The Sanctity of Life

The Sanctity of Life
By Rev. Robert P. Elkins
All Scripture verse taken from the NIV Bible unless otherwise noted
(John 10:9-10) “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

I would like to address a topic we don’t hear about to often any longer. There was a time when the church addressed this topic from the pulpit on a regular basis but that is a day gone by. I’d like to address the “Sanctity of Life”. When talking about the sanctity of life we have to ask the question, “What is Sanctity, just what does that strange word mean? What does this seldom used word imply?” The word “Sanctity” means “Anything held sacred” it means that sanctity is anything we look at or consider to be sacred with synonyms being “Holiness, Sacredness or Purity”. Were we to be talking about the sanctity of God we would talk about his “Purity”, how God is pure and perfect, his purity is total, he’s complete, there is nothing that could be added to him or taken away from him, God is without flaw or defect of any kind. Sometimes we talk about a really good chocolate candy as being pure chocolate. The better chocolates are made with purer chocolate and milks and not much filler, the poor grade chocolates use wax as a filler ingredient, editable wax of course and still okay, it will not harm you, I can attest to that. It is the only kind of candy I had as a child. I didn’t know good chocolate until after I get married and my wife introduced me to it. Now we are very good friends, both my wife and the chocolate. If I were to talk to someone about pure chocolate they would instantly understand that I was talking about a chocolate item that contained nothing but chocolate and their mind’s eye would picture a piece of delicious chocolate of perfect taste and color. I think that gives us a good mental picture of the point I’m trying to make.

Were we to be talking about the sanctity of God we would talking about his Holiness, God is Holy, God is spiritually perfect or pure, he’s untainted by evil or sin, he’s sinless and worthy of all reverence and adoration, God is to receive our deepest respect as we stand in awe before him. But this is only one half of our selected topic for today, “Sanctity” is the first part, but “Life” is the second part.

Most of us know or have a good understanding of what “Life” is and the implications of what the word means. But how often do we think of life as something sacred? For the most part, societies in the world today look at life as something to be highly guarded and cherished, most societies want to protect life and the lives of the people that make up that society. Mind you, not all societies have this thought pattern, there are some radical followers of a twisted and demented mind set that have no regard for life and take the lives of others, and even offer their own life thinking that they can become gods and heroes through their acts of violence and destruction. Although their perverted actions cause tremendous devastation and heart ache, we should consider it a blessing that this little segment of demented people make up only a small part of the total population of the world. With the hatred they carry in their deceived hearts and the perverted propensity for cruelty and violence they possess, the number of innocent people killed and mutilated each year would be far higher were this group to be larger than it is.

For the vast majority of people in the world today the concept of life being something that is to be protected and cherished remains intact. And how ironic it is that even though for many, who are not of the Christian belief, they still share in the benefit of life and the mindset of sustaining life with this mindset being rooted in Jesus Christ whether they want to acknowledge this fact or not. It is the teachings of Jesus Christ, the teachings of Christianity, which says life is to be cherished and protected. The reason we Americans love and cherish life so much is because we were brought up under the banner of Jesus Christ, he being our Lord and Savior. And as we look at Jesus as being God, one of His names is “Jehovah Nissi” meaning “The Lord is our Banner”. The Nay Sayers may not like this but America was founded as a Christian nation and it was intended to be a Christian nation, that was the intent of our Founding Fathers, and it is part of the Christian’s belief and teachings that we hold life to be very dear. My friends, I say to you that it is high time we announce to the world and in particular the Nay Sayers of America, and our elected politicians that our faith and belief lie in the One Eternal God and Lord of All Creation! It’s high time … no it’s well past the time when we, the family of Christian believers let everyone know that we are the majority and the anti-Christ is the minority and always will be to the praise and glory of God, Amen.

In the news media of recent times there has been much said about life and if we’ve followed the news much we’ve read or heard about man’s attempt to assist God in creating life through the morally reprehensible practice of cloning human life. If we’ve been in church where they should be talking about this, or have done any reading on our own from the Christian perspective on the subjects of cloning, which is trying to create life outside of God’s ordained order, or the sustaining of human life through the use of artificial means. If we have been a party of either of these two avenues of enrichment we would have seen or heard that there are many people who have and are searching the scriptures trying to see what the Bible says about life and the heroic efforts of modern medicine and science in their combined efforts to sustain life at all costs. Our court system has been overwhelmed with lawsuits and appeals pertaining to the sustaining or ending of life dependent upon whom has filed the suit. We have seen one such case in recent times where the courts battled for years over one young woman, Terry Schrivo, she was living in a comatose state with her husband and her parents arguing over whether to allow the her to die of starvation by stopping her feeding through the artificial means of a feeding tube due to her inability to eat on her own. Although the woman needed no assistance in breathing, her inability to eat or perform the other body functions we all take for granted, things such as walking or talking or making any kind of movement on her own was not possible. In the end it was the courts decision to allow the removal of her feeding tube and over a series of days the world watched as her body withered away, each internal organ shutting down until at last her spirit returned to her Lord from whence it came.

