Saturday Devotional

My People Perish From a Lack of Knowledge

“Wow!” He said to her in shock, “Really? You were home schooled?” Her fellow bank teller continued, “But you’re so…normal. I mean, you’ve got some of the best customer service skills here at the bank. You’re extremely outgoing. You fit right in with everyone else. You’re not awkward at all…even though you were…unsocialized.”

Normal as opposed to abnormal, awkward, and unsocialized are sneaky little words thrown at us with regards to home schoolers.

“Now before we go any further,” the anthropology professor interrupted her lecture, “we should address the opponents of evolution. Those would be the religious people who believe all of nature was created and was not evolved and that it happened fairly recently-about 6,000 years ago-according to the Bible.” Her tone of voice switched from a matter of fact way of speaking to one of concern as she devoted this quick minute to what she clearly did not agree with, “But of course, we all know that the universe is billions of years old, so having said that….”

We all know? No, we don’t all know that the universe is billions of years old, but she’s just convinced a whole class that we do.

It’s amazing how bombarded we are with a mindset so contrary to the truth. Words and phrases are tossed around that seem to massage the mind. I say this because they’re usually not spoken from an angry voice, but one that sounds as if it cares deeply. In addition, they’re spoken from a trusted source, and thrown around in so many arenas that we trust them as much as we trust that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening.

How do we combat this propaganda, for that’s what this truly is? These phrases are messages intended to gain public support of an opinion, not a fact. The final goal is for the opinion to be trusted as fact by the majority population, often times resulting in confusion and a lie. We combat all lies with the truth.

More and more I’m realizing how much propaganda is out there, and sometimes I feel helpless as I raise my children in this world of confusion. Educating ourselves with the truth is both our defense and our offense. Seeing the evidence of my adult daughter succeeding in her job as a bank teller enforces what I’ve already done to educate myself and my children about the lies of public education and the so-called socialization factor. Doing the research of the vast amount of scientific information out there about a young earth and an Almighty Creator confirms my faith in Christ and His Word. Sometimes, however, I feel defeated as I learn of a lie that I once believed.

I’ve always been against abortion and it shocks me to hear of some of the propaganda surrounding this issue. To consider that a woman has a choice to murder another person because she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced by the result of her behavior is unfathomable. However, the term “pro-choice” does sound softer and easier to digest than “pro-murder”. So, it succeeds. The term “blob of cells” is even more horrifying, and a flat out lie unless you consider that’s what we all are. What takes the cake is using the term “disease” for a pregnancy. What? Disease! Are you kidding me? “Disease” is the term given to a pregnancy way back in the mid 1960s when the government first became involved in subsidizing birth control. It was an employee of the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Willard Cates, who coined the termed stating that the cure for the disease is birth control. It’s an official diagnosis still used today in certain circles defending birth control as “preventative” health care for women.

Talk about a lie! Diseases came about because of sin entering the world. Though the pain of pregnancy came about because of the curse of sin, if there were no sin, there would still be pregnancy just without the pain. God commanded reproduction at the very beginning before the fall of man. What irony indeed to consider pregnancy a disease when pregnancy existed before disease.

For many of us, there’s just no confusion surrounding abortion, and the terms used are far from subtle. So, imagine how shocked I was to learn that I had been taken as a fool in, of all things, the topic of contraception. The contraceptive birth control pill is something that my husband and I utilized in the beginning of our marriage before we were ready for our first pregnancy. I believed I was preventing pregnancy and not destroying it. Many years later, I was horrified to learn that there is more than one way that the pill works, and one of those ways is to destroy a pregnancy.

One of the ways the pill works is to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, therefore an embryo, therefore a baby. It prevents the build-up of tissue in the uterus which the embryo is supposed to attach to. This is because the main purpose of the pill which is to prevent ovulation is truly only accurate to a percentage somewhere in the 70s…not even in the 90s. So, how often while taking the birth control pill does a pregnancy occur and then abort having no nourishment in the uterus? It happens way more often than we’d like to believe. The birth control pill is an abortifacient, a drug that causes an abortion.

How do I deal with realizing that not only did I believe a lie, but because of it I might have aborted my own children…unknowingly? The key word here is unknowingly. My heart may hurt at this, but God only holds me accountable once I’m aware of it. Now, I’m accountable…then, I was not.

My lesson learned is to continue day after day educating myself and not just believing what I’m told. The more I do this, the more aware I’ll become of the lies that I believed in the past, but I can rest assure that God’s mercy covers that. My responsibilities are the choices I make from this point on, and what I do for others with that knowledge.

It’s a scary world out there, and as Christians we’re to be in it, not of it. I pray that the Lord gives me the wisdom to continue to recognize the areas of worldly propaganda that go against His Word and so easily draw us in. I pray for the courage to speak up to help others in this world to become aware of this same propaganda. I pray that in the process, lives are changed by His power and saved by His grace.

My people perish from a lack of knowledge…Hosea 4:6

 

Amie Spruiell
3/02/2012