“Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean.” That’s the message the Lord spoke to Moses at the conclusion of Leviticus 18, as Israel was being ushered into the promised land—a land they are still trying desperately to hold and defend. “But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you, lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.” 

Isn’t it interesting that the warning to Israel wasn’t that God would banish them if they made the land unclean but that the land itself would retch them out. There’s a harmony, apparently, to the created order such that even “mindless” soil cannot stomach moral rebellion. The secular mind may have no categories for such thinking, but the more you analyze the life trajectory of those who keep God’s statutes and those who don’t, the more you realize they’re not random restrictions on fun. They’re protections against that which would destroy us. “You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them,” says the LORD your God, because “if a person does them, he shall live.”

No doubt you already know the five or maybe six abominations to which the Lord here refers, the “abominable customs” that were practiced by both the Egyptians from whom the Israelites were delivered and the Canaanites whom they would supplant. Actually, I jest. My assumption is that you have no idea what the listed abominations actually are. If they were commonly known, I suspect that both Israel and America would be very different places. But we forget—and suffer for it. So by way of reminder, these are the practices which the land cannot endure:

• Incest
• Adultery
• Infanticide
• Homosexuality
• Bestiality

Until relatively recently, everything on this list was publicly scorned and outlawed by those in the West. Now two are broadly celebrated and three are broadly protected by law. Only incest and bestiality remain legally and morally beyond the pale—even as the irreligious struggle to articulate exactly why they’re wrong. Is that progress, would you say? Evidence of our enlightenment? That we now take pride in both sexual deviance and baby killing and believe adultery to be a merely private affair.

I want you to notice the pairing which begins in Leviticus 18:21 because it offers insight into something that has perplexed me recently. Specifically, why has the promotion of abortion and the promotion of homosexuality become a joint venture? Why does the abortion industry make it such a priority to celebrate homosexuality and the gay pride movement make it such a priority to celebrate abortion? On the surface, there’s no reason for these issues to be so intertwined. They are, after all, mutually exclusive practices—at least in theory, but then you read the following in the law that was given by God to Moses:

You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

As I’ve outlined before, the giving of children to Molech was nothing short of child sacrifice—which is made explicitly clear in 2 Kings 23:10. “When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you,” we read in Deuteronomy 18, “you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations.” More precisely, “There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering.” And “if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” (Lev 20:13) God calls both baby killing and sexual relations between men abominations, and he does so in direct succession. In other words, this otherwise irrational pairing actually finds its roots in the Pentateuch. So if you’re wondering why these disparate entities have become such unyielding cheerleaders for each other, here’s one possible explanation. Demonic forces are driving them both. Why else would abortion advocates so relentlessly push LGBTQ+ ideology and gay pride advocates so relentlessly push abortion?

The only abomination listed in Leviticus 18 that is not explicitly sexual in nature is the sacrificing of children. But the implication is that it is directly tied to the others. Immediately preceding the condemnation of baby killing is this warning. “And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her.” You see, one of the fruits of sexual sin is unwanted children, born outside the confines of marriage, and it seems fairly clear that one of the ways the ancient pagan world dealt with the children conceived through illicit sexual unions was to abort them—after they were born, on the altar of a demon god. The in-utero baby killing techniques that are all the rage today were still millennia away, but the end result was the same. A dead baby. That, after all, is the price society pays for our throwing off of sexual restraint.

Even if your biblical literacy is not the best, you’ve no doubt already guessed what Israel did upon entering the promised land. It seems all but inevitable given what we know of human nature. And it’s the same story that’s been playing out since the garden. Not surprisingly, Israel did precisely what God commanded them not to do. Rather than forego sexual sin and perversion, they sought a more pragmatic solution. Just as the wicked nations that preceded them, they started sacrificing their own children—their own flesh and blood—on the altar of convenience. This is the word of the Lord that was delivered to the prophet Jeremiah and recorded in the 32nd chapter:

Behold, I am giving this city into the hands of the Chaldeans and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall capture it. The Chaldeans who are fighting against this city shall come and set this city on fire and burn it, with the houses on whose roofs offerings have been made to Baal and drink offerings have been poured out to other gods, to provoke me to anger. For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth. The children of Israel have done nothing but provoke me to anger by the work of their hands, declares the LORD. This city has aroused my anger and wrath, from the day it was built to this day, so that I will remove it from my sight because of all the evil of the children of Israel and the children of Judah that they did to provoke me to anger—their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They have turned to me their back and not their face. And though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instruction. They set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