During the same time frame we watched as the Roman Catholic Pope, the late Pope John Paul, his life also coming to an end, his life sustained by the same method of feeding as Terry Schrivo’s, his life sustained by the feeding tube she was denied. I personally found it to be of great interest that the Roman Catholic Pope had just one year earlier issued a “Papal Bull” or official statement endorsing the use of the feeding tube if nourishment was not obtainable through the normal method of consumption. The Pope’s statement was issued a full year before the story of the woman gripped the world’s media, and little did Pope John Paul know that he would be the recipient of this same means of nourishment to sustain his life for a time until his life ended.
I would imagine that just about everyone has at one time or another made the statement about himself or herself, or about someone else, that they “ need to get a life”. Of course that is using the word “Life” out of context, it’s not saying that the subject of the statement, the person the statement was directed at, doesn’t have God given or blessed life in them, it’s not saying that they don’t have “Life”, that they don’t have life as in the opposite, that they are dead. It’s just saying that while they do have life, the life they do have needs an injection of something to make that life a little more fulfilling, more vibrant. Most often when we say, “They need a life” the implication is that the person needs something added to their life to fill up the gaps of free time they seem to have so much of, and so much of that free time is spent with their nose meddling in our affairs, often they are deeply embedded in our life.

A major part of the American culture and concept of life is found in our Declaration of Independence, which talks of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This wonderful document states in part; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Although we could designate an entire teaching to the beauty and connection to God of this special document written so long ago by the Founding Fathers. That isn’t the intent of this teaching so we won’t further address that topic. If they, the Founding Fathers, were alive today they would be in the forefront leading a revolt against our government and what this country has become in it’s denial and rejection of God and his precepts. The Founding Fathers felt that it was “self-evident” that we were created by God. “Self-evident”, this simple little word consisting of eleven letters means, “You don’t have to spend a lot of time and millions of dollars in legal fees and court costs.” Self-evident means; “There is no discussion needed, God is God, God created us and that’s the end of the story!”

Sorry, got a little side tracked there, time to return to the sanctity of life. As a people why should we fell that life is sacred? Why should we feel that life is something to be held up or elevated as holy or pure? Well to start with, all life originates in and through the will of God. If we were to read the “Genesis” account of creation we would see that everything we see and know of is from and through the will of God, God willed everything into being and existence. Everything! I don’t care what it is, where its at or how long its been here, if its here it’s here because God willed it to be here, if its here it is because it was in the will of God to have made it. If we can taste it, touch it, smell it, look at it or even think of it, God created it, it originated in the will of God. God created everything from nothing and there is nothing we can think of or comprehend in our minds that didn’t have its origin in God’s creation.

You may have heard the little story about the time when God and a group of scientists were debating about God being the creator of everything; the scientists insisted that they could create a person outside of the will of God using all of their skills and knowledge of science. They insisted that God allow them to show him just how they could do this and finally God agreed, telling them to go ahead and create a person without his assistance. The first thing the scientist did was to gather a small amount of dirt because in that dirt was found all the same elements that compose man and God had to stop them for a little instruction. “No, no boys, you can’t use my dirt, use your own.” The point is that there isn’t a thing we’ve made that doesn’t have its origin rooted in something that God created. Man has never “created” anything out of nothing, he’s made things using what was already here, and he’s just rearranged the order of that thing to make what we call “Something New”. If we take a tree and turn it into paper is it something new or just a tree now in a different shape? God created the tree, he created the water we use to soften the tree, and he created the chemicals we use to alter the wood fiber. If I give you a cake and you cut out little circles and decorate them and call them cupcakes is this something new made from nothing or isn’t it still just the original cake altered by someone else’s intervention?

