Lamar Howell's Weblog

[This thesis is in three parts with endnotes: The Blood of the Prophets, The Blood of the Slaves, The Blood of the Unborn, ]                                                                                                            

Part I: The Blood of the Prophets                                                                                                              

 I have been given complete authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach them to do all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.[1]

This statement which Jesus made to the disciples was really the heart of God to all Jews. The chosen people were supposed to take the message of their Messiah in order to make him the world’s Messiah. Before Jesus commanded them to go into all the world he told them he had complete authority over the earth. His words were the mandate to the Jews and his authority was his legal power to make it happen. They had no choice but to go. I believe I know why.

Jesus had earlier dropped hints that something would happen to Jerusalem, events which would cause an exodus from the city. At one point he told his disciples not to admire the temple, because it would be leveled to the ground.[2] He also told them that a crisis would come to the city which would make people flee without even having time to pack their belongings. [3] There is always a two-fold reason for divine crises, and a divine crisis was on the way. Jerusalem was about to be destroyed by the Roman general Titus. The first reason for the crisis was to compel the new Jewish believers to take the gospel to the world as Jesus had commanded. Scholars have corroborated this, saying that Rome’s attempts to break up Judaism and Christian sects had the effect of advancing evangelism.[4]                              

The second reason is a bit more elusive. Besides Jesus’ prediction of an invasion and the destruction of the temple, he made an alarming, provocative statement to the religious Jews. The blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, shall be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple; verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation”[5]                                                                                                           

In other words, one generation would pay for the prophets of God who were murdered over a period of 3,500 years. Jesus repeated himself to stress the certainty of this dire prediction. Thirty-seven years later [70 AD], Roman General Titus invaded and destroyed Jerusalem. The historian Josephus claims that 1,100,00 people died during the siege, 97,000 were captured and enslaved, and that many fled.[6] I have personally stood under the Arch of Titus in Rome, not knowing that the general had refused a wreath of victory, saying there was “no merit in vanquishing people forsaken by their God.” [7] The fact that the Jews were scattered around the world at that time is undisputed. What can be disputed is that all of them took the true gospel of God, the revelation of Jesus as Messiah. It seems unfair that a whole country essentially could be judged based on the acts of a few. Certainly not every Jew participated in the murder of the prophets from Abel to Zechariah, but they all had to pay the price. I’ll propose the reason why at the end of this three-part series.   

                                                                                                                                                                                      Part II    The Blood of the Slaves                                                                        

Slavery in the New World goes back to the late 1500s, and researchers have the proof. In the year 2000, reseachers found the remains of African slaves, authenticated through chemicals in tooth enamel, near the ruins of a colonial church in Campeche, on the coast of Mexico.[8] As for slavery in the British colonies, New England’s first slaveholder was a man by the name of Samuel Maverick.[9] He owned two African slaves in 1624, five years before the Massachusetts Bay colony was established. By 1860 the slave population had gone from two individuals to 4 million strong.[10]

In his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote that the United States would pay for the institution of slavery and for the mistreatment of millions of their fellow human beings. Douglas rails against the “corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical” Christians. He goes on to say the nation put a cloak of religion over slaves being prostituted, denied learning to read the Bible, separated from their families, fettered, beaten, and sometimes killed. He said that men were sold to build churches, women were auctioned off to support missions, and babies were bartered off to purchase Bibles. [11]

He ends his passionate speech with these somber words: “Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”[12] One generation was about to pay for 246 years of slavery in the United States.

Douglass predicted that if the nation failed to abolish slavery, slavery would abolish the nation. In his famous July 4^th speech, he had this to say: “And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation [Babylon] whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! [13] Twenty years later the Civil War broke out. Half a million Americans died as a result.

James Russell Lowell, an abolitionist poet had written in 1845 “Careless seems the great Avenger” but he stands in the shadows and watches over his own.[14] Sixteen years later, God stepped out of the shadows, and the Civil War broke out.                                                                                                                                         

Part III The Blood of the Unborn

It is chilling to entertain the thought that one generation, our generation, may have to pay the price for the blood of fifty million unborn children[15], but at the very least it would be fair. Jesus’ generation paid for 3,500 years worth of crimes and Frederick Douglas’ generation paid for 236 years of atrocities, so how could we complain about unfairness. After all, Roe V Wade happened, and is still happening, in our generation.[16]

One reason I believe my generation may pay for the blood of the unborn is because of a judicial principle established by God long before the law was given. “He who sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”[17] This principle of reciprocation – blood for blood – has a broader application than justice for the individual. Immutable principles apply on a personal and a national level.

