Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Nine-Pound Sledge in the Freezer

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

As many of you know, some of the Center For Medical Progress ("CMP") videos had been blocked by a judge, but a few days ago someone — another hero — hacked the videos that had been withheld from us, and they are now available. I have embedded one of them. In the course of the video, the presenter reads some quotations from various abortionists, working the lucrative fields of the second trimester.

There are any number of appalling things here, but I would recommend that you pay particular to the section beginning at 9:28. This is the clip where the abortionist being cited described the eyeballs of the child falling into her lap, read in such a way as to draw laughter and applause. Laughter and applause.

Now these are people who make their living chopping babies into pieces, and they have come to a conference, and they are participating in a workshop at that conference, and the  workshop is dedicated to helping them to feel sorry for themselves. They are trying to figure out how to cope. They are dealing with the stigma. Let us feel sorry for the abortionist who had eyeballs fall into the lap, but we must never allow ourselves to feel sorrow for the child who will never see anything out of those eyes.

Not only so, elsewhere in the video, the enemies of their ghoulishness are charged with “obstinacy” and “obstructionism.” Yeah, that would be us.

This particular segment highlights the actual problem, the problem that lies right at the heart of our national life.
Watch the seconds following 9:28 over again. The problem here is, pure and simple, hardness of heart. This is not an intellectual problem. This is not a problem that medical science can solve. Medical science has a limited focus, and cannot tell you that you must repent of your bloodlust and believe in the Lord Jesus. But that is absolutely what must happen here. This is not a problem of the intellectual. This is an issue of moral rebellion. It is a matter of the heart.

Meditate on this. We have had one damning video after another, and the practitioners of this vile trade have been exposed as people who know full well what they are doing, and there is still a public debate over it. Planned Parenthood is still subsidized by the Congress of these United States. At our last local protest against Planned Parenthood, a significant number of counter-protesters showed up this time with their pink signs. They were willing to stand out in God’s sunshine and say that they wanted to “stand” with Planned Parenthood. They were able to stand in the first place because some years ago, their respective mothers decided not to exercise their constitutional option of cutting off their legs.

This is no longer a debatable matter, but that plain fact has not halted the debate. What do you call it when that happens? Our national heart is stone cold dead. We are dead in our trespasses and sins. Thankfully, there are still many individuals who are calling the nation to repentance, but it is the nation collectively that must repent. What is our national heart like? It is as though someone sawed the head off a nine-pound sledge hammer, wrapped it in three layers of tinfoil and put it in the back of the freezer for forty years. That is where we are. That is who we now are, and there is no sense pretending otherwise.

We do not need, in the first instance, to legislate. We do not need, in the first instance, to repeal. We do not need, in the first instance, to reform. We do not need, in the first instance, to withdraw subsidies. The very first thing we must do is repent of our insolence before the God of Heaven. The first order of business is repentance. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs says that all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36). That is why we are here. America, through her elected and appointed representatives, has solemnly embraced folly, sin, iniquity, death, and hardness of heart.

Not only so, but Christians who stand against those who have turned our nation into a vast charnel house must learn to make our appeal in terms of repentance. But we don’t like speaking this way because it reveals our absolute  helplessness. We can legislate. We can repeal. We can subsidize or not. We think we have options. But repentance is a gift of God (Acts 5:31; 2 Tim. 2:25). And if He determines not to give that gift, we will be left to the desolations of His entirely just condemnation.

As mentioned, Lady Wisdom says that those who hate her love death. But that is not the only thing that the passage says. She also says that those who sin against her wrong their own soul. America has sinned against God, against the millions of slaughtered children, but also against her own soul.

And we need to be told that there is no way for us to get it back. It is utterly beyond our reach. We are helpless, entirely impotent. If we want our soul back, we must receive it as a gift. And God has never given that gift to the unrepentant.