Infant Exposure

Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. He appointed Herod to be the King of Israel about 35 years before Christ’s birth. Because of Herod’s amazing ability to govern and his genius when it came to construction, he was called Herod the Great.

Herod may have been brilliant, but he was also ruthless. He appointed his wife’s brother to be the High Priest of Israel, and then later killed him, fearing his popularity. Later Herod murdered his two sons for the same reason. He even ordered his wife’s execution during a fit of jealousy. That’s why Augustus said of him: “It is better to be Herod’s dog than one of his children.”

As shocking as Herod’s brutality is to us, murdering your own children was not unheard of in the Roman Empire. Unwanted babies were often taken to a secluded place and left to die. This practice was called “exposure.” The head of the home had the legal right to decide which children lived and which ones died. In fact, the Greek historian Plutarch, taught that until a baby was eight days old, it was “more like a plant than a human being.”

There were several reasons why babies were taken outdoors to die. Some were put there because they were deformed. Others were abandoned because the family was poor; sometimes wealthy families didn’t want their wealth divided; or often the baby was discarded just because it was a girl.

The Jews were different. Their faith led them to oppose the practice of exposure. When Jesus came, He reinforced this belief. One day the disciples asked Jesus who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. His reply would have been shocking to the average Roman citizen.

Jesus pointed to a child and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3–4).

Why were children viewed so differently by Jews and the average Roman citizen? Here is the key: Romans believed that the king, and only the king, was made in the image of a god. The Bible, on the other hand, shows us that “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Every person is valuable BECAUSE each person reflects the image of God. That is what prompted the founders of our country to make this statement in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Sadly, our country has wandered far away from those original convictions. The result is that we now practice our own form of “infant exposure.” Since the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, the lives of over 57 million babies, little images of God, have been brutally ended. The statistics are more than we can grasp, but there is hope.

We can reject the lie that the strong have the right to end the lives of the weak. Instead, we should embrace the truth that every human is valuable because he or she has been made by the divine Creator.

Here is how we can know that this is true.

Jesus Christ proved that human life is infinitely valuable when He forfeited His own life on the Cross in order to rescue us from our wayward and sinful condition. “But as many as received