The midwives were obliged to thwart Pharaoh. This was not about personal safety and protection but about fearing and obeying God and protecting the babies. So God rewards them.

Satan attacks our children from every side.

By breaking down gender and gender roles he demeans both mothering and fathering.

By breaking down marriage with unilateral divorce laws, and the very redefinition of the institution, he deprives children of the needed presence and care of both their parents.

By forcing our mothers into the workplace through economic compulsion or social expectation he forces our children into the care of strangers.

Until birth the very lives of our children hang upon the wills of their mothers and fathers. Every year the lives of nearly 100,000 unborn children are violently ended in Australia alone.

In Exodus 1:15–22 Satan attacks the Hebrews and their children through Pharaoh his proxy. From these black and grim verses many crucial doctrines pour out. And unexpected shafts of light.

Exodus 1:15–16 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.”

Pharaoh tried to deplete the Israelites by putting them to forced labour but they continued to be fruitful and multiply. So he resorts to genocide.

Jesus said that the devil was “a murderer from the beginning.” He aches to slay our bodies and souls. His tyrant-puppets, like Pharaoh, have no regard for the Author of human life.

Contempt for God inexorably breeds contempt for the imago dei, to the gradation then degradation of human beings according to our own notions of worth. Pharaoh values his own person and power above the lives of the Hebrew boys. By killing these image-bearers he assaults God himself.

In Western Australia abortion was partially decriminalised in 1998. I was a young teacher at the time and wrote my protest to the West Australian newspaper, which they printed. The first church I pastored developed close ties with the amazing Dwight Randall and Pregnancy Problem House, which lovingly supports vulnerable pregnant women.

In Tasmania my wife testified before a parliamentary committee about abortion and every year reasoned through the tragic realities of abortion with year 11 students at a prestigious Hobart school. It was the same every year: students who were at first guarded and hostile were soon won over to the value of all human life and our duty to protect the weak and vulnerable.

The Sixth Commandment reads “You shall not murder.” rātsach (רצח) means literally “to dash to pieces” and refers in the Decalogue to all unjust killing. Our Larger Catechism explains that this command requires “protecting and defending the innocent” and forbids “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defence” (WLC 135, 136).

Before throwing rocks down upon others we ought heed the words of the great Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. In her celebrated 1974 essay “On the Right of Resistance of the Catholic to the State” she pungently maintained that “Each nation that has ‘liberal’ abortion laws has rapidly become, if it was not already, a nation of murderers.” To the extent that we tolerate legalised abortion we participate in the killing.

God’s people must solemnly denounce all unjust taking of human life – whether the frail elderly, the disabled, the unborn, or oneself – and provide sensitive support to those who may feel tempted or compelled to end the life of their unborn children.

For any fathers and mothers who have participated in the killing of their unborn – whether actively or passively, whether wilfully or by culpable thoughtlessness – God in his stupendous mercy offers full forgiveness. The blood of Christ washes away all the guilty stains of those who approach him in remorse, confession, and repentance.

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