Sacrificing Our Children

As the Bible reading plan my wife and I are following has been taking us through the Historical Books of the OT, we have been running frequently into the ancient pagan practice of sacrificing one’s child to the gods. It was supposed to be a distinguishing hallmark among the Israelites that they did NOT practice such a horrible thing.

God set his people apart from this practice even before the law, by forbidding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It seems to me that God led Abraham right up to the brink of this practice to affirm Abraham’s commitment as being as stout as any pagan’s. But then God stopped Abraham short of follow-through. In this, God showed mankind that what was both impossible for man to do, and unthinkable for man to try – that is, to appease God by the sacrifice of man’s own offspring – was both appropriate and necessary for only God himself to do. By this, of course, I mean that God offered his only Son once for all sins.

Sadly, long after Abraham, God’s people failed to be distinct in even this most heinous practice. They not only worshipped the false gods of those pagans they failed to dispossess in Canaan, they even came to emulate the practice of sacrificing their own children on altars to false gods like Baal and Molech (2 Kgs 16:3; 17:17; cf. 2 Kgs 3:27; 23:10; Ps 106:34-39).

Ugh! We recoil in disgust, don’t we? How could anyone – let alone God’s people – fall into such gross sin and violence? Perhaps we know all too well.

I have concluded we in our modern American culture may actually have done worse. The way the OT narratives read, it seems that when the ancient pagan sacrificed his child it was out of a high level – misguided, yes – but a high level of devotion to a false god. And these sacrifices seemed largely to be offered as a final step of desperation (see 2 Kgs 3:27 listed above). But many in our culture sacrifice their children for mere convenience, out of a high devotion only to one’s own interests.

Two huge American issues come to my mind as illustrating the offhanded ease with which we sacrifice our children: abortion-on-demand and foster care.

The decisions handed down by the courts in 1973 that attached the fate of the unborn child to the mother’s “right to privacy” paved the way for millions of children to be sacrificed. Certainly, some mothers have had to make hard decisions, like in pregnancies that came through rape or that posed an existential threat to the life of the mother if carried to term. But the vast majority of abortions carried out in our country have had nothing to do with excruciating moral dilemmas. They have been matters of convenience, a cold-hearted solution to the natural consequences of sexual promiscuity. But we now not only have an epidemic of children sacrificed before birth, but also of those being sacrificed after. 

My wife and I have fostered dozens of children. We have seen firsthand, and heard the stories of parents so caught up in their own indulgences and whims that they have sacrificed their children to the gods of pleasure, leisure, and every kind of addiction – in short, to the god of self. The “higher power” a typical westerner hopes to appease is his or her own desire. So, parents get drunk, or high, or indulge in every kind of violent power struggles or promiscuity while their kids become currency, or slaves, or – at best – just try to fend for themselves.

And, sadly, like with Israel of old, the distinction between the pagan parent and the Christian parent has all but disappeared in many homes.

I understand that most parents I am describing were already themselves victims of the same kind of child-sacrifice, and that we are called to have compassion for them as well. But parenting is a responsibility for which God holds us accountable. And God has never let slide a culture that abuses and neglects the poor and weak. How much more that society who has some of the richest resources ever in the history of humankind.

What do we do? We call sin sin. We love the hurting parents, and try to help them love and value the kids they’ve been hurting. And many times, it means loving the kids well, when their parents won’t or can’t. Foster, adopt, or mentor a child.

The Apostle James put it this way:

²⁷ Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:27, CSB)