Life is precious, so much so that Jesus asked that if a man should gain the whole world and would lose his own soul what would he be profited? “Or, what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:36, 37). We have been asked to give consideration to the value of all lives, and rightly so. God has given us exhortations and examples to affirm the truth that every soul is valuable and every life matters.
Consider one family that God saved when the universal flood came, Noah and his wife and their three sons and their wives. God brought the flood because of the universal wickedness that pervaded the world then which caused Him to say that “every imagination of the thoughts of his (man’s) heart was only evil continually.” (Gen 6:5). He would tell Noah that he and his house would be spared in the flood because “thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.” (Gen. 7:1). But the fact He saved only eight people when the flood came does not mean that the multitudes of humankind alive at that time did not matter to God. Peter makes that clear in his New Testament commentary on Genesis 6 and 7 when he speaks of that time “when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.” (I Peter 3:20). The waiting Peter spoke of lasted over 100 years! A longsuffering God waiting for more people to turn to Him because to Him, all lives mattered!
God spared Joseph, one of patriarch Jacob’s sons, certain eventual death in an Egyptian prison, elevating him to Egypt’s first prime minister, so to speak, because one life mattered to God even though it apparently mattered little to Joseph’s eleven brothers.
Two million lives mattered to a compassionate God when Joseph’s posterity came under oppression in Egypt after Joseph passed off the scene, along with the sympathetic Pharaoh that Joseph served under in Egypt; God delivered miraculously 2 million Hebrews from living in dire conditions as slaves on the night of redemption as recorded in Exodus chapter 12. Hebrew lives mattered.
God spared one woman and her family out of the Amorite/Canaanite city of Jericho when those walls of the city were toppled by nothing more than the vibration of marching Israeli feet and the sounding of trumpets because to a merciful and compassionate God, one believing family in a city full of pagans mattered.
One woman, considered by the average contemporary Jew of Jesus’ day to be the scum of the earth, a woman who was living with a man who was not her husband though she had known five men at different times as her husband, mattered to Jesus so much so that He went out of His way to meet her and to invite her to have her deepest thirsts quenched by the living water that He would offer her. (John 4:14-18). All because one life mattered.
Jesus was not cow-towing to public opinion when he asked the despised publican tax collector Zacchaeus to descend from the Sycamore tree in which he was perched so that he could see Jesus as He would pass by; nor was he bowing to political correctness that day; rather it was because one life mattered that Jesus said, “Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house…This day is salvation come to this house…For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:5,9,10).
So, yes, all lives matter: red and yellow, black and white “they’re all precious in His sight.” And that is what those who are His followers have always believed: every life is more valuable than all the wealth of the world, and all lives do matter. It is not a matter, therefore, of being politically correct and yielding to the demands of a frenzied mob; it is a matter of God’s love which has been shed abroad by His Spirit in the hearts of His family of faith that causes us to affirm without equivocation, “ALL LIVES MATTER!”
“This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” (I Tim.1:15)
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