Sam Rohrer: And Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a fairy tale, but once upon a time there was a nation where freedom and liberty prevailed and life was sacred. This nation embraced the God of heaven as creator of all, the one who breathed into man, the breath of life making up every person a valuable and sacred creation. This nation taught their children that they were inherited of the Lord and that their children were the blessings and taught them the blessings and the promises of God.
They recognize this God as the giver of liberty, the giver of life, and the God who gave 10 simple commands for which that nation, if they obeyed these simple commands, could live successfully. The sixth of these commands warned against willful and intentional murder of any human life in that nation, but this nation forgot God, and God did what he said he would do to every nation who forgot him and willfully murdered life, and judgment came to that nation.
Now, what nation of I’m talking about? You’d say, “Well, certainly if we go back far enough yet he’s certainly talking about Israel,” and I am talking about Israel because that’s the nation that God gave these promises to, but they applied to everyone, so you could say maybe Germany of old. They used to be more of a Christian nation that look where they ended up, but you know that I think that there’s no nation, perhaps so great and arrogant and their defiance of God and life. Then our nation, the United States having now murdered over 60 million babies.
So just how integral is the defensive life as it’s tied to the view of God as Creator? Ever think about why is life so important to the maintenance of freedom and liberty or the blessings and security hoped for in a nation? Well, today we’re going to focus on the issue of life.
Our theme for today is in the defense of life. Our very special guest is Scot Klusendorf. He is the president and the founder of Pro-life Training Institute. He’s also author of a very good book and titled the Case for Life. He’s a respected speaker on a range of issues, but particularly on the issue of the sacredness of life. And with that, I welcome you to Stand in the Gap today. I’m Sam Rohrer and I’m going to be joined by the entire team, evangelist Dave Kistler and Dr Gary Dull, as well as our special guest Scot Klusendorf.
So with that, I welcome Scott to the program today. It’s the first time that you’ve been on with us. We are really glad for your ministry, what you do, and we’re glad that you are with us today.
Scot Klusendorf: Thank you Sam it’s a delight.
Sam Rohrer: Scot, let me go here just to begin with, I want to ask you this question from the standpoint of your focus on pro-life training and the institute. You shared a few things with me before, got on the air, go where you want to on this, but when did you begin your ministry of pro-life training and the institute that God’s allowed you to form and what was your most compelling motivation for doing so?
Scot Klusendorf: Here’s what got me into this movement full time. In November of 1990 I was an associate pastor at a church in Southern California where I was overseeing the youth ministry and I got invited by the local pregnancy center director to attend a pastor’s gathering at a local church and I was under the assumption there’d be a good sized crowd there because there usually was when there was district area breakfast.
Well, this particular Saturday morning in November of 1990 I showed up and it was me, four other guys that I recognized and their wives, there couldn’t have been more than 15 of us in this room that seated a couple of hundred and the speaker was Gregg Cunningham, a former member of the Pennsylvania State House, much like yourself, Sam. And Greg gave a compelling case for the pro-life view. He laid out logic and he laid out arguments and I thought, this is great. This guy doesn’t hurt the brain to listen to. I had heard pro-lifers that quite frankly were embarrassing in the arguments they were putting forward, but not Gregg.
And then he did something though that changed the course of my life. He showed an eight minute video depicting abortion. I had never seen abortion and I watched that clip and I thought, something has to change. I’m no different than the Priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side of the road. And if I’m going to say I oppose abortion, I’d better start acting like it.
So through a course of events, changes at the church and my own thinking, six months after that event, I was leaving the church with the blessing of the church, to pursue doing full time pro-life work, namely equipping Christians how to make a case for the pro-life view in a secular culture that rejects religious truth as real and knowable.
Dave Kistler: Scott, let me ask you this. It’s not just the life of the unborn baby that’s important, obviously we believe all life is sacred. That would include those with special needs and those that are older and have maybe unique challenges as an older citizen as well. But why is life across the breadth of the spectrum so critical to freedom and liberty? If you could address it, that’d be great.
