Although most people may not be able to meaningfully articulate the reason why, we all inherently know that murder is a particularly heinous and evil crime. In fact, it may be the second worst of all crimes, surpassed only by another kind of murder called genocide. Still, if you were to poll a large group of people, most might struggle to offer a coherent answer as to why murder is a more potent evil than any of the other human evils. Maybe they would say, “it's wrong to kill people because people are special.” But if you pressed them on that answer, they would then strain to explain why humans are any more special than the animals kept in zoos – or the ones they ate for dinner last night. They then might argue that people are smarter than animals. To which you could respond with the question of, “does that mean that someone can put you in a zoo, kill you, or farm you and eat you if they’re smarter than you?” Indeed, those educated in a thoroughly secularized, atheistic university might say that there isn't anything at all special about human beings relative to the rest of the animal kingdom. On the other hand, religious people in the Judeo-Christian traditions might say that murder is bad because the bible’s ten commandments prohibit that kind of killing. But if you pressed them on that answer and ask why the commandments prohibit it, far too many of them would stutter or blankly stare at you as the gears in their brain grinded to a halt. The truth is, the majority of the people in most of those groups haven’t really thought about it all that much.
The reason that murder is evil is that people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). When a person commits murder they are destroying that image and negating any potential it had for the time it would have remained on Earth. This image that we all bear isn’t a reference to what a person looks like, but rather the status, authority, glory, and good a person is supposed to represent. Destroying that image is destroying an image of the highest possible good. We do it at our own peril.
Our society has been engaged in a serious, substantial, morally consequential, and contentious ongoing cultural debate for decades about whether or not legal abortion is a kind of sanctioned murder, and therefore by extension, a kind of legalized genocide. Even so, hopefully we can all agree that abortion is the ending of an innocent life, and therefore the destruction of an image of God on Earth, and the deletion of the potential for a human being to represent the highest possible good in the community in which they would have been born. That deletion has uncountable and terrible consequences. Because of this, it is a Christian’s duty to discourage abortion, to promote life, and to assist mothers in their decision to carry an image of God to term, and then provide for the nurturing of that image to maturity and to the realization of all of its potential.
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