We are fast approaching the 250th anniversary of the Independence of the United States (this July 4th will be 248 years). Where have we come in those years and where are we headed?
Dr. Jerome Lejeune pointed out that ‘Technology is cumulative; wisdom is not.’ We have come from the horn book for the students in school to AI – from the stagecoach to the automobile, trains, planes and rockets to the moon and back.
Medical science has advanced by leaps and bounds and we now have ‘test tube babies’ but lack the wisdom to use such technology. We make ‘spare’ human embryos, “left over very tiny children” from IVF procedures stored in liquid nitrogen where even time stands still in case the mother returns to implant another one of her children. If she does not, these very tiny children are orphaned to the concentration can of liquid nitrogen. They are in want of the warmth of life of their own mother or an adopted mother (infertile women are now routinely adopting human embryos and implanting them and carrying them to term and live birth).
Seeing is believing for most people. Like Nicodemus, we lack the faith to believe what we cannot see. Not until the human embryo grows to where she resembles a tiny baby in the sonogram do we recognize her as one of us – her sonogram picture being the earliest baby picture that all of us once were. But we lack the faith, and the wisdom to understand that the human embryo is fully human and not unlike a rose bud which if not nipped by some thoughtless prey will bloom into lovely, satisfying maturity.
Just as God sees the heart of the individual, God looks to and sees the heart of the nation. Those nations that continue to respect and honor Him receive his blessings. Those nations that do not respect and honor Him find that God removes His protective hand.
If ever there was a time to have the ‘Ancient of Days’ (the King of Heaven’s Armies) on our side, it is now! The sabers of nuclear war are being rattled in the East as well as the West (China, North Korea). But if we want God not to turn His back on us, we must not turn our back on Him.
God looks to the heart of the nation. Where is our nation’s heart in 2024? Are we embracing a ‘culture of life’ as we did following the world wars or are we becoming a ‘culture of death’? The states of these “United” States are divided (24/26) on the equal humanity and personhood of the preborn child.
Dobb’s gave the preborn child unleavened bread. The Dobb’s court lacked the courage to rise to the occasion that the votes to overturn Roe afforded them and declare the equal humanity and personhood of the preborn child to be easily found in the nation’s Declaration of Independence – that inspired document admired worldwide that enshrines these immortal words: “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…”
The Declaration of Independence is greater than the Constitution. It is above the Constitution. It recites and provides the moral foundation upon which all else is built, including the rules and regulations for running the nation (known as the Constitution – excepting the amendments thereto which set forth principles upon which the government was to be based).
The inspiration for what our nation was to be about came from God through the pen of our forefathers in the Declaration of Independence. John W. Brabner-Smith (founder of the International School of Law, Washington, DC, now known as the George Mason University Law School), taught his students that the Declaration of Independence is really a Declaration of Dependence upon God.
In 1857, our U.S. Supreme Court chose to ignore those hallowed words in our Declaration of Dependence and held that the black slave was not person but property. 600,000 men of both the north and the south then bled and died before our nation got it right with the 14th amendment.
The devilish mischief was to use one word in that same 14th amendment; the word ‘person’ by which he seduced a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to deny the personhood of the preborn child (Roe v. Wade). If the preborn child is not a person, you and I are not persons because we were once preborn children. And remember that Scripture teaches us that when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she would conceive, he also told Mary that her cousin Elizabeth was in the sixth month of pregnancy.
It’s most important to remember what happened next. We are told that “Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda; And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb;” (Luke 1:39-41)
John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb – the spirit, the soul, the personhood of John was leaping with joy at the spirit, the soul, the personhood of his Savior, Jesus Christ. We know this because Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Ghost” (verse 41) exclaimed “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.” (Luke 1:43-44) And the alacrity of the word ‘joy’! The unbelievable excitement of it is emphasized by the fact that this is the first time the word ‘joy’ is used in the New Testament. Here we see the Holy Spirit revealing that both of these preborn children are persons. One person is the Lord and the other person recognizes Him with alacrity.
The devilish mischief was to seduce the Roe court into holding that all preborn children were property not persons – the ‘property’ of the mother to do with as she wished.
Dr. Jerome Lejeune put it this way: “If you ask science, ‘What is a human being?’ science responds, ‘A human being is a member of our species.’ and if you ask science ‘What is a person?’ science responds, ‘A person is a human being alive.’ and science has no other answer.”
In Dr. Lejeune’s address to the Legislator’s Conference that we sent all of you at Christmas he made a very curious statement. You may wish to go back to the video and listen for it if you missed it.
“It is very interesting because after it [the fertilized human ovum] splits into 2 cells then it splits into 3 cells. We were expecting it would do 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on. It does not do that in nature and apparently, there is some discussion between the 3 cells. (We know that because of experiments with mice) and suddenly they realize, “We are not a collection of cells” because in my lab we have lots of cultures of cells which are taken from the body and never a baby is coming out of the incubator. But in the very beginning when they have the 3 cell stage, some ‘click’, some transmission of information between those 3 cells occurs and they decide, “We are an individual.”
And I said we know that by experiments with mice because we cannot mix more than 3 cell lines to have one embryo. In mice, you can take a cell from one embryo and from another one [and one other], mix them together in the zona pellucida, and see what comes out. It comes out a little mouse. (If you have taken a black embryo and a white embryo – she has on her chest fur a place for black [hair] and a place for white [hair].) You can do it with [a cell] from 3 different embryos, but with 4 [cells], it does not work.
This means that this stage of 3 cells which just follows the first division is an individualization system. It is very curious to see that you need a Trinity to define one hypostasis [a greek word meaning “individual existence”].”
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
R. Martin Palmer
