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Contract On Children - Part Two

"And what do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?"

"Alive."

Calvin Miller, "The Singer "

The Moloch Factor

There's a fascinating passage in Revelation 12:1-6. Although there are various prophetic interpretations of these verses, the imagery itself is powerful. A woman is giving birth to a child. Nearby a dragon waits to devour the child at birth. This is the spirit of Moloch, a dragon waiting to devour a newborn child. Why doesn't the dragon eat the woman? Because it's the child he's after.

Moloch was a heathen god in ancient times. The Ammonites, and later even the Israelites, participated in gruesome orgies in Moloch's honor in which babies were sacrificed. We will meet Moloch again.

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in Me, it is better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea." (Mark 9:42)

Jesus warned us. The war on children has come to our own generation and you can see it all around you.

From Abortion to DINKs

Abortion is only the beginning. More than 417,000 are performed each year on girls between the ages of 15 and 19, and at least 15,000 girls under the age of 15 have had legal abortions. Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, more babies have been killed than in all American wars put together; over twenty million babies have died so far. Abortion is America's most devastating war.

Unfortunately, abortion is just the first wave.

A murder takes place in the United States every 27 minutes. That's 54 murders a day and 20,000 a year - and an alarming, growing number of victims are young teenagers, children, and babies.

Then there's suicide. Each year between a quarter to a half million youth between the age of 14 and 24 will try to kill themselves. This year, an estimated 6,000 will succeed. Forty thousand kids ran to the Reaper between 1970 and 1978, making suicide the third leading killer of the young.

Now even children are committing suicide. In a recent American Psychiatric Convention, Dr. Perihan Rosenthall presented case studies on six suicidal children, each under five years of age!

Another front in the war on children is the attack on families. Without a stable family, children are robbed of role models; they grow up not knowing their place, nor learning how a mother or a father function. Even more devastating, they fail to understand God the Father's love for His children.

Toffler says in his book, "The Third Wave," that only 7.3 percent of the families in the United States are traditional homes, with a mother taking care of the children and a father supporting them. The other 92.7 percent are growing up not knowing what it is like to be part of a typical family. The family has become an endangered species.

Many no longer consider children to be a blessing. A growing number of young marrieds are deciding not to have children because it will decrease their standard of living. A new name has been coined to describe these people: DINKS. Double Income, No Kids.

"My Mom Did That..."

Even children fortunate enough to be born are often the victims of physical or sexual abuse. Of the one million children who run away from home each year, more than half leave because they've been physically abused or neglected by the parents who were supposed to love and protect them.

"And the King shall say... 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least... you have done it unto Me.'" (Matt. 25:40)

I worked in the streets of Detroit and New York with Teen Challenge. I met little children, six and seven years old, roaming the streets at one or two o'clock in the morning. I'd ask them, "Why don't you go home?" Some didn't know where home was. I'd ask, "Where's your father?" Often the answer was, "Which one?" They didn't know their dad, and their mother didn't care.

Dotson Rader, a journalist who was himself once a runaway, interviewed runaway kids across the nation. Here's a typical story:

I sat beside him on the grass. His name was Richard. A small boy, blond, light-eyed, slight, vulnerable... lost and unhappy. He wore cutoff blue jeans and a torn, frayed cowboy shirt. He wore no shoes. He was eleven.

"Why don't you go home?" I asked. "It's getting late." He stared at the grass. "I'm sure your parents miss you. He glanced up, raising his left hand for me to see. His entire body and arms were thin like sticks. Across his left forearm between his wrist and elbow was a deep red gash.

"My mom did that," he said, without emotion. "My mom did that," he repeated, as if I didn't believe him.

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't know," Richard said. "She just doesn't like me."

I asked how it happened.

"She got mad 'cus my room was messy. She started screaming at me and whipping me like crazy. She s always screaming about something."

"That's how your arm got hurt?"

He dropped his arm, and looked down. He didn't like talking about his mother. I asked him again to tell me.

"Mom held my arm against the door frame and slammed the door shut."

Richard stood up. He was about four feet tall. Facing me, he carefully removed his shirt, then turned around to show me his back. There were bruises on his body and on his left shoulder was an ugly burn larger than a man's hand... just beginning to heal. Richard pulled his shirt back on, wincing.