Now, although we have to accept that God created everything, we don’t have to accept or consider all things sacred. Pantheism looks at all things as sacred, the Pantheist says that God is in everything and thusly; everything is to be considered sacred and worshiped as such. This friend is not true; this concept has no scriptural basis. In all of God’s creation there is only one thing we will find as something to be considered sacred, in all of God’s creation, water and land, plants and animals, the sky and stars, in all of it there is only one thing that is considered sacred, man and woman, human life. When we read the creation account as found in the Bible we see that God created all things, we read that God spoke them into existence and that it was good. But that’s all it says, that it was good. But when we get to the creation of man and woman, then the account goes into far more detail. Once we reach the portion of the creation story telling us how God made man we get a description of not only how he made us, again by speaking us into existence, but also what he made us from, dirt, and how life was instilled in us. (Genesis 2:7) “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” The apostle Luke tells of how the apostle Paul restates this in the book of Acts. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” (Acts 17:24-25)

God took the dust of the earth, he gently and lovingly formed it into just what he wanted, the shape of man, and then he took his breath, his Holy Breath, the very essence of God, and he breathed it into the man. And so man, formed from the elements of the earth, shaped by God, and in God’s image, is filled with God’s own breath and with that Holy Breath comes life, now the life in man is sacred because God is sacred. When God first made man, man was pure, there was no sin in him, no flaws, no personal agenda, no lust, greed, no nothing other than the pure ingredients God used including his own Holy breath.

Plants have life, are not plants a living thing? They grow and they die, they contain life, but plants aren’t sacred. Likewise animals, they too have life, they live, and they breathe and eat and reproduce. If anyone knows me at all they can attest that I am a real animal lover, right now I have two dogs and four cats, I’ve had just about every kind of domestic animal a person can have and a few that were not domestic, and shouldn’t have been in my care or home, I’d have a few less scars on my body if I had left them alone. The point I’m trying to make is that although animals are cute and playful they are still just pets, they are not sacred. Each pet has its own personality and is uniquely individual but this doesn’t make them sacred, whether it’s Fluffy the cat or Bessie the cow, dependent upon the culture in which you live, they are both eatable. In Iceland, they have a far different view of horses than we do in America, in Iceland horses are raised as a food item; they aren’t viewed as pets; they are viewed as the “Main Course” at dinnertime. There was a time when horse meat was offered in America not so long ago, I think it was back in the 70’s when this occurred, when there was a strong drive to mass produce horse meat for consumption. But the American public couldn’t get over the concept of eating the family pet. What sets man and animals apart is the breath of God. When God breathed life into man he also breathed into him his soul. It’s the having a soul that makes us special over plants and animals. In the grand scheme of things there isn’t a big difference between a cow and a carrot, they are both a source of food for man, neither has a soul, neither has a spirit part on life. Man is different, man is composed of the same elements as the cow, we are both made of the same organic materials just arranged differently, but we have been filled with Holy Breath, its that Holy Breath, God’s Ruah, the breath of God, this is what makes us special and sacred. This is why cannibalism is considered so vile and repulsive to most societies. And even in the society of those practicing cannibalism they don’t look at eating human flesh as a source of food, it’s to instill fear in their enemies, it’s to show or establish territory lines, it’s saying “You don’t want to enter our area, keep out”. Or it’s part of a demented religious practice, but the consumption of human flesh isn’t looked upon as a source of food.

Since all mankind, both men and women, are made in the image of God, all life is sacred and all life is precious. And it seems as if mankind has a hard time accepting this principle. Man places so much importance on his wealth, there is almost nothing men or women won’t do or try in an effort to increase their wealth. So often men and women do things to gain or obtain wealth that places their life in jeopardy, physical danger, mental stress far beyond what is needed, poor eating habits or poor and improper rest all done to increase that almighty bottom line. And regardless of how much a man or woman accumulates in the end it’s all for naught. As we start to come close to the end of our lives and we can see what damage our labors have done to us. We would do anything to reverse the effects of our lifestyle but by then it’s too late for most. Look at how many people are willing to spend every cent they have for just one more year of life, one more month or even a few more days. No matter how we make our living or what we do to gain our livelihood, we need to realize that sustaining life is of far more value than possession of a house or car; of far more value than any article of clothing or the number of toys we have in the end. I’ve seen two bumper stickers that pertain to this; the one said “He with the most toys in the end wins” and the other said, “He with the most toys is still dead in the end”. I personally think the second one is the real truth.

King Solomon realized this and he wrote about it in his book “Ecclesiastes” which is found in the Old Testament. Here are Solomon’s thoughts on working and trying to accumulate wealth taken from the second chapter; “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This toll is meaningless. So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; ever at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless”. All of it is meaningless, what is having a great number of possessions going to do for us if we loose our life trying to gain them? Life is sacred, possessions are not.

