What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?

(Christianity’s  Impact On The Value Of Human Life)

 I. Jesus Christ, the greatest person who ever lived on this earth has forever Let me distinguish here what I am talking about. I’ve spent many months talking about Jesus…on purpose. My entire focus has been on the spiritual aspects of what He provided for us by coming to this world as a man, taking our sins on himself, dying in our place, then defeating death and sin, and satan, and rising from the dead bringing eternal life to all who would believe.

changed almost every aspect of human life!

… and many, many simply don’t know it at all.

What I’m going to be talking about in these next three sermons and reinforcing in the Bible studies on Wednesday evenings is different than anything I’ve been saying this last year or anytime in the history of this church.

John records in his Revelation of Jesus Christ that Jesus said these words:

(Revelation 21:5) And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. (KJV)

(Revelation 21:5) He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” ..(missed the word, “Behold“ look closely, examine carefully)

It’s important to understand proper theology….Jesus formed a perfect and wonderful world when He said “Let their be” and all this came into existence:

(John 1:1-3) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Sin wrecked what God had made and brought it’s destruction into every area of human existence. Jesus death and resurrection didn’t just bring change into the inner man but he also brought sweeping changing into the sinful world around us. He began the process of

We’ve mentioned here before, but it’s still a potent truth. Jesus birthday forever changed the way we measure time. The whole world now counts time as BC and AD.

A.D. – Anno Domini -_____________________

When the atheistic Soviet Union wrote their constitution in 1917 they were forced to reference in the constitution the phrase “In the year of our Lord.”

You can go into a New age library and find rows of books proclaiming that man is sovereign and God is the figment of weak people’s imaginations and every one of them are required by law to reference the phrase “In the year of our Lord”….but that’s a minor point compared to what I’m going to show you.

Jesus taught:

(Matthew 13:31-32) He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” (NIV)

That is what has happened in the last two thousands years ; from the humble beginnings in in a manger in Bethlehem, this One who many today scorn as irrelevant is still proclaimed as Savior of the world by some 1.8 billion people in almost every country in the world.

In addition to that his influence and teaching can be directly tied to massive world changes in the areas of :

1) High regard for human life

2) Worldwide impact on moral values…civilizing the uncivilized

3) Impact on health and medicine…hospital construction

4) Contribution toward freedom for all and civil liberties

5) Contributions to the poor and needy in our world

6) Impact on science

7) Impact on economics

8) Establishment of sexual values and family formation

9) Contribution to education and the formation of schools and universities

10) Impact on arts and music

11) Representative government the separation of political powers

12) The codifying and writing of languages

13) Elevated value for the common person

14) Elevated value of women

15) Millions of changed lives from societal liabilities to assets

As I show you this stuff, it will become clearer and clearer that Christ and Christianity have literally been at the very roots of the development of civilizations as we know it. Completely aside from the whole issue of salvation from sin and eternal life….

If Jesus Christ had not come into this world; our world would be a very different place …..from Washington, to Moscow, to Hong Kong, to Mexico City. If you think there are things about this world that you don’t like not now …try to imagine your community without the positive effects Christianity has brought. Maybe you, like many struggle to understand the full significance of the “mustard seed of Christianity, growing like a tree throughout the world….. That’s why I’m preaching these three messages.

There are those in our society, (who are becoming increasingly more vocal), who try to paint Christianity as an annoying tumor on the side of an enlightened world. They literally have no idea what they are talking about! Many world leaders have disdained Christ and Christianity and they are rotting in the grave…their accomplishments have turned to dust, but Christ and his worldwide accomplishments lives on.

Frederick Nietzsche, the nineteenth century atheistic philosopher who coined the phrase, “God is dead” said Christianity was a poison that had infected the whole world. He said, if Jesus hadn’t died as quick as he did, that “greater maturity” would have caused him to reject his own doctrines. Here’s a direct quote:

“I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions, it seeks to work the ultimate corruption… The Christian church has left nothing untouched by it’s depravity, it has turned every value into worthlessness, every truth into a lie, every integrity into baseness of soul.”

Many of Nietzsche’s idea’s were put into practice by one of his disciples: Adolph Hitler. In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler blamed Christians for carrying on the idea of Judaism and said he wanted to completely uproot Christianity once he had finished Uprooting the Jews.

Charles Markmann; who wrote a book on the history of the ACLU said:

If the otherwise admirable civilized pagans of Greece and Rome had had the sense to laugh Judaism into oblivion, we would have been spared the 2000 year sickness of Christianity.

Communism in Russia and China have tried desperately to wipe out the effects of Christianity by killing off thousands of believer only to have Millions more take their place. I showed you the statistic a while back that when Communism took over China there were only about one million believers….now there are:

More than 100,000,000!

Let’s talk for a bit about the poison that Christianity has brought to our world…

The devaluation of Human Life!

