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A message to Clickbait Addicts…
I am going to speak plainly to a culture that confuses a slogan with a standard and a clip with a case. You have all seen the street videos: a man wanders into a crowd and asks, “Is God pro-life?” Heads nod, “Absolutely.” He smirks, “Oh no He’s not—He killed forty-two children with a bear for mocking a bald man. Didn’t He kill all of Egypt’s firstborn?” The crowd gasps, someone mutters “mic drop,” and the camera cuts. But common sense isn’t common when you rip a moment from its frame and judge a covenant God by a bumper sticker. The question being asked isn’t even the right question. “Pro-life,” in our modern usage, has become a flat label that means “always preserve biological continuity in every circumstance.” Scripture’s frame is not a slogan; it is covenant life under Yahweh—life ordered under His holiness, justice, mercy, and faithful love. Judge Yahweh by a sticker and you will call the surgeon anti-leg for amputating gangrene and the firefighter anti-forest for cutting a backburn that saves the mountain from a crown fire. Judge Him by His own covenant frame and you will see what He has always been: the Author of life who loves life enough to confront the machines that grind it to dust. This is not a tutorial; it is an explanation, and it is the kind of explanation that ends the performance art and restores reality.
Let us begin where the cynics think they have a trophy: the so-called “bald man and bears.” The caricature says Yahweh killed toddlers for teasing a hairstyle. The text says otherwise. The place is Bethel, a city that had enthroned counterfeit worship since Jeroboam planted a golden calf there; hostility to prophets was not an accident of the day but the policy of the place. The crowd that confronts Elisha are na’arim qetannim—youths, young men, late teens to early twenties, a band of retainers and idlers with a mob’s courage. Their chant “go up, baldhead” is not playground mockery; it is a political-religious jeer that rejects prophetic authority and, likely, sneers at Elijah’s ascent: “Take your fantasy and leave, we own this street.” The intention isn’t to share a laugh; it is to humiliate, drive out, and, if the crowd turns, to harm. Elisha calls on the Name of Yahweh; two she-bears rush out and tear into forty-two of them. The text does not say they all died. It does identify the act as a covenant sign, the kind Moses warned about when a community casts off Yahweh and the protection of the covenant hedge—“I will send the beasts among you”—and it plants that sign at Bethel, the heart of counterfeit religion, as a boundary stone. In context, this is not thin-skinned rage; it is a surgeon’s incision across a gangrenous line, a warning flare on a cliff’s edge: prophetic word is not a toy, and Bethel is not sovereign over truth. The crowd’s “mic drop” disappears the second you bring the city, the language, the motive, and the covenant backdrop back into the frame.
Now take Egypt’s firstborn. Glib mouths make it sound like Yahweh woke up angry and lashed out at sleeping cribs. Reality: Egypt had ground Israel under the heel of multiple pharaohs—“pharaoh” is a title, not a single man—systematically enslaving a people, ordering the drowning of covenant sons, and defying repeated calls to release the oppressed. The plagues are not a temper tantrum; they are escalated, warned judgments that expose Egypt’s gods as useless idols. Mercy is braided through judgment from the beginning: nine signs with time to relent, clear lines of distinction so that those who heed the word are protected, and—this part the videos never mention—an open door at the end. A mixed multitude walks out with Israel because covenant life was never about ethnicity; it was always about allegiance. There is also measured reciprocity in the climactic blow: a regime that targeted covenant first strength faces the loss of its first strength. This is not anti-life; this is the backburn that stops a wildfire started by a throne that had normalized the murder of the innocent.
If you want to claim ten “anti-pro-life” texts, I will show you a single pattern running through every one of them: entrenched anti-life systems confronted; warnings issued; delays extended; witnesses sent; exits provided; thresholds crossed; decisive action taken to preserve covenant life so that many more lives can live. You can pluck each scene out and shout, or you can put them back in their frame and see the same hand, steady and clean.
