace and privilege. Through Bible studies, conferences, or retreats, women able to teach labor for the Great Commission. God’s word never returns void (Isaiah 55:10–11). How beautiful is the generational ripple effect of teaching other women to treasure God and his word!

Pillars of Beauty and Strength

Some of the sweetest words in Scripture are those spoken by Mary, the mother of Jesus. When Gabriel appears and announces that she, an unwed virgin, is favored by God to conceive and birth Jesus, Mary could have protested. Her response? “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” — a heart posture submissive and strong, gentle and resilient (Luke 1:38).

When God searches your soul and mine, will he discover a spirit of conflict, tempted to defy his word by following our own desires? Or will he behold a lovely spirit of one fully devoted — “let it be to me according to your word” — yielded to that which is good, true, and beautiful in his sight?

May we follow in Mary’s footsteps as “corner pillars,” adorned with beauty and strength, fit for God’s palace (Psalm 144:12). May we labor to fortify the bride of Christ rather than squander what God has provided. May we lead well, in all humility, as servants eager to give our lives away, as Jesus did. We are not men but women, called to rise and serve the church with tender hearts and sturdy, outstretched hands.

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