Once you lose sight of God and the fact that men and women are created in his image the value of an individual life falls off dramatically. Cain’s improper focus on God led to the murder of his brother and if you are a student of history at all you know that the early history of the world is a history of paganism and barbarianism.

In all civilizations where Christianity had not touched; the taking of another human life was not something to be concerned about. In today’s civilization, where the true God of heaven is absent, we find atrocities that defy our ability to understand. We can’t even conceive of the atrocities of a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein. We can’t even fathom the mind of a suicide bomber. I read a book from a prisoner in a modern concentration camp in North Korea …. I couldn’t finish the book.

You must understand….the only reason you value life, like you do, is because of your Christian value system. The more our nation moves away from our roots and toward a post-Christian future the cheaper life is becoming….it has started with our unborn infants, will eventually move to the elderly, and then the unwanted in society…the deformed, the criminals, the unproductive, the Christians. Pastor…you are being overly dramatic…

No I’m not….read your history books!

In the ancient world, the pagan world, the world Jesus was born into it was common practice to sacrifice a child, Not one, thousands and thousand of children were murdered.

If you were being born in ancient Rome or in ancient Greece (and those were the civilized countries) a newborn came out into the most dangerous environment imaginable.

1) Abortion was considered a normal and desirable part of everyone’s lives.

2) It was perfectly common for an unwanted child to simply be placed in the woods for the wild animals to feed on, or for strange and perverted people to come along and retrieve for whatever purposes they intended.

3) Virtually all deformed babies were simply abandoned

4) If you were a girl your chances at survival and a good life were minimal

5) Romans considered the child the property of the Father…up until age eight he could kill or sell his child and it was considered simply a matter of wise economics.

6) Only about ½ of the children born lived beyond age eight.

Then came Jesus!

Why? Because the founder of our faith is the one who said:

(Matthew 19:14) Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (NIV)

In a day when children had no value.. Jesus elevated them to a preferred status. The early church were so forceful and faithful in there attempts to turn the horrible practices around that slowly but surely their views became the predominant views of the Romans themselves. Sometime around 300 AD (In the year of our Lord) Emperor Constantine

Enacted laws that give children the same rights as adults and made killing children a crime. They also promoted a practice that today we take for granted: Adoption

While we are on the subject of life let’s look at another aspect: Suicide!

If you are made in the image of God then taking your own life is perhaps the single greatest insult one could commit against God. In Godless societies today taking ones own life can be considered a badge of honor. Killing one’s self in battle is the highest form of human behavior.

Did you know that in ancient times suicide was considered an honorable way to go out. In 4000 years of Bible history only five people took their own life. In ancient Rome it was common for a great to “exercise his power of choice over his own body” Pontius Pilate committed suicide and nobody thought less of him for doing so. Christianity was an outspoken foe of taking ones own life in the ancient world and brought into the pagan world for the first time a sense that living until death was more noble than choosing to go out early under our own terms.

Interestingly, as our own country has become more post-Christian, the suicide rate has risen and we have even gone so far now as to toy with assisted suicide for the elderly or infirmed.

(Proverbs 8:35-36) For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the LORD. But whoever fails to find me harms himself; all who hate me love death.” (NIV)

We talk, even in political circles in our world, about the sanctity of human life. The word “sanctity” means holy, sacred unto God, that which God has declared to have great value!

To the humanist, or atheist, or even the unbeliever, there can be no such thing as the sanctity of life.

And that is showing up in our post-Christian world. We now have far greater penalties against endangering a turtle egg than we do against killing the egg of a human being created in God’s image. I’m not against protecting turtles but it seems odd to me that often those who raise there voices the loudest to save animals are also the loudest to give permission to terminate human babies.

Ted Turner said in Miami Beach in 1992:

Overpopulation is the cause of drive by shootings and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants.

The environmentalist magazine, Wild Earth said:

If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it might seem strange. But if you give it a chance I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions , of Earth dwelling species.

So much more to talk about on Wednesday Evening, Christianity’s contribution to women, the elderly, slavery, cannibalism…..

The moral base of any society can be judged by it’s view of human life!

In 1844 H.L. Hasting visited the Fiji islands. Life was very cheap. You could buy another human being for 7.00 or trade for one musket. They were cheaper than buying a cow! After purchase you could work them, whip, them, starve, them or eat them and no one would say a word. In fact, some were actually bought for the last purpose.

He returned several years later and found that one could not buy a human being for 7 million dollars and there were now some 1200 churches scattered throughout the islands. The gospel had been preached and people had learned that they were not there own, they were bought with a price, not silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

The cold hard reality is this, If Christianity had not penetrated into the United States many of us sitting in this room would never have lived long enough to be here today….

Conclusion:

1) Abortion disappeared in the early Church

2) Infanticide and Abandonment disappeared

3) The Church started taking in others abandoned children (Orphanages)

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“In the year of our Lord”