"It don't hurt much," he said.

I wanted to know how he got such a wound. He said he had a fight with his mother when she was cooking dinner. He didn't know what started it, it was one of those things that happened all the time for no good reason. She'd gone into a rage, grabbed him, lifted him up and shoved his bare back against the hot oven.

"She don't want me anymore," he said ruefully.

"Where will you go if you can't go home anymore?" I asked him.

He sat down again in the grass but didn't answer for a while. He was thinking hard. At 11 that's the kind of question that scares a kid. "I'll run away," he said. "I'll run away for good."

"And then what?" I wanted to know.

"I'll just run away."

Another 35 percent of those who run away are victims of sexual abuse, usually incest. Little children shouldn't have to deal with a father who rapes his own daughter and threatens to kill her if she tells, or a mother who gives her child in payment for housecleaning.

Rader tells of another runaway...

Huddled in the doorway near Woolworth's was a slight, hungry girl of 12.

"Wendy's got no place to live," said Daniel, 15, "and she's scared of everybody. She had an abortion two weeks back." He paused, then added quietly, "She's not going to make it when the cold weather comes."

Late that night Rader and Daniel went to a bus depot where Daniel got a small bag of clothes out of the 25-cent locker. Rader rented him a room at his hotel, as he had no other place to go. "What's gonna happen to me?" he asked. "I can't get a job, there aren't any for runaway kids. How am I going to finish school without money and no place to live? The 'tricks' already want boys younger than me. You tell me what to do."

When Rader didn't reply, Daniel mumbled something under his breath. He asked what he said.

"I said, nobody gives a damn about us kids."

All of the runaway programs combined in the United States can only take care of 44,000 children - and most of them for only a night or two. And yet every year 150,000 children disappear without a trace. It is hard enough for adults who have to live on the street, but what do you do if you're only a little kid? There are roughly 300,000 children and adolescents classified as "hard core" homeless street kids. What kind of job would you find? People aren't going to give an eight-year-old a job. Most children are forced into male and female prostitution in order to survive.

Buy A Child Slave for $500

And if that isn't bad enough, you can also be abducted; stolen from your home and parents. Kidnapped not for ransom but to be sold. There is a slave traffic in this country offering children for sale. Children are purchased for sexual use or for whatever purpose their "owner" desires. In New York City a child costs about $5,000. In San Diego you can get a child for as little as $500.

White slave traffic in children has existed for centuries. William and Catherine Booth launched the Salvation Army in England in the nineteenth century. Booth's daughter-in-law uncovered a huge, hideous network where children coming to London to find jobs were tricked and trapped into child prostitution. Captured children were sometimes drugged, nailed alive into coffins, and shipped overseas.

That same trade is active again today in major cities across the world. Children are kidnapped, bought and sold into slavery, for Satanic ritual sacrifice, or for sexual perversion.

The Rene Guyon Society in the United States is named after a notorious child abuser. To become a member you must have intercourse with a child younger than eight years old. Their motto is "Sex before eight or it's too late." It claims 5,000 members. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) combined with the Rene Guyon Society claim a membership of over 25,000. They are actively seeking legalization of sex between adults and "consenting minors." Unfortunately for them at the moment, there isn't such a thing, legally, as a consenting minor.

Why is all this happening? Because the demonic world hates children. It's not enough to rape a child's body. His mind must be raped too. "Let's get him posing and let's make him into a real little adult. Let's get him involved in pornography." Not just reading it, but being pornography.

Child porn in this country is well over a half billion dollar industry. And the ones who make money out of it are only a small fraction of those actually involved. The vast majority don't do it for money but for pleasure. The market for this ugliness is so vast that more than 263 different child porn magazines were available in this country in 1977 alone. That's more than 263 monthly pornographic magazines showing sex with children.

You cannot go into an adult bookstore and buy a child porn magazine, it's only available through the mail. Someone gives an address to someone else and he sends off for whatever he wants, magazines, pictures, videos, or films. The average cost to print this sort of sick magazine is only 35 cents, (plus the cost of a child's soul), but the magazines retail anywhere from $7.50 to $12.50 a piece. A pornographic video can be produced very cheaply, yet it sells for $300 to $400. Child pornography is illegal and it's against the law to send pornography through the mail, but the profits are so huge that the cruel filth continues to spread. Even if authorities find those involved and arrest them, prosecution is difficult. They must first prove that it is pornography, and that it was published with "commercial intent."