Please don’t take this in a wrong way; I’m not advocating that we need to live a pauper’s life or to not have anything in our homes. That is not my intent, but we need to be able to keep things in perspective, we need to know and differentiate between what we need and separate that from what we want. Our needs are just that, needs, our wants on the other hand can lead us to ruin, and this is what I am advocating we guard against. If our “Wants” are leading us to an early grave then they just aren’t worth it, there is nothing more sacred than life other than God himself. God has preordained for each of us just how many days we are to have on this planet (Psalm 139:16b “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”) but we can alter this number by poor choices and poor habits, God gave us free will, and although God preordained our number of days in his love for us, by giving us free will he also opened a door that allows us to exercise that free will and we can prematurely bring about the end of our life. This isn’t to say that we have a will stronger than God’s, we don’t. The same God that preordained the number of days we will have is the same God that preordained what is going to happen when we make poor choices. God has given us the options, but he’s also laid out the consequences for those options. The same God that says, “If you live by my rules and under my guidance you will have a long and prosperous life” is the same God that says, “If you violate my rules and live outside of my guidance you are seeking an early ruin and death.” Again looking to the Wisdom of Solomon in his writing as found in Ecclesiastes 11 and 12 “Light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all. But let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything to come is meaningless. Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment. So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, "I find no pleasure in them"- before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain; when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, when the grinders cease because they are few, and those looking through the windows grow dim; when the doors to the street are closed and the sound of grinding fades; when men rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint; when men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets. Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it”. Oh how true this is, life is precious and sacred, remember God in all of life and enjoy life to the fullest. Our Lord wants us to enjoy life and the blessings he’s given us. If we have family, enjoy that family! If we have friends, then by all means enjoy those friends. Seek out and enjoy all of God’s blessings, but do so wisely, in activities that will add to our number of days not subtract from them.

To fully enjoy life we need to have a spiritual life in conjunction with our physical life. To fully enjoy life men and women need to have a covenant relationship with their God. By covenant I mean we need to have an agreement, a promise, a pledge with God that isn’t broken but remains intact and viable. But how do we open the door to this spiritual life? Man can only have spiritual life through faith in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on the cross under the ever-watchful eye of Father God. It is through the work of Jesus at the cross, his death and his resurrection from death that allows us to partake in a true spiritual life. There are many false or imitation spiritual lives to be lead, the spirit of deception calls to us offering a deceptive alternative life, but the true life is found only through Jesus Christ.

And what is the nature of this spiritual life? To start with, it is a new life, something that is vastly different than the life we live without Jesus living in us. It’s life that is completely surrendered to God and in total rejection of our old life. (1st Peter 1:3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”. Our new spiritual life is a new hope, a new birth, and it’s glorious beyond compare. Our new spiritual life is true life; this isn’t something that is artificial. (1st Timothy 6:19) “In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of life that is truly life.” You see, life without God isn’t really life at all, it is only partial life, and a major segment of life is missing if we don’t have God living in us. For men and women, life without God is like wandering from false hope to false hope, from false promise to false promise, always seeking a sure place to drop anchor and being able to harbor in calm and warm waters. But all we ever found was turbulence and icy cold water, never a place to harbor or drop anchor because the conditions were always stormy. Friend, we can find safe harbor in Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ there is safety from the storms of life, there is shelter from the winds and waves, there is protection and truth as we find safe harbor in the shadow of the cross.