Consider the flood. The text says the earth was filled with violence, not inconvenience, not a policy disagreement, but systemic predation—an entire ecology of blood. The Holy One does not hit “reset” because He is tired of the noise; He builds an ark through a man who warns his generation, He preserves human and animal life in seed form, and He writes a covenant afterward for all living creatures under the sign of the bow in the clouds. The flood is a cosmic backburn; the covenant after is a gardener staking a sapling in the ash so it may grow straight.
Consider Sodom and Gomorrah. People like the sulfur; they ignore the courtroom. The Judge of all the earth invites Abraham to intercede and then states a threshold that shocks modern ears: He would spare the city for ten righteous. When the messengers arrive, the city answers with a public, coordinated attempt at gang assault. The issue is not a private lapse; it is a civic order that preys upon the weak and sanctifies violation. Mercy would have triumphed if a remnant had existed; none did. What falls is a structure that fed on image-bearers and called it normal.
Consider the Red Sea. Critics sneer, “He drowned Egyptians.” Reality: a pursuing army, after years of oppression and hours of clear releases, chooses to chase a helpless people into a parted sea with swords drawn. The waters stand as walls for those seeking freedom and as judgment for those seeking slaughter. Deliverance is not anti-life, even when it means halting the hand raised to kill.
Consider Korah’s rebellion. This was no honest question about process; it was a populist power-grab against the order Yahweh had assigned, a strike at the center of worship that, if successful, would have turned the camp into a wheel with no hub. Moses pleads, “Depart from the tents of these wicked men,” and a safety corridor opens for anyone willing to step away. Then the ground splits and swallows the ring-leaders. Authority is not a toy; glory is not a ladder; the community lives because the coup dies.
Consider the incident of the fiery serpents. A wave of slander and unbelief spreads in the camp; the serpents come; people are dying; and immediately a remedy is raised—look and live. Judgment is not the last word; mercy is welded onto it like a lifesaving handle. The cynical eye sees snakes; a truer eye sees a lifted antidote that will be echoed in a greater lifting when Yehoshua bears judgment to open mercy for the nations.
Consider the herem texts of the conquest. They are the hardest for modern ears, and the most distorted in meme-culture. Here is the context the clips never bring: Yahweh tells Abraham generations in advance that the iniquity of the Amorites is “not yet complete,” which is to say, delayed judgment with centuries of patience. The cultures targeted cultivated child sacrifice, ritualized sexual violence, and predation sanctified by shrines. If you do not purge that cult from a land, it will consume your children and your neighbors’ children and call it worship. The language of “all” is often the idiom of Ancient Near Eastern war reports; the narrative itself shows both persistence of many groups and the integration of those who align with Yahweh—Rahab, the Gibeonites, and many others who dwell in Israel’s shadow and peace. The aim is not ethnic cleansing; the aim is the removal of anti-life worship so covenant life can take root.
Consider Amalek. They did not meet Israel face-to-face; they lurked and struck the stragglers from behind, the tired and the weak, shaping a generational identity around predation. The command to remember and erase is not a tantrum; it is the sentence against a people who made devouring the helpless their craft. Modern ears will defend “rights” for a sword trained on infants; Yahweh defends the infants.
Consider Uzzah and the ark. At a glance, it looks like God struck a helper for trying to steady a holy object. The reality is more sobering: David moved the ark like the pagans did, on a cart, ignoring the law that required it be carried on poles by consecrated Levites. The breach is not about well-meaning spontaneity; it is about profaning the holy center of national life and treating the weight of glory as cargo. The procession stops in fear; then, in obedience, it resumes with sacrifice, song, and joy. Holiness is life’s oxygen; treating the oxygen of the nation like a souvenir is not harmless.
Return to Bethel and the bears, because it is the meme’s favorite. A hostile city, a mob of young men, a taunt that rejects the authority of the word and the God who sent it, a sign that tears into the ring-leaders, and a warning etched into a place that thought itself above correction. When a people adopt a covenant of scorn, it is mercy to burn a line before the whole hillside goes to ash.