Scot Klusendorf: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that. Freedom, liberty, and life as understood in our Declaration of Independence are all what we call natural rights. It’s an, and it’s important that Americans understand the difference between natural rights and merely positive or legal rights. Natural rights are those rights you have simply because you’re human and and not some other kind of creature.
Humans have certain rights that apply to them in virtue of their humanity. So for example, I don’t have a right to go vote in the next UK election even though I love visiting that country, but I certainly have a right not to be gunned down in the streets of London when I’m visiting there. And what gives me the right not to be gunned down is not a legal right created by government, but rather a natural right that precedes government. That’s pre-political.
And I have that right in virtue of my humanity, the right to life, the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, our founders recognized as being natural rights, grounded in our nature as human beings, which they understood to reflect the image of God. And therefore government’s job is not to grant those rights, but to protect them and to make sure they’re not unjustly taken away.
So when we as pro-lifers argue that the unborn have a right to life, we’re not arguing that they have a right to vote in the next election or drive a car, rather, we’re arguing they have a natural right not to be intentionally killed unless you can render reasons and just cause that’s how it links to those other two rights that we talked about. Joy or excuse me, happiness and liberty.
Sam Rohrer: Scott, that was a great distinction. There ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you caught that a natural right life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. We’re got to talk a little bit more about that in the next segment because not everybody believes what Scot just said, but those of you who are listening to this program like us, if you hold to a biblical worldview and we believe that rights came from God and are the highest of moral authority than of necessity, we see that applies to all around the world. That’s a natural right, and why it is totally linked to the concept of freedom, civil freedom and civil liberty.
The move of a culture from one that broadly values all of life, which I described at the beginning of the program. It really used to be us in the United States where, we viewed the life of everyone including and particularly the most vulnerable, the preborn baby. Where that moves to a culture that cries out for laws and court rulings to legally permit the willful murder of the lives of the preborn and even the just born.
This process can also oftentimes be slow and because it’s slow, sometimes not so obvious, but then at some point if the shift in a culture begins to happen, at some point the culture will shift, where it becomes marked by an arrogance and a pride, where the power of the living, those who are alive, use their power to destroy the life of the weakest. And then that change becomes unmistakenly obvious.
And when this happens, the culture has shifted. Like moving of tectonic plates creates a physical earthquake, which we’ve been seeing in this country and around the world, like that the shift from life to death creates a moral earthquake where the love of life and liberty shifts to the pursuit of death and tyranny. And aren’t we seeing that happen in America?
I mean, just think about it. Who would have ever thought that public officials, that media, that members of the judiciary and other so called leaders would fight for the right to murder the innocent and then stand to their feet and praise the passage of laws to destroy life and murder the preborn, as we have seen done in New York and elsewhere? Well, in this segment, as we continue today’s focus on the defense of life, we’re going to talk further with Scot Greg Klusendorf, he’s the president and the founder of Pro-life Training Institute and the author of a great book, I encourage you to get it, look it up, the Case for Life.
As we now focus on this piece of the focus here, understanding the culture of death, Scot, for a Christian person or I’m going to say any lover of freedom who believes, as we just talked about in the last segment, that Declaration of Independence, which says this, “We’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights,” natural rights as you described them to be, “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness,” which means private property ownership and that these fundamental rights come from God and by the very nature, sacred.
It’s really hard to imagine Scot, that we’re now dealing with people with attitudes towards death, as strong as our attitudes are toward life. So I’m asking you this question. When you go around this country and you teach people how to defend life and to influence others to think life, I know it’s important that you share some basics probably with those folks about how to understand the other side, who really embraces death and how they come to those conclusions.
So this I would ask you right now to start off this segment, what do you say to people about the culture of death among us here in American culture? I mean, what do you say about them that, we who are of the culture of life must understand in helping to confront that pro death mentality? I mean, it’s foreign to the Christian mindset. How do you deal with that and how do you describe it?
