In my last post, I posted about the importance of names. This post is the flip side of the coin. Names are important, because names identify us.

Identities are precious to us, and Satan knows this. Satan is the first great identity thief. To Eve, he created an identity of an untrustworthy God, leading Eve to sin. For their disobedience, God punished Adam and Eve in the areas where they would find their own identities.  Adam would be forced to work in sweat and toil to bring things of the earth; labor and provision – how men traditionally identify themselves – would be, well, laborious. Eve would also be punished in labor, while bringing children into the world.

A woman’s identity is tightly wrapped up with her ability to help conceive, bear, and raise children.* Every. single. thing. about raising a child has ardent supporters or vehement opponents. Make a declarative statement about any child raising issue on social media: BOOM! Instant disagreement.

As we celebrate Mother’s day coming up, I’m reminded that sadly, Satan hasn’t given up his attack on mothers, on their identity, and on their view of the identity of God. He is using the same tactics he did thousands of years ago. “You can be like gods. You can be the ones in control.” Satan has found his most vicious anti-mother identity thieves in the abortion industry.”Woman’s rights, woman’s rights, woman’s rights,” the pro-choicers chant over and over again.

The number of people in our land that think that babies aren’t actually living humans while in utero is very small. The pro-abortion crowd doesn’t argue that they’re only disposing of unwanted tissue. Ultrasounds and a basic knowledge of biology can tell you that is a child inside your womb.

Planned Parenthood and their ilk don’t need to prove that babies aren’t human as long as they can continue their demonic lies that women are the gods of themselves and the children living inside them. Recently, a woman wrote a pro-abortion article simply because she believes “All life is not equal.” Unequal lives simply being those that are unwanted by their mothers.

That author though, is parroting justification that totalitarian dictators used to slaughter their own people whom they thought were unworthy, whether Jews, black, or political dissidents. Racism hinges on this same lie — that all life isn’t equal. It is a lie of Satan. “Did God really create this person in His image? Does God really knit together these babies while they’re still in the womb?” Once Satan steals the identity that a certain human (or ethnicity of them) is uniquely designed by God, any atrocity can be foisted upon them.

Even today, however, most of humanity accepts the correct belief that dictators using their “legitimate ” government don’t have the right to kill their own citizens, people living in the protective embrace of the national boundaries, nourished on resources of the land they belong too, in a place they should find acceptance.

How are some unborn babies exempt from this? Don’t they too live in a protective embrace of the boundaries of their mother’s womb, nourished by the resources that pass from her body into theirs? Shouldn’t their first acceptance be to the woman who conceived them?

Abortion is our national shame, but I must stress that I am NOT sitting here calling mothers who have aborted their children Hitlers and murderers.

Like Eve, they are victims to Satan’s lies about themselves and about God. Like Eve, they’ve made mistakes. Like Eve, they too can find redemption.

Satan’s lies and Adam and Eve’s sin threw the world into a path that would include the darkness of abortion and war, and the evils of the world.

Then God.

Satan had tried to make the identity of God one of jealousy and weakness, but God showed himself to Adam and Eve as He really is. A God who mourns the loss of a relationship with His creation. God promises, yes, there must be judgement, but there will still be redemption, mercy, even hope – because of his power and authority!

God gave hope to Eve. It was through a woman that the promised Deliverer, Jesus, would come and take that judgment that God had to pronounce in the Garden.

God gives hope to this day. Hope for the girls who are told there is no way out of their situation but abortion. Hope for the women told that their rights trump the life inside them. Hope in the identity He gives us when we call on Jesus. Identities as His precious and forgiven children.

That is an identity Satan can never take away.

*I realize that God’s plans for each women are unique; nothing in this post is meant to say that your identity as a woman is somehow compromised if you don’t have or want children.