This subject can awaken feelings of guilt or fear. Rest assured, Jesus Christ guarantees forgiveness and freedom from guilt.
In November, Britain became the first European country to pass 50,000 deaths from Covid 191. That’s also the fifth highest in the world – despite our small population. The vaccine, which we praise God for, comes too late for many.
How come our NHS staff (whom we applaud), fuelled by the world’s fifth largest economy, are so humbled? And why have other nations with far less done far better? Clues may lie in our history.
Secrets of our success.
The world’s first national health service – free to the poorest and richest – was inspired by the visionary proposals of a Christian doctor from Sheffield Medical School, in the early 20th century, Prof. Christopher Addison.
He was building on older roots, right back to the mediaeval friars of England, inspired by Christ to open hospitals for the poorest, such as St Bartholomew’s London.
In the 17th century, another Christian, Dr Thomas Sydenham, instructed his students to practise scientifically and to advise patients to prepare for the next life in either heaven or hell. He is known as the father of modern medicine.
In nursing, Florence Nightingale followed her Christian call to relieve suffering. She is hailed as the founder of modern nursing. In the later 20th century, nurse and doctor Cicely Saunders pioneered the first modern hospice – showing we don’t need to die in agony.
Such revolutionary pioneers, following Jesus Christ and the Bible, fired huge progress in great healthcare – as even an ex-Hindu observed2. This was progress that has been exported all over the world. However, another more dubious export was coming.
Seeds of failure
In 1967 doctors helped then MP David Steel to design and pass the Abortion Act, helped by bishops in the Lords and dithering Christian gynaecologists. While legal protection for doctors and pregnant women was needed for rare life-saving treatments, where abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life or physical health, the negative results of the Act are staggering. Our medical carers have destroyed more healthy lives in a few years than a century of war.
Nurse Letby has hit the headlines, accused this month of murdering eight babies on a neonatal unit3. Yet, in reality, another NHS employee could easily have been paid to abort them on their journey to birth had they been unwanted – for instance, on the grounds of a cleft palate (routinely treatable after birth).
These once unthinkable practices were exported to the Christian West of Europe, along with Christian North America, transforming healthcare into an agent of mass destruction.
How did mass abortion become routine?
Firstly, British medics dispensed with 2,000 years of English biblical knowledge on human bloodshed (an embryo just five weeks old has blood pumped by a beating heart). “I knew it was wrong, but after the first one I was hardened,” one gynaecologist remarked in 1977.
It has been known from the 1960s that abortion brings women no health benefits, only harm and a higher risk of death compared with giving birth.
A culture of lying by British and American doctors multiplied. The UK Abortion Law became worthless. For instance, discharge letters after abortions gave the grounds as “Unwanted pregnancy” – wholly illegal grounds under the Abortion Act. Will God confront doctors for this lying at the Judgement?
Medical corruption went further, turning blind eyes to colleagues’ clinical warnings about abortion. It has been known from the 1960s that abortion brings women no health benefits, only harm and a higher risk of death compared with giving birth.4
Consequences for our actions
Boris Johnson recently voiced his fear of the NHS being overwhelmed, and what he feared is upon us: on 2nd November a doctors’ website said: “Threat to NHS as virus overwhelms hospitals.”5
How could this relate to Christ’s patience and justice? We must track a thread throughout the Bible: innocent bloodshed leads to national disaster. Note: the bible uses the same word for ‘a child’ from conception through to child, as seen in the Christmas story about the embryonic Jesus and the six-month-old foetus, John the Baptist. (Luke 1:11-45)
Early in Genesis, the blood of the murdered Abel “cries out from the ground” to God for justice. Years later, Jesus had not forgotten Abel, warning Israel, “this generation will be responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the blood of Abel…” (Luke 11:50)
The ancient Canaanite nations, who practised child sacrifice, were tolerated by God “until their sin had run its course.” (Gen 15:16) Then God told the children of Israel to destroy them. They were told to never do it themselves – or they would suffer a similar fate, including fearful plagues. (Deut 8:19-20, 18:9-12, 28:59)
Sadly, the early Israelites copied the habit. After multiple warnings the Northern Israelites were brutally exiled and scattered for ever. After another 130 years of prophetic warnings the Southern Israelites suffered the same (summarised in 2 Kings 17:17-20). So both secular nations and those covenanted to God were judged under the same divine laws. And these justice warnings repeat until the end of the bible (Revelation 6:10).
A sign of hope
Remarkably, the worst child-killer king of Israel – the notorious Manasseh – was thrown into prison where he repented! And God granted him the longest reign of all the Kings of Israel. (2 Chron 33:1 -19) Judgement is not God's last word – God waits, longing for us to rethink. Forgiveness is free to all who come to Christ in repentance.
Back to our National Health Service
Arguably the UK has received more Christian teaching and has had more godly influence on the world than any other nation before. But if you were God and your children were being destroyed by that nation – how long could you wait to intervene?
The bible remains clear: relentless bloodshed brings national disasters.
While our health crisis may have many roots, we can see that God has granted Britain over half a century of restraint since we began mass destruction. Is it unreasonable of God to permit our health service to fail under Covid 19? He warned: disobedience will make you “unsuccessful”. (Deut 28:29)
Sadly, without humble repentance, the Bible teaches further humiliation of our ‘god’ the health service. The next virus may be as serious as Ebola where one in three die. We must even entertain the possibility that “the Lord will ruin you.” (Deut 28:63)
We must be cautious of claiming the woes of the NHS are all due to abortion, but the bible remains clear: relentless bloodshed brings national disasters.
Future hope
We must not despair but come back to the old successful ‘secret’: the love story of the cross, where God so loved the world (and all NHS staff) he gave his one and only Son, that all who believe in him may not die but live. (John 3:16)
Practically speaking, can your church love the ‘unwanted pregnancy’ better?
We all bear some blame in abortion; judgement begins with the household of God. Let’s plead in prayer and repentance for the Holy Spirit to convict many of sin, righteousness, and judgement, and to bring revival.
And practically speaking, can your church love the ‘unwanted pregnancy’ better? Can you commit to caring for the pregnant woman, her partner, and the child, including the disabled child, like Jesus would?
Endnotes
1 Covid: UK first country in Europe to pass 50,000 deaths, BBC News,11 November 2020
2 The Book That Made Your World – How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilisation by Vishal Mangalwadi, Thomas Nelson, copyright 2011, ISBN: 978-1-59555-545-8
3 Chester hospital baby deaths: Nurse Lucy Letby in court, BBC News, 12 November 2020
4 For instance, evidenced in Pregnancy and Abortion – a Practical Guide to Making Decisions, 2020, ISBN 978-1-912863-19-8. Also available from www.choicescommunity.co.uk
5 https://news.doctors.net.uk/news/32133