Scot Klusendorf: Our nation is having a huge argument right now over two key questions that impact every one of us hearing this program right now and those two key questions are this, number one is moral truth, real and knowable? In other words, is moral truth, something we can connect with accurately or is it just a subjective opinion like choosing chocolate ice cream over vanilla?
The second question we’re arguing about is what makes humans valuable in the first place? Are we valuable because of the nature we have, creatures who bear the image of our creator or are we only valuable because of some function we perform? Another way of thinking about this, Sam, is that there’s a competing view of human value that competes with the Christian worldview. The competing view is what we call the performance view of human value. It says that what makes you human and valuable and have a right to life is not your nature as one made in the image of God, but rather functions you can immediately exercise like self-awareness or having desires or having the ability to feel pain.
Of course, Christians hold to what we call the endowment view, that we have rights that come from our creator as we discussed in the last segment. Now, how did we get here? Here’s the thing that your listeners need to understand. This did not happen overnight. It did not happen in the last 50 years. It did not happen in the last 100 years or even the last 200 years. You have to understand the history of thought to get a basic understanding of how we got here and that’s important for two reasons, Sam, number one, we don’t want to lose hope. It’s easy to give up. People say, “Well, we’ve been trying to end abortion for 47 years. We haven’t been able to do it. You know, it’s not going to ever go away.”
What they don’t understand is the changes that brought us, the plausibility structures that make abortion seem right to so many people have been in play for about 400 years. What happened is if you look at the history of mankind and you look at the Old Testament, you’ll see that moral truth was real and knowable. God had his covenant people. He gave them his laws. They were objective, they were real. They weren’t figments of our imagination. The same is true in classical thought. Even in Greek, classical and Roman thought morals were real and knowable. We didn’t make them up. They were objective. Then of course, in the New Testament, we see Christ teaching not only duty for duty sake, but even a higher call, to honor God, to honor the son of God by living out our salvation as people who have an objective sense of right and wrong. We don’t earn our salvation, but it’s the fruit of our salvation.
Even the Middle Ages. Moral truth is real and knowable. Looking at thinkers like Aquinas and others. Then everything gets blown to bits in the Enlightenment. By the middle of the six, I would say the end of the 16th century, early 17th century, you had the Empiricist who came along and basically said, “If you can’t taste it, touch it, feel it, see it or hear it. It’s not real.” And of course you can’t measure morality empirically. It’s like as my colleague said, “Trying to weigh a chicken with a yardstick.”
They’re two different categories and once morals got reduced to an item of not being real knowledge, it got reduced to mere personal sentiment, personal opinion. And once that happened, we began seeing the erosion. So imagine if you were to throw a rock into a perfectly still Alpine mountain lake and you’re out there early in the morning, you tossed that rock into the lake, the ripples are going to go out for a very long time. And that’s what happened in the Empirical age of the 16th century. That rock hit the lake and we’ve been living with that turbulence, that cultural turbulence ever since.
Gary Dull: Scott, I’m going to jump in here because that was an excellent explanation but we’re limited on time and on the program here as well as through APN generally speaking, we stressed the reality and the significance of the biblical world view. Perhaps you could speak more precisely about how the view of life as being sacred is linked to a biblical worldview and how in history of the world, a culture of life, where all life is protected and valued, is more unique and distinctive than is a culture of death. Can you comment on that uniqueness and tie this together to the American experience briefly, please?
Scot Klusendorf: Sure. If you look at scripture, the case for the pro-life view is very clear and it goes like this, “All humans have value because they bear the image of God.” The old covenant teaches that in Genesis 1 and the new covenant teaches it in James 3. Because humans bear the image of God, the shedding of innocent blood meaning the intentional killing of an innocent human being is strictly forbidden. Exodus 23 teaches that Proverbs 6:16-19 teaches that, Matthew 5:21 to name a few.
From that we only need to ask one question, “Are they unborn human beings?” If they are human beings and we know from the Science of embryology, they are, the same biblical commands against the shedding of innocent blood apply to the unborn as they do everyone else. Now, how does that relate to a western thought, to the founding of our country in particular? It relates this way.