Nebuchadnezzar was a wicked king, and the Chaldeans were a wicked people—and yet God used them to judge the wickedness of his own people. When God’s hand of protection was removed, Israel could no longer overcome the evil surrounding them. That too is a story almost as old as time—which brings us to today. The world’s unyielding and undying hatred of the Jews is a phenomenon for which no secular explanation makes any sense. It’s totally irrational—just like those “Queers 4 Palestine” signs that have started popping up. The left should love Israel for its secularism, its “tolerance,” and its embrace of progressive social policy. But it doesn’t. It would rather link arms with Israel’s terrorist enemies. You know, the ones who literally execute infidels. What can this be but demonic? As Andrew Klavan recently declared, “people hate Jews because they hate God.” It’s as simple as that, and yet Israel itself has largely walked out on the God to whom they’re so inextricably linked—creating a strange web of alliances. A recent National Review article highlights the dichotomy this way:

Ironically, a lot of American pro-choicers are shouting for the support of the anti-abortion regime (Palestine), and a lot of American pro-lifers are demonstrating their support of the regime that permits, and, in some cases, pays for abortion (Israel). As you may have guessed, in the Palestinian territories, abortion is almost entirely banned… Those angry progressive campus activists have found a strict, religiously-based, anti-abortion regime that they’re willing to defend . . . in Hamas.

When Hamas terrorists slaughtered close to 900 Jewish civilians on October 7, at least 29 of the victims were Israeli children. Some 30 more children were taken hostage. In an effort to galvanize global outrage towards the unprompted attack, “Israel's government showed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO defence ministers graphic images of dead children.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s staff posted pictures to social media “of a dead infant in a pool of blood and the charred body of a child.” When innocent children are violently torn apart, the world takes notice. With one exception. 

Every day in Israel, approximately 50 Jewish children are legally killed by Jewish “doctors.” We call it abortion. These children may not be literally sacrificed on the altar of Molech, but their deaths are no less demonic for all the secular trappings. When Israel first legalized abortion in 1977, a termination committee was created to grant or deny the approval of each one. If it strikes you as incredibly perverse that a “termination committee” should be established in Israel—just a generation removed from the Holocaust—to decide which Jewish children could be lawfully torn apart, you’re not alone. It used to be that you could only get an abortion in Israel if you were unmarried, or younger than 18, or older than 40, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Now the termination committee rubber stamps them all. Ninety nine point five percent of all abortion petitions were granted in 2021. And when the American Supreme Court finally struck down Roe last year, Israel went the other way—doing away with the approval process almost entirely. “Israel,” the AP reported, “eased its regulations on abortion access in what the country’s health minister said was a response to last week’s ‘sad’ U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.” Women in Israel now have “access to abortion pills through the country’s universal health system” and are no longer required to “appear physically before a special (approval) committee.”

Hamas has a well-deserved reputation for not caring about the preservation of innocent life. They’ll use civilians as human shields and turn hospitals into weapons caches if it will help them kill more Jews. Israel, by contrast, has a reputation for going to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian deaths. And yet. And yet, Israel kills more of its own children each day than Hamas could ever dream of—doing to itself what its enemies have been fruitlessly pursuing for thousands of years. In a world of antisemitic hate, Israel’s abortion practice may be the most antisemitic of all. As One for Israel observes, “One hundred times more Israelis have been killed by abortion than by all the wars and terrorism attacks in Israel’s modern history combined.”

Israel and America both talk about the crucial importance of protecting innocent human life, and yet we both sacrifice our own children en masse. That doesn’t justify anything that Hamas has done to terrorize its Jewish neighbors, but how can we categorically deny that there could be any connection between child sacrifice and the social, moral, and political upheaval we see all around us? To say that a society can blithely engage in child sacrifice without there being serious existential consequences strikes me as shallow and naive. Not to mention unbiblical. I’ll close with a return to Jeremiah 32. This is the promise God makes to Israel after they are removed from the land:

Now therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, ‘It is given into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword, by famine, and by pestilence’: Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.

The land may be unforgiving, but God is not. And by the grace of God, the people of Israel have been gathered back from the countries to which they were driven. Again. But their hold seems a perpetually tenuous one as religious devotion continues to decline. Pew Research reported in 2016 that a “plurality of Israeli Jews say religion is not important to them.” The Times of Israel added in 2021 that though “religion has (an) outsized role in Israel,” most of its Jews [are not] observant.” The end result is an increasingly secular nation that is hated not for its devotion to God, but for God’s devotion to it. Let God be true though every man be found a liar! Does that mean Israel gets a pass for the immorality it now sanctions within its borders? I don’t think so. Hope in God, but do not presume on his patience. You cannot engage in wickedness and still presume that Abraham is your spiritual father. The kindness of God is meant to lead to repentance—not indulgence. We can and should place our hope in the mercy of God, but we must not forget that it is righteousness that delivers from death. And righteousness that delivers innocent, helpless, tiny, unborn babies from the violence of abortion.