Despite new, tougher laws, many convictions of child pornography are overturned. How do you prove that something is "unnatural" to an immoral culture? In one case in New York a judge decided that confiscated porn was indeed an "accurate portrayal" of a child involved in those things, and it had some "redeeming social value." He dropped the charges and the pornographers got off Scot-free.

One magazine, Baby Love, intercepted by government agents, showed somebody attempting to have sexual intercourse with a six-month-old child. Movies have even been made of people having intercourse with "newly born" babies.

In August 1985 one of the nation's top newspapers, The Los Angeles Times, conducted a sophisticated study to determine the number of Americans molested as children. The results...

A shocking 22 percent of all Americans, 38 million people, were sexually molested as children.
An estimated 750,000 of the 38 million were daughters abused by their fathers.
One out of every four American females are sexually abused or raped before the age of 20.
Approximately two million boys had been sexually abused by adult women.

Now imagine what happens if you're on the receiving end of this. Approximately 40 percent of abused children grow up to abuse their own children. Recent studies show between 62 and 90 percent of prostitutes were sexually abused when they were little. Surveys of drug and alcohol abusers have likewise shown that 70 to 75 percent were abused as children.

Children Committing Crimes

With all this loss of innocence, the gap between childhood and adulthood is rapidly narrowing, and children reacting out of hurt are committing terrifying crimes.

In 1950, notes John Whitehead, only 170 people under the age of 14 were arrested in the United States for committing a serious crime like rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. In that year, the incidence of adult crime was 215 times greater than that of child crime.

By 1960, however, adult crime was only 8 times higher than child crime and by 1979 it was only 5.5 times higher. Did that mean adult crime was decreasing? Not at all. Between 1950 and 1979 adult crime leaped 300 percent. The startling conclusion is that during this same period of time serious crimes committed by kids jumped 11,000 percent!

When children do not act like children anymore, the law begins to treat them like adults. United States law may be changed so that minors receive the same kind of sentences as adults, including capital punishment, because they're committing the same crimes.

We are returning to the conditions of the Middle Ages where the distinction between childhood and adulthood was swept away. Children were not only given the same work as adults; they were punished the same, even to the point of being executed.

Yet a protected childhood is a relatively new thing, introduced by Christian reformers. Only a century ago, children in England were made to work in coal mines because they were considered the only ones with bones flexible enough for the horrifying conditions. Imagine the terror of their days in the mine shafts.

Human Flesh Was Cheaper

The simplest job was being a "trapper." A child was lowered 50 feet down a shaft to squat in the mud in total darkness with trickling water, beetles, and rats, waiting to open the trap door for other children pulling coal cars. He would let the coal through and then close the trap door again. That way, if there was a mine explosion, it only killed the children between the doors. The trap doors cut off the exploding gas from spreading further. Little children, seven or eight years old, would sit in the dark every day, sometimes 18 to 20 hours, listening for the coal cars. Some went insane. Yet in the mines, that was the best job.

The children suffered terrible cruelty at the hands of adults, who bargained for them, used them, and dismissed them as they pleased. Many working underground were only eight or nine years old, girls as well as boys. Some began toiling in the pits when they were only four or five. They only saw the sun on Sundays. There were no hours of relaxation, their meals were mostly eaten in the dark, and they lived with parents who devoted them to this life.

Think about the actual pulling of the coal cars. Women or small children had to crawl on their hands and knees dragging enormous weights along narrow passageways that were only 18 to 24 inches in height, and were as wet and slimy as common sewers. Women remained at this work until the last hour of pregnancy. Boys and girls performed the work by using a girdle and chain. A girdle was put around their naked waist. A chain from the carriage was hooked to the girdle and passed between their legs. Crawling on hands and knees they drew the carriages after them.

"It is not necessary to describe," says Shaftesbury, the Christian politician who fought against this horror for most of his life, "how their sides were blistered, their ankles stained, their backs chafed from rubbing against the roofs, or how they stumbled in the darkness and choked in the stifling atmosphere. It is enough to say they were obliged to do the work of horses or other beasts of the field, only because human flesh and blood was cheaper in some cases and horse labor was impossible in others."