Our founders had a biblical view even though not all of them were what we would consider conservative Christians by any means, but they had a biblical view that said, “Our rights come from our creator and because we are human beings, we are endowed with these rights and these rights don’t come to us through government, through function, they come to us through our creator.” And that was grounded on the biblical concept of the imago dei, meaning the image of God in man. And that image applies to every living human being, regardless their stage of development, regardless their sex, male or female, regardless of their status in life, and government’s job is to protect that, and that our founders drew that right out of the biblical principle of the imago dei.
Sam Rohrer: Scott, again, a very, very clear and great answer and Gary, thank you for asking that. Ladies and gentlemen, as we try to say in this program and I hope you’re catching it, and as you listen to the program, you understand when we say that God’s word holds the answer to all issues of life, we mean it. This issue of life and abortion, whether we protect life, and government uses the sort of justice to punish those who take life or we reward those who obey God’s moral law, all of these things come right off the pages of scripture so it makes no difference when we talk about immigration and borders, or life and abortion, or the meaning of justice and truth, or taxation. Any of these things that we talk about, ladies and gentlemen, they’re all right there in God’s word, but it starts with the understanding that we are endowed with God given rights, it starts with life, and that’s where we’re focusing today.
Well, welcome back to stand in the gap today. I’m Sam Rohrer and today accompanied by Dave Kistler and Gary Dull. Our very special guest today is Scot Klusendorf. He is the founder and the president of Pro-life Training Institute and they have a website at prolifetraining.com so it’s pretty easy, prolifetraining.com and you’ll find a number of resources there focused on the issue of life and that’s what we’ve chosen to talk about today on this program.
So if you have just joined us, we’ve started by talking about the nation who once feared God, who now really embraces death, that’s really talking about us, but we’re not the only nation that has gone this route. We talked the last segment about understanding of the culture of death. How is it that we moved from the support of life and understanding that it came from God, to a culture of death where you actually have people standing up and clamoring for the legal right to kill the most innocent among us.
It’s an amazing shift. It’s not accidental, but we have to know how to deal with it and to respond to it. And if you’re like me, ladies and gentleman, and I think probably if you’re listening to the program you are, you love life, you love God, you believe in morality, you believe in absolute truth. And every time you hear about a baby being killed or you hear somebody standing up and wanting to pass legislation to kill more babies at grieves, you on the heart grieves me in the heart and it ought to grieve you in the heart. The question is, what do we do about it? That’s all I want to talk about in this segment here because I think all of those who have a sense of right and wrong, who have a fear of God are faced with a dilemma every time they hear someone stand up and talk about why they should take life and have that right.
So how do we respond, for instance, to the demand that we often hear that a woman has a right to kill her preborn baby in her womb and that her right supersedes the right of that baby to be born and lived a fulfilled life? Or how do we respond to the legislator, the judge, or the other public official who has sworn to uphold the constitution to pass now, laws or rulings that make it illegal to do what God said is unlawful and that’s to take life inappropriately.
We’re gonna talk about that right now in this segment with Scot Klusendorf. Scot, you as an apologetic and a person who helped to train people how to argue the defense of life, we do that in a culture that has become pretty adept at supporting death. So some of the reasons that they give are more often heard, and I’ve just picked a few of those. So let’s start with this one right here. The one we hear often. I heard when I was in the legislature, people said, “But it’s my right as a woman, it’s my right. Don’t tell me what to do with my body.” How do you respond to that issue when it comes to the preborn? Does that woman have a right that supersedes that right of that baby to live?
Scot Klusendorf: Well when anybody makes an assertion like I have a right to X, notice where the burden of proof lies. It does not lie on you, the listener. It relies on them the speaker. If I claim for example, that there are pink elephants dancing above your head right now, you don’t bear the burden of proof to refute me. I bear the burden of proof to affirm that which I’ve asserted. And people love to make assertions and think they’ve made arguments.