Now step back and see the through-line they don’t teach in clips. Divine judgment is never sudden in Scripture. Yahweh warns. He delays. He sends witnesses. He distinguishes between the humble and the hardened. He provides exits and remedies. Human agency is always in the frame—pharaohs harden their hearts, mobs choose incitement, conspirators choose rebellion, ambushers choose the weak, kings choose convenience over holiness. Judgment tracks real decisions made in the face of light. Mercy is braided through: a bronze serpent lifted, a shout to step away from tents about to break, a band of Egyptians and others joining Israel in exodus, a Canaanite woman woven into Israel’s line, an entire city spared when it repents, and, in the fullness of time, Yehoshua Himself bearing the blast so that the nations might live. Judgment and mercy are not rival moods in Yahweh; they are the two hands by which He rescues a world determined to call darkness light.
Let’s raise another point the street theater always dodges, and it matters: the question is not only “Is God pro-life?” but “What about the gods they served?” In the ancient world, idols did not cradle their worshipers; they devoured them—sometimes literally, as with the furnaces of Molech, and always spiritually, as they trained cultures to consume the poor, to sanctify exploitation, to name domination as divine. So when someone sniffs, “So God only protected His people,” I answer: “Everyone was invited.” The door stood open for Egypt’s neighbor who smeared lamb’s blood and walked; it stood open for Rahab who sheltered messengers; it stood open for Ruth who clung to Naomi’s God; it stood open for Naaman who washed and confessed. Yahweh is not tribal; He is holy. He is not the god of one ethnicity; He is the God who calls all peoples to abandon gods that eat their children and to come under a covenant that defends the life they keep calling disposable. The fact that so many refused the open door does not indict the door; it indicts the house they preferred.
If you still want to wave your clip and call Yahweh anti-life, answer one question honestly: if He had not acted in these scenes, who would have been devoured next? If He had smiled at Egypt’s drowning of Hebrew boys, at Sodom’s civic assault, at Amalek’s ambush of the weak, at Bethel’s program of scorn against the only voices calling the city back from a cliff, how many image-bearers would have vanished in the name of progress? Preserving covenant life sometimes requires severe surgery. The scalpel is not hatred of the body; it is love for the body strong enough to risk misunderstanding from those who only see the cut and never the cancer.
So here is how I address the “mic-drop” culture without playing its game. I refuse the category error: Yahweh is not to be measured by slogans; covenant life is the standard. I restore the context because context is not a footnote; it is the meaning. I insist on human agency, because Scripture does. I name the preservation logic: these acts prune anti-life so life can live. I trace the mercy line running through every judgment. I remind the room that the door was always open to outsiders who aligned with the Holy One. And then I let the pattern stand there, unembarrassed, while the memes deflate by themselves. You want to know if Yahweh is pro-life? Watch Him rescue slaves, spare cities for a remnant, warn for centuries before He acts, carve an exodus through the sea, welcome foreigners into His people, and ultimately bear the weight of the world’s judgment in Yehoshua to open life to the nations. That is not a slogan; that is a record.
I began by describing a man with a camera manufacturing certainty in the space between a leading question and a selective quote. I end by addressing those who have been trained to mistake that choreography for wisdom. Hear me: Yahweh is not on trial under your hashtag; your hashtag is on trial under Yahweh. He loves life—really loves it, not as a sticker slapped on a season, but as a covenant reality guarded against the wolves that dress themselves as priests, progress, mobs, or kings. When He prunes, He preserves. When He burns a line, He saves the forest. When He closes a sea, He opens a future. Call that anti-life if you must; the survivors who walk into freedom will call it what it is—justice married to mercy, holiness ordered toward human flourishing, the only hand strong enough to break the teeth of the machine and still lift the child. I have given you the frame, the language, the motives, the cultural setting, and the ten cases the memes always throw. If you still prefer the clip to the case, that is not because the case is weak; it is because you prefer the performance. I am not here to perform. I am here to tell the truth plainly, and the truth is this: the Living God is for life, covenant life, and He loves it enough to do what sentimental slogans will not—confront and cut the things that kill it, so that many more lives can live.