The result of this barbaric lifestyle was that for many poorer children there was no childhood in the 1800s. What restored childhood into society? Christian revival. The preaching of the Gospel. And out of these revivals came social reformation. It took the restoration of the Christian emphasis on family, the work of ministries like the Salvation Army in the streets, and men like Shaftesbury in the political arena.

Salvation Army Protects Children

It was a costly, terrible battle. When the Salvation Army uncovered the hideous child slave trade in "moral" Britain, they knew most people would never believe it. General Booth's son, Bramwell, and his wife, enlisted the help of a Christian editor of one of Britain's most widely read newspapers, "The Pall Mall Gazette". The editor, with the help of a woman convert of the Salvation Army who herself was previously involved in the trafficking of children, posed as a child procurer. This editor then purchased a child from her parents for 10 pounds. He documented the entire process, right up to the point where he, the procurer, would have actually had sexual intercourse with the little girl.

They published the story. Bramwell and those involved were viciously counterattacked by the media and by those who were exposed. The Christian editor and the woman who had helped were even jailed. But the exposé hit London like nothing in a hundred years.

The Salvation Army marched into Parliament with a huge roll of paper containing 160,000 signatures. The incident galvanized Parliament into action. Within two months, a protective bill was passed which had previously been defeated three times. The age of consent, which had been lowered to 12, was pushed back up again.

Spiritual awakening and Christian concern gave children back their childhood. Now we're losing it once more.

The Disappearing Child

Professor Neal Postman of New York University has written, "The Disappearance of Childhood." He notes the great danger from the so-called children's rights movement. These child "advocates" claim: "The social category of children is in itself a suppressive idea and everything must be done to free the young from its restrictions."

When the devil wants to eliminate a freedom, he forges a movement to demand personal rights. The curious thing is, focusing on individual rights ends up in a loss of freedom. Demanding rights rather than concentrating on moral responsibilities always promotes rebellion. In contrast, God targets our personal responsibility and service, which promotes revival and true freedom. Go with some self-centered crusade for personal "rights" and all too often you end up with laws that destroy whatever it was these "rights" were supposed to protect.

Television is also taking away childhood. A book written for adults is almost in a code, as far as a child is concerned. A child can't understand an adult theme if he doesn't understand the vocabulary. He may read the words fornication, adultery, incest, homosexuality, genocide, or infanticide, but he is protected from the ugly ideas behind these terms. But what happens when you bring those ideas into the living room via the TV set and portray them in vivid action and color before a child's eyes?

There's hardly a seamy side of life unexplored on prime time television. Adult themes are reduced to a child's level because scripts are written to target an eight-year-old mind, which some say is the average intelligence level of the TV audience. The result? Little kids view an evil and dangerous adult world, all broken down for small people's understanding. Eight-year-old boys watching "Putting on the Hits" prance like Prince singing "Love Sexy," and seven-year-old wannabee girls sing, "Like A Virgin." Pick up a modern child's reading book, it may deal with divorce, rape, or incest. I don't know what you read when you were a little kid, but this isn't Goldilocks! Childhood is going, not just the children, but the whole idea of childhood.

Death To the Dragon

We live in dark and terrible times, but our poor world has been in darkness and fear before. And into that ugly world once long, long ago, Light and Love and Hope came back in the Person of a Child. "Unto you is born today in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord." The Child of this passage is the real threat to the reign and the future of the dragon I mentioned before. And the same dragon that was after the child then is out to destroy the child today.

The Lord Jesus said, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (John 9:5) He is not often physically in our world, but He, by the Holy Spirit, has come again to speak the word of Life around the world through millions of cleansed lips, and reach out once more through a multitude of holy hands. He has given us a great honor and a great task. "You are the light of the world; a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." (Matt. 5:14)

We are not God, but He is our King and our Friend, and we know how to point the way to His feet. We are not Jesus, but we are the only "Jesus" some hurting people may ever see. He is the head of the Church, we are His body, reborn to express His life and hope to a world filled with darkness and despair.

You can read the end of the story yourself. The woman is saved, the child is born, and the Devil finally gets his due. This is no fairy tale but reality. Christ is still on the throne and God is going to have His family yet.

Part III

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