Bible Text: Luke 15:1-32 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Trinity 2023 | Abortion is evil because it makes man the determiner of the value of human life. Whether I or you, the government, a confused young woman or a selfish young man, human beings cannot be the ones who determine the value of human life. God creates life, He determines its value. The devil’s temptation of Eve in the Garden was to say she would be the creator, she would determine good and evil. He said, “You will be like God, knowing, determining, good and evil.” This is what sin does. It claims divinity, claims the status of God, the office of creating and of determining what is good and what is evil. I made the baby, I determine what to do with it. I made the money, I determine how to spend it. I produced the righteousness, I determine who measures up to it.
The Pharisees valued the tax collectors and sinners at nothing, because they fell prey to exactly this lie, that they and not God determine the worth of a human being. Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them. The pride of the Pharisees does not allow this to Jesus. They have determined themselves worthy and sinners unworthy. This is pride, the same pride that built the Tower of Babel into the heavens, the same pride that laughed at Noah when he preached repentance for a hundred years, the same pride that now names this month of June, that determines for itself what marriage is, that creates men out of women and women out of men, it is the pride that asserts its own righteousness and then judges others unworthy because they do not measure up. It is the pride of men who imagine that they are gods, who imagine they are the creators of reality. The Lord says, “I said you are gods, but you will die like men.”
The pride of Pharisees in their own righteousness is a lie. The Christian heart knows this. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. You do not set the standard. God does. And you have failed it. If the value of human life were determined by you meeting the standard of God’s holy law, you would be worth nothing. This is what contrition looks like, sorrow over sin, fear of God’s anger. This is what it looks like. It is crushing because it is the realization that really, truly, you have no value, if this is the standard, God’s expectations, God’s holy law, which you have failed. And this is a horror to think.
Thank God Jesus receives sinners and eats with them. Thank God there is a different standard by which He judges your value. That standard is Christ, that standard is God’s love.
God has implanted in our nature an intense desire to recover the things we have lost. Our care for what we have lost is greater than our care for what we still have. The patriarch Jacob had twelve sons, but when he loses the one, when he loses Joseph, the fact that he has eleven other sons is not a comfort. His intense desire is for the son he lost, for his Joseph. King David had many sons, but when he hears of the death of Absalom he says he wishes he had died in his place, his care is all for the lost one. And this is amazing, because Absalom was evil. Absalom’s sins were outrageously hideous. Absalom tried to kill his father. He slept with his father’s wives in broad daylight. He was a traitor. He was waging war against his own father, drove him from his own home and out into the wilderness. He repaid David’s kindness with betrayal. And David wanted nothing more than to regain this horrible son whom he lost. He wished he had died instead of him.
God put in our nature this desire to recover the lost because God wanted our nature to reflect His, He made us in His likeness, in His image, and though we lost that image, though this likeness is totally corrupted, still there is this dim reflection. David’s intense desire to recover His lost son Absalom is like a drop to the ocean of God’s desire to recover lost sinners. If you could quantify David’s desire or your desire to get back what you lost, and then multiply it by a million, maybe you could begin to see the intensity of God’s desire to recover what has been lost to Him. It is a desire so full that the human soul cannot contain it, cannot comprehend it.
And this should put any thought of your having no worth, no value out of your mind. The devil could parade all the sins you’ve ever committed before your mind’s eye, you could watch with vivid shame every selfish thought, every mean word, every nasty action. Whatever the wickedness, whatever the filthiness, even if it is a million times worse than Absalom’s, you cannot, you have not out sinned God’s love. It is an ocean.
