GRIEVOUS SINS

Proverbs 6:16-19: “These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”

Proverbs 8:13 “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”

Proverbs 21 is another very informative chapter about what God hates on the wicked. The list of sins in Proverbs 6:16-19 starts with the proud look, and it’s not by chance. God hates pride in man above all things and honors humility (Proverbs 19:12, 29:23, Matthew 23:12, Luke 14:11, 18:14 James 4:6,10). Pride was the sin of Lucifer that caused his fall (Isaiah 14:13,14). Isaiah 59 is another good description of the greatest sins of men, and I repeat only Isaiah 59:7,8 “Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.”

I will focus on one issue, whether the shedding of innocent blood in Proverbs 6:17 and Isaiah 59:7 includes abortion. The context of the statement in Proverbs implies it is the murder of a victim that has done nothing wrong to the perpetrator, and the perpetrator is motivated by hatred and meanness. In other Bible verses it becomes more clear. Examples are Exodus 23:7, Isaiah 57:9, Jeremiah 22:3,17, Deuteronomy 19:10, 27:25, 2 Kings 21:16. If the person murdered, insulted, robbed, cheated or mistreated to name a few examples, is righteous before God, the sin becomes more serious. It’s a person that God dwells in him, and everything done to him is like it’s done against God (Matthew 25:42,43). Exodus 23:7 uses separate words for innocent and righteous, but both qualities are commonly found in the same person “Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked”.

The Bible doesn’t make a straight reference to abortions, even if it was an issue since the ancient times, centuries before Christ. On the other hand, not a few times, people in the Bible found themselves in difficult situations either because of bad decisions or because of bad circumstances. Jacob, beguiled by his uncle Laban, slept with Leah without knowing it was her. He previously made clear that he wanted Rachel as his wife and only her (Genesis 29). It didn’t avert him from his previous goal to marry Rachel. Rachel became his second wife. Peter denied Jesus three times because of his mistake of following Jesus too closely after his arrest (Matthew 26:69-75, Mark 14:66-72, Luke 22:54-62, John 18:15-18, 25-27). We can’t tell for sure what would happen if he admitted he was Jesus’ disciple, but there’s a good possibility he would be in danger if he was honest. Peter sinned to fix a previous mistake.

David was guilty of a premeditated murder he committed to come out of a very uncomfortable situation. He slept with Uriah the Hittite’s wife and left her pregnant. In David’s words “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die” (2 Samuel 11:15). In the last two cases, Peter and David were forgiven by God, even if in the case of the latter his act was horrible and inexcusable. That’s why David was given serious punishments by God despite the forgiveness (2 Samuel 12). God didn’t condemn or reprimand Jacob for taking two wives, and all three of them were loved and blessed by Him despite the faults of their characters. Nonetheless His perfect will since the time of Adam and Eve was one man having one wife. One of the reasons is manifested in the story of Jacob. The two sisters married to Jacob were jealous of each other.

Abortion is a removal of the fetus from the womb in order to terminate a pregnancy. The notion that abortion equals murder is too simplistic. It’s not a black and white issue. In the Roman Empire, Christians refused to enroll in the Roman army because of the misinterpretation of the commandment of the Lord “Thou shalt not kill”. God instructed Israel to kill certain nations, and ordered king Saul to kill the Amalekites including “both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. God decided that mankind excluding Noah and his family should be killed with the flood He caused. The message here is not that murder sometimes is a good thing but that those nations God commanded their slaying would not make it to heaven, they were wicked people. The children of those nations would have the same fate regardless of age. The infants or young children don’t have the judgment to choose between righteousness and wickedness so they are judged according to who their parents are. If at least the one of the two parents is righteous, the child or fetus is sanctified and his or her destination is heaven. In the examples above these nations were totally wicked, and God wanted them out of his sight. God is not guilty of violation of His own commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. He never sins and never changes. His name is Holy (Isaiah 57:15, 6:3). In case of murder, as we see in the story of David with Uriah and Cain with Abel, the motive matters. Cain killed his innocent brother because of jealousy, and wasn’t forgiven. A woman, possibly underage and going to school, not to mention many other problems she could face, could find herself in a very unpleasant situation because of the mistake she made and became pregnant. The issue of sinning is between her and God, but the abortion is not the cardinal sin churches in the Christian world made it to be. The claim that there should be exceptions for the abortion, like life-threatening medical conditions or anomalies in the fetus or the conception being the result of rape, shows that circumstances and motives matter. It’s easy to be outside the situation of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy and take a moral high ground. The abortion has been associated with a murder of an innocent life. That brings us to another important issue, since the Bible explicitly says blood is life “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life (Deuteronomy 12:23). Unless the fetus has its own blood, there is no life, or a separate existence. The estimation of the start of the production of blood by the fetus is between the seventh and eighth week of pregnancy. So abortion does not necessarily mean murder. Its omission from the Bible from both the Old and New Testament seems to be deliberate because it’s a complex issue; whether it could be done is not answered with an absolute yes or no.

Homosexuality as a sin is viewed in the wrong way in a similar manner. God never treats it as one of the worst offenses in the Old Testament, most notably in Proverbs and Psalms. He destroyed Sodom for reasons other than the inhabitants being homosexuals (Ezekiel 16:49,50). Homosexuality does not affect if you are a good person or not and at the end of it, it is a condition dealt with by God during the new birth and not by an unfruitful mental effort of man.