Why is human life valuable? The image of God in us! That’s what we’ve been exploring in our current series CREATURES. What happens when we don’t recognize God’s image in every person? We dehumanize & devalue them. We treat them as “something less”, even sub-human.
Last Monday was the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday to recognize the importance of civil rights for every person regardless of race or ethnicity. I posted on my Facebook page one of Dr. King’s quotes from his 1963 “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. He’d been arrested for leading a protest march.
“The whole concept of the “image of God ” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. … And this gives [man] a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this. . . there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.”
Ten years later In 1973, abortion on demand was legalized by the Supreme Court. The right to life is inherently linked to civil rights because the unborn’s rights are not recognized. People are free to put them to death. That’s what happens when we devalue life by ignoring the sanctity of God’s image in persons. The annual March for Life continues today in Washington, DC. I pray that it’s the final one we ever have to witness because the current Supreme Court may be set to finally overturn that 1973 decision!
If we’re just evolved animals without a Creator, then it’s the law of the jungle & survival of the fittest. That’s what natural selection is about, and what Hitler & atheist Communist dictators, Mao & Stalin (or anyone else), can use to justify their denial of rights & death sentences. Why not, if there’s no God to be accountable to and no objective standard for what’s right & just?