So when someone says to me, “A woman has a right to choose.” My first question is choose what and where did that right come from? Well, the obvious answer they give is, “Well, it came from the government.” “Well, if it came from the government, the same government that gave that right can take it away.” “Well, no, they have a fundamental right to an abortion.”
“Okay, where did that right come from?” And notice that at that point we’re getting very close to them implicitly affirming the theistic worldview that we hold to, that rights come from our creator. So the first thing we want to do is force them to defend their own assertion. Why should we believe it? Choice to do what and where does that right come from?
Then if they assert a bodily rights argument, like what you just said, I’m going to ask them if there should be any limitations on that. For example, suppose a woman is pregnant and she is suffering from morning sickness and she wants to take thalidomide to reduce her, her nausea symptoms. Would we allow her to take that drug that would potentially give, caused her to give birth to a child without limbs? Would we say to her, “Sure. Go for it. Your body, your choice.” No. In fact, no responsible physician on the planet would let her take that drug.
They would tell her specifically, “You can’t take it,” but if it’s true that she has an absolute right to her own bodily autonomy, then who are we to tell her she can’t take that drug? What if she wants a child with no arms? Who are we to tell her she can’t do it? This is what follows from a worldview that asserts autonomy as the greatest good without any reference to objective truth.
Dave Kistler: Scot, let me ask you this. A lot of times the justification for the murder of a pre-born baby is quality of life and sometimes that may refer to physical quality of life, but even more recently, Sam knows that to which I’m referring, so does Gary, we have a mutual friend who was pro-life activist, he’s now totally flipped. And he’s even gone to the point of saying, if the quality of life economically cannot be guaranteed, then really that child has no reason to be born. What do you say to those that make that quality of life argument for abortion?
Scot Klusendorf: Well, one of the first things we need to do as Christians is get behind the objection and look at the worldview that’s idling beneath the surface there. And what’s idling beneath the surface there is a worldview known as body self dualism. That’s a big term, but let me define it for your listeners. It’s simply means this, the real you has nothing to do with your body. You are, the real you is your thoughts, your feelings, your aims, your desires and once those go away, or before you get them in the womb, you have no real you that’s there. You just have a body that’s mere matter in motion.
That view body-self dualism is what drives the claim. That quality of life is what matters. But body-self dualism is very problematic. And the first thing about it is it’s totally subjective. Who decides what traits count to make the real you? Who decides what traits give you a right to life? Well, the answer to that is real easy, the elites in power, will decided, which means human equality is thrown on the ash heap of history and you can forget about it, but it’s also very counter intuitive.
Imagine someone saying, “Oh, you know, until you have desires, you really don’t have a right to life. There’s no real you present.” Well if we are not our bodies, if the real us has nothing to do with our bodies, guess what? You’ve never hugged your mother because you can’t hug desires and aims and feelings. You hug embodied humans and this is what follows from this body-self dualism that our culture has bought into and it results in savage inequality because here’s what happens with this Sam, if having desires is what gives me a right to life or having self awareness or having the ability to feel pain, pick out any trait you want, if you have more of that trait than me, by definition, you have a greater right to life than me and we can again, throw human equality on the ash heap of history.
Christians need to get in the habit of pressing back instead of buying the premise of our critics. Our critics say, “Well, until that embryo has self awareness, it’s not a human being with a right to life,” and most pro-lifer’s say things like this. “Well, we can measure brain waves by week six and why fetal development shows us that by week 12 the child can feel pain.” Not only are those claims dubious from an empirical standpoint, you’ve bought the premise of the critic. When you reply that way.
I’m going to push back differently. I’m going to say, “Wait a minute, tell me why I have to be self aware not to be killed. Why should I view having desires as being value giving in the first place and not say having a belly button that points out rather than in,” if I claim it’s a belly button, it’s no less subjective and arbitrary than what they’re claiming. So I’m going to make them defend their own claim. I’m not going to roll over and just accept the premise.
