The Whole Duty

The end of the matter, all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13 (ESV)

 

So, if a Christian woman gets an abortion does anyone else share in her sin?

As I was contemplating Titus 2:5 today, I wondered about this.

The passage I was working with included verses 3 and 4 so that the whole passage says this:

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Titus 2:3-5 (ESV)

If, in the church, the preacher has failed to preach on the topic of murder including abortion (because what good Christian ever murders anyone?), does it makes it an untouched (or untouchable) topic? Or,  if the older women have failed to teach and train the younger women that a part of “loving their children” is giving birth to and raising them in the fear and instruction of the Lord, are they (the preacher and the older women) somehow complicit in the death of that aborted baby?

Many of us are quick to point out that we are to teach the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27 {ESV}).  We are not to use the Bible like a menu and choose what we want and what we will not have.

Yet, this passage in Paul’s letter to Titus in which he was instructing him in how the church should work, specifically says that the older women are to teach the younger so that “the Word of God is not reviled.”

Clearly this indicates that not only do we have a responsibility to teach them the Word of God but they have a responsibility to follow it. If we teach it and they sin anyway, we are without fault.

If we refuse to teach it because it is a sensitive issue or because we don’t think it will ever be something they would do, we are responsible before God for what we did not do.

Though we must teach those who do not know, this responsibility lies mostly with the parents. It does not require (though it could include) a formal meeting time where the family will discuss abortion and what God means when He says, “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13 {ESV}).

As these things happen in the world, as we read of bills being passed that allow for  the murder of some-but-not-all pre-born children, when we, or brothers and sisters in the Lord, go to abortion “clinics” to plead for the lives of the innocent unborn, we are offered opportunities to relate God’s Word to real life situations. If we “protect” our children from these truths, we are failing to “teach them diligently” as we are commanded in Deuteronomy 6:7 (ESV).

Part of the whole duty of man is to make sure that the next generation knows the truths that are in God’s Word. Titus 2:5 would remind us this is so God’s Word is not reviled.

Are we doing our duty to God?