This is what the incarnation of the Son of God is. It is the worth God has placed on you. It is how much He values what He has lost. It is the price He gladly pays to get you back. David cried in vain, if only he could die in place of his wicked son. Jesus did not cry in vain. He could and He did die in place of wicked sinners. The human heart, the human soul, would burst if it tried to feel a fraction of God’s love for us sinners, a fraction of His desire to win us back. But the human heart of Jesus, His human soul, felt it all, not a fraction, but all, because His is the human heart and soul of God become man for us. He sits and He eats with sinners because they are lost and He wants them back with all the desire of His Father. He will suffer anything to get them. He will shed His blood. He will bear their sin. He will feel their filth. He will be forsaken by His Father.
The devil could parade all the sin of all the world before your face, blame you for all of it, call you worthless, and still you would see your worth undeniably obvious on the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ, see it pouring out of the veins of your God, and hear it in His cries of agony. The Son of Man has come to save that which is lost.
And He, Jesus, parades this before your eyes and speaks it in your ears and places it in your mouth. He knows what the devil does. He knows how worthless sin makes a man, how valueless you will feel in a world that creates its own values and measures you by them. So He sets your worth in plain sight in His Church. He gives you His name in your Baptism. He inspires the Scriptures and has them proclaimed every Lord’s Day. He commands pastors to forgive your sins in God’s own name. He places His body and blood in your mouth. He makes you see that your worth is objective because your worth is Jesus.
God determines the worth of human life. We who know this need to live like it. This means two things. First, that we live like our lives are precious. This is how the Spirit speaks, “Know that you were not purchased with perishable things, like gold or silver, from the futile ways you inherited from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Jesus, as of a lamb without spot or blemish.” “You were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body.” God has invested His life in you. Time is spent in heaven, among angels and archangels, among the saints, in God Himself, rejoicing that you have been found. Live like it. Your life is too precious to throw it away in open sin, in pornography, in obsession over money, in bitterness and grudges. And life is too precious to think that if you have been like the prodigal, if you have once wallowed with the pigs, you are doomed to repeat it. Look at the welcoming arms of your Father, feel His embrace, hear His voice when He calls you His son, eat at His feast. One angel, a single angel, who rejoices over you is more powerful than all the armies of all the world, can strike down the army of Sennacherib and end the Assyrian dynasty, can blind the army of the Syrians and lead them captive to Samaria. You have countless angels rejoicing over you, guarding you and protecting you. You have God just as intent on keeping you His as He was in finding you in the first place. Do not despair because of your sins, you are washed in the blood of Jesus, they are gone, but do not let them rule you either, do not turn back to that pit of pain, because you have been washed in the blood of Jesus. Call on the help of the Father who has welcomed you into His house, call on Him with the groanings of the Spirit, speak with the Psalmist in times of temptation, in times of loneliness, in times when the devil provokes you with the thought that you are worthless and that you may as well wallow in it again, pray to your Lord Jesus, “I am yours. Save me.” Because you are His. And He will rescue you. You are precious to Him.
Second, realize the worth of every single human being. We are pro-life because we are pro-God. And our fight for the unborn is our fight for the life of every human being. Because there is no difference. The people out there marching in the pride parades are the prodigal. Yes, they are disgusting. Yes, we can join the older brother and the Pharisees imagining the depths of their depravity. But we know their worth. It’s a worth they deny. But it is objective. It is real. God made them. God has become a man for them. The God-man has bought them with His suffering and blood. The Father waits for them, watches for them, hopes they will come home. We are true sons and daughters of our Father. Let us wait with Him and watch with Him and hope with Him. I want those purple haired freaks who have destroyed their lives here, not screaming and carrying their pride flags, but with tears at the worthlessness of their own sin, hearing for the first time that they are really worth something, that God really loves them, that He created them for better things, that Jesus has bled and died for them, that He wants to wash them clean and take away their shame and introduce them to brothers and sisters who actually love them and will love them forever with the love of God.
This is the worth of humanity, of every individual, the unborn, the born, the greatest sinner among us. Jesus is the standard of humanity’s worth. As Pilate said, “Behold, the man.” And it not only heaven’s joy, not only the angels’ joy, but especially our joy, that Jesus receives sinners and eats with us. Amen.