Speaker 5: You know, Scot, another leading argument is that abortion must be legal so that the preborn child can be murdered, and that’s what abortion is, can be murdered in the case that the child was conceived through rape or incest. And that is out there a lot. You hear that often. Even a lot of Christians will go down that road. We don’t here, but a lot of Christians do. So how should this argument be responded to from the biblical perspective?
Scot Klusendorf: Well, again, let’s notice the assumption in the claim. It assumes the unborn aren’t human. Nobody suggests killing toddlers whose fathers were rapists. They only consider doing this to the unborn. So my first question is going to be, “In a case where there is pregnancy that results from rape, are there two humans involved or three?” I’m gonna make the person answer that question. And almost always they’re going to end up saying, “Three.” You’ve got, of course, the the woman who’s been raped, the rapist and the child.
Then I’m going to ask, “How ought we treat each of them? Should we kill the guilty rapist?” Of course, they almost always say, “No,” because they’re against the death penalty. I’ll say, “Fair enough. How about the mother? Should we kill her for the rape?” Well, that’s barbaric. I mean that’s what these Islamic countries do. And people point that out and then I’ll say, “So should we execute the child for the sin of his father?”
And when they hedge on that, I’ll say, “Can I make an observation of the three people you said were involved in a case that results, in a pregnancy case that results from rape. You won’t kill the guilty rapist. You won’t kill the mother, but you will kill the innocent child for what his father did.” And usually that gets them thinking but there are two types of people who generally bring up rape. There’s the inquirer and there’s the crusader. The inquirer is actually tracking with a pro-life movement. She’s hearing our arguments, she’s hearing what we’re saying and she starting to buy in, but she’s just emotionally hung up on the issue of rape.
And so the question I’ll put to her goes like this, “How should a civil society treat innocent human beings who remind us of a painful event?” And I’ll let the question hang there for a minute.
Sam Rohrer: And we’re going to let that hang there just for a little bit ladies and gentlemen as well. A great question. Great response, Scot.
Well, as we move now into our fourth and final segment of today’s program, our theme has been in the defense of life. We started with the importance of defending life. We’ve covered the understanding or trying to understand the culture of death, which is what so many hold to in this country and around the world. Last segment, we talked about how do we address three leading reasons of those who issue the call to kill as I put it, those who want to justify the murder of the unborn.
In this last segment. Then we’re going to kind of summarize this whole program today and ask our special guest Scot Klusendorf who is the president and founder of Pro-life Training Institute and their website is prolifetraining.com encourage you to go there. He’s also the author of the great book, The Case For Life.
So in this program today, we’ve talked about the arguments for the defense of life that, as you’ve heard they’re really simple, they’re very logical, they’re historically virtuous, if I can put it that way, they’re always linked to freedom and liberty and they are moral.
Now, the arguments for death are confusing. They’re illogical, they’re historically evil and they’re always linked to tyranny and repression and they are immoral. Now, how do I say that? Well two different worldviews, biblical worldview is the first I explained the second worldview of the culture of death is a totally different worldview. Two different views of morality, two different views of duty and responsibility. These two worldviews have two different political and judicial systems that they espoused. Two totally different cultures. Two totally different views of freedom.
I personally prefer a culture where all life is valued and freedom is linked to the understanding of a biblical worldview that recognizes God as God, God as creator, the giver of all rights, natural rights. We recognize where a fall happened where sin entered the world precipitated by the devil, but where there is a promise of hope and redemption secured through Jesus Christ.
Those four points I gave that really is the essence of a biblical worldview and it stands in sharp contrast. So this view was shared by our founders of our nation. It was preached in our pulpits. It produced the holy experiment that came out of the ground right here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania where I am right now and Dave, and Gary is on the other side of the state as we speak, this nation became the shining city on a hill that’s offered hope to the oppressed and to those caught in a culture of tyranny and death and they look here, but what’s happening to our light?
I think that light is linked to how we view life. Scot, I want to go to you right now. Take and summarize if you want, how you want, what we’ve talked about on the program today and tried to present an overview of life in the defense of life, but on your website, if somebody goes and you get a text form, they can read it where you say, “You can defend life in five minutes.” So you’ve got about five minutes. Scot, go ahead, defend life from an overall perspective. Okay.