Another nature of our spiritual life is that it offers the believer eternal life. (Romans 5:21) “So that, just as sin reined in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” When our spiritual life was non-existent or fragmented, we walked in sin and darkness; the just reward for a sinful life is death eternal. But by grace, grace being “unmerited favor”, or “something we did not deserve or were not entitled to” because no one deserves salvation from sin based upon his or her own merit. But by this grace, which only comes through Jesus Christ, we can walk and live in light, the light of God rather than walking and living in the darkness of the sin nature and obtain eternal life. The mind of man has a hard time formulating a concept of eternal life; we can understand the concept of “Now” and “Tomorrow” and of our “Past”. But the concept of “Eternal” is beyond our ability to fully grasp. We can talk to our parents or our grandparents and ask of our family history; this we can grasp, we can understand the past. We can grasp the concept of a few hundred years with little or no trouble, we call it our family tree and it’s something we can look at, many families have one in a large family Bible. We can understand the present, its where we are at now, we may not be able to understand the world in which we find ourselves with all of the uncertainty and chaos going on around us, but we can understand that we are alive and living right now. And we can understand something about our future, not all of it but to some degree we can understand the concept of our future, our immediate future. Depending upon what age we are right now we can think of the future as a very limited number of years. To a person of twelve or thirteen years of age or younger, thinking about the future means thinking about what is going to happen tomorrow or next week or even next month, but anything beyond that is usually to much to comprehend. To a person in their late teens to late thirties we tend to think more along the lines of looking foreword in segments of twenty or so years at a time, we start thinking about future employment, having a family, marriage, college for the children. Then we get to the forties and beyond and we start thinking of the future as hopefully another forty years or more, retirement, grandchildren, enjoying what we’ve worked for, and yes; even death. But man has a hard time thinking beyond death, we have a hard time thinking of the “Eternal”. But “Eternal” is what Jesus gives us, “Eternal” is glory; “Eternal” is living in the very presence of God Almighty in His heavenly domain. Think of the blessing that will be! Friend, there is only one source for the eternal life we’ve just talked about, and that source is Jesus Christ and Christ alone. One of the scriptures that states this best and in it’s simplest form is (1st John 5:11-12); “And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” If we have the Son of God we have the life, if we don’t have the Son we have no life, it can’t be stated any simpler than that! This passage can’t be twisted or manipulated to say anything other than what is plainly says, there is one way, one path, one road and any other path takes us nowhere.

The last point to be brought foreword is found rooted in (Psalm 16:11). “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at you right hand.” Found sheltered in our spiritual life is an abundant life today. The psalmist said: “You fill me with joy in your presence”. Notice this is in the present tense; this is for now, today. God isn’t saying that this filling is something that will happen in the future, it’s not something that is going to take place after we’ve been called to glory, this is something we can have right now. Knowing the path of life brings filling right now, and what is the path of life? It’s Jesus Christ and walking out a life in accordance to the scriptures of God. The psalmist said “You fill me with joy”, what can be more abundant or copious than being filled? The farmer who is looking at his barns filled to bursting with the fruits of his labors says that he has an abundant crop. The store merchant who has just had a great string of holiday sales says the purchases were abundant for the season. (John 10:10) says, “The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).” {The Amplified Bible}

Having life more abundantly through Jesus Christ is capable of possessing a dual meaning or purpose, and the result of both meanings is a sacred life. The first meaning is life more abundantly, right here and now. When we have Jesus in our life we have more color, more radiance, we feel more vitality and find more meaning in life. Not only do the big things of life bring us joy, but the little things as well bring us wonderful joy and that joy has a longer shelf life, it doesn’t fade as quickly as it did before we met Jesus. We find that our laughter originates more from the heart and its of a purer nature, our joys are no longer simply on the surface to be blown away by the winds of the world, they have a deep root to our inner being and stem from God’s love that is alive inside of us. When we have life in Jesus we have the ability to look at obstacles that once appeared as solid concrete walls of great height and length and suddenly we see that although there may still be some walls out there in our path, what was once thought to be impossible to pass through, around or over now has little cracks that allows God’s light to filter through and shed light in what was once a place of darkness. The things we once looked at as impossible to overcome are now looked at as stepping-stones we can use as we work our way through the hills and valleys of life. When Jesus said that he came that we may have life and more abundantly he was saying that he wants us to have a fuller life, a richer life until he calls us to glory.

The second half of this dualism is found in the ultimate future. Jesus wants us to have a more abundant life in the heavens; he wants us to have a richer life as his bride in glory. The scriptures tell us that Jesus is going to be the groom in this heavenly divine wedding to which we are all invited as his bride. Being the bride of Jesus will be the ultimate in sacred life, it will be far more abundant and fulfilling that we can ever imagine.

In closing, have you ever wondered about the wording used in the Bible when it says that we are to be the bride of the Lamb? Ponder this thought for a moment. At a wedding the bride is always beautiful, always radiant and lovely. The bride is always filled with laughter and joy, it’s her special day and she is the center of attention, not only in the eyes of the guests; but she is the total center of attention to her husband. The husband is completely focused on her and no one else. The wedding day is a day of laughter and dancing. It’s a day of feasting on the best of delicacies, the choicest of foods and the finest of wines, it’s a day we would like to last forever, never ending. This is what we are offered by Jesus, this is what he would like for each of us to experience. Jesus wants each of us to be his bride, he wants each of us to feel his love and know that we are in the center of his attention, that we can be his bride and that for every day throughout all eternity each day will be special, new and exciting, basking in the love of God the Father and worshiping God forever. And that my friend is a sacred life, when we stand as the bride beside Jesus our groom and are forever surrounded in love. Amen.
Grace & peace