So if this principle holds true, and it does, there must be justice for the murdered unborn, and that justice will come through war. “By man shall his blood be shed.” Man sheds man’s blood through warfare. War is often considered punishment for a nation’s irresponsible acts. [18]

Just this past January 22^nd protesters gathered in Washington to protest abortion, as they do every year. Could I be so bold as to say that our commemoration of this event has become more symbol than it is substance? The godless have institutionalized abortion; we have memoralized it. Who is more wrong? The National Memorial for the Unborn is located in Chattanooga, Tennessee in case anyone wants to go there, cry, and go away feeling better about our failure to end this holocaust.[19] Sipping a fresh latte helps take the lump out of the sympathizer’s throat. 

There are some direct parallels of abortion to slavery. The unborn are treated today much like slaves were once treated. They are considered non-persons. They have no voice nor do they have any rights. President Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act in 2004 but there are still arguments in many states as to how the law is to be applied and whether one can murder a fetus. If you could ask any slave, the right to not be murdered is hardly a right worth celebrating or which would afford a person human dignity.

Also, like slaves, the unborn are considered the property of another. The slave belonged to his master; the fetus is part of the woman’s body. Apes in zoos have responded to instances where a child fell into their pit by carefully picking up and cuddling the child or guarding the child till zoo officials arrived to help.[20] What would an ape do with a seven-month-old fetus? Probably anything other than throw it into a dumpster.         

I’ve read that before the Civil War, the subject of slavery came to be avoided in everyday public discourse. It had become the unpleasant Thing-not- talked-about. The same attitude is taking over today. No one wants to take on a seemingly unyielding topic. It seems irrelevant that the subject is as important as life and death. We have this tendency to think that dismissing something is dealing with it. We are only putting off the inevitable day of reckoning, just as the Jews ignored Christ and his warnings, and just as Americans ignored the abolitionists’ warnings in the days before the Civil War. We are doing the same thing today, ignoring the warnings and hoping someone else will resolve it. Like God?                                                      

Synopsis

Why our generation? Why Christ’s or Frederick Douglass’ generation? The reasons may be complex and many. Consider the following: when the cry or the case against the nation has reached heaven, when the cup of iniquity is full, when the hearts of the people have become hardened, when the ground becomes saturated with blood of the innocent, or when the crime has taken on exponential proportions. If you think about fifty million aborted, that is a full one-sixth of our current population. That, my friend, is exponential. Finally, it may be our generation because the accountability is placed on the generation responsible for rectitude. The Jews could have accepted Jesus Christ as Messiah. They failed. The slave-holders and congressmen could have abolished slavery. They refused. Our generation could have ended abortion. We faltered.                    

The irony of abortion in our nation is that we have made a truce with the enemy, yet the killing continues. Might I propose that the hidden power behind the abolition of abortion is greater than the apparent power to hold this nation together? The irony of slavery in America is that both sides lost – the states could have united with one purpose and abolished slavery. Instead, the Union dissolved and slavery was still abolished. The Emancipation Proclamation only proclaimed what dissolution of the Union had already done. Douglass’ prediction came true – slavery had abolished the nation. The irony of the scattering of the Jews is that they were supposed to scatter to the four corners of the earth anyway, as God’s chosen ones bringing the Messiah to the world. But had they accepted the Messiah and the Great Commission at the outset, at least they would have had time to pack for the journey. [21]. When we read the epistle of James we never think about his salutation, “James, to the twelve tribes scattered abroad.”[22]                                                            

Jesus – the murdered prophet – on the cross, prayed, “Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.”[23] Hear me out on this one – God did not answer this prayer. He held them accountable for the death of his son. We know this from the parable of the vineyard. [24] In this parable Jesus said the owner of the vineyard (God) would come and kill the farmers who killed his son (the Messiah). When Jesus told the Jews of his day that they would have to pay for the deaths of the prophets from the beginning of the world to Zechariah, the implication was that they would have to pay for the prophets up to and including those killed in their generation, including John the Baptist and Christ himself. Zechariah had a revelation of this and had already looked through the prophetic eyeglass and pronounced their doom in advance. As he lay dying he said “The Lord look upon it, and require it” [25] That is why Jesus’ generation paid the price. The Lord required Zechariah’s blood, but not then.                                                                                                                 

In conclusion, I would like to propose a hypothetical scenario. How many of the unborn in our nation were called to be prophets? Of fifty million precious lives, certainly some of them were called from the womb to be prophets. So, we too have killed the prophets, and there is no excuse for what we have allowed to go on for so long. Let me end by saying that there is hope for America. If we can stop the killing, we could see a modern Nineveh spared[26], and if we are spared we will scatter throughout the world with a message of magnanimity and national deliverance rather than as refugees. But we will have to do it as did Nineveh, with no promise from heaven. If we are unwilling to do this or unsuccessful in its execution, then how deplorably unsustainable the thought, how halting I speak, and what great trepidation I feel to have to utter these words to my beloved compatriots: There will be blood.