Scot Klusendorf: I’ll do it in two minutes or less cause I know we’re almost out of time. Here’s how you defend your pro-life view in a minute or less. Here’s what you say and let’s say you have an aunt Betty who’s not a Christian, she visits your home at Thanksgiving and she asks, “Why are you pro-life?” Here’s your answer in a minute or less. “Aunt Betty, I’m pro-life because the science of embryology says that from the earliest stages of development, you were a distinct living and whole human being. You weren’t part of another human being like skin cells on the back of my hand. You were already a whole living member of the human family even though you had yet to grow and mature. And you know what else, aunt Betty, there’s no essential difference between the embryo you were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you back then. Differences of size, level of development, environment, meaning where you’re located, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying we could kill you then, but not now.”
Now I got that done, Sam. In less than a minute, I didn’t site any Bible verses, but I communicated the biblical worldview to aunt Betty and I gave her something to think about. I did what my colleague Gregg [Koval 00:34:35] says, “Put a pebble in her shoe and it’s going to wear on her and wear on her until she deals with it,” and that’s how we make that case for life. We argue from science, the unborn are distinct living whole human beings. We argue from philosophy that there’s no essential difference between the embryo you were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you back then.
Sam Rohrer: Scot, that was excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, go to our website when we’re done, standinthegapradio.com, pick up the archive of this. If you’ve not downloaded our app on your phone, do that please because it makes it very easy to bring up archived programs. This program, send it around. Get your friends and your family members to listen to this. This is about as simple a presentation on the value of life and how to defend it as you all have ever heard, it’s not long.
Take advantage of this send it along, post it on Facebook. If you Twitter out, you know, put it out there, encourage your friends to like this and on our Facebook page of Stand in the Gap Radio or American Pastors Network, let people hear this program. Gary, you’ve got about two minutes left. Scot did a superb job there. Let me just ask you to lay down a few precepts, principles, from a purely biblical perspective right now of why we should defend life and why it’s so critical.
Gary Dull: Okay, Sam, let me just make a statement first and that is the idea that life is a divine sovereign entity that no human being has the right to tamper with, particularly as it relates to abortion or any of the type of death. And I say that based upon what the word of God says in Genesis Chapter 1 verses 26 and 27, we are told that it is God who made human beings in his image and he is the one who is breathed into us as it were, the breath of life. In Psalm 139 verses 13 through 17 we’ve got great teaching there that shows us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God himself in the womb.
And since God made us, we have no right to snuff out life. Deuteronomy chapter 5 in verse 17 simply says, “Thou shalt not kill.” And we’ve already laid down the foundation that, that’s what abortion is. And then in Job chapter 12 and verse 10, Job says something that’s very telling. He says, as he’s speaking of God and the Lord, he says, “In whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breadth of all mankind.”
And so you see God is the creator of life. He’s the sustainer of life. And any time we as human beings jump in there and try to take life, we are on thin ice. In fact, let me just leave you with these three statements, Sam, to take life dishonors God, to take life sets oneself up as God and that’s not good, and to take life robs God of the purpose that he has for that life. Even though that life may be born in some deformed way or whatever the case, God has a purpose for that life and he will be glorified through that life when it’s allowed to live. So we need to recognize that God is the one who gives life and we just need to leave it all in his hands.
Sam Rohrer: And that’s a great place to leave it. Scot, I want to give you the final word here. Take us to your website. Any final comments from your perspective for our listeners right now on this program today in the defense of life?
Scot Klusendorf: Well, at Life Training Institute, we specialize on equipping Christians to make a persuasive case for life in the secular marketplace of ideas, and they can get some help there at prolifetraining.com especially if they go to the resource section and look at the Case For Life articles that are there that will equip your listeners to make an intelligent and thoughtful defense for human beings.
Sam Rohrer: Thank you so very much Scot for being with us again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. This was a tremendous gold mine of information today on this program. I pray simply stated on this most important issue.
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