(6.) Women and Children First: God is Disgusted with the Mistreatment of Women

(6.) Women and Children First: God is Disgusted with the Mistreatment of Women. 

“Enough! How long will you defend the evil-doers? How long will you show kindness to those who do wicked things? You’re here to defend the defenseless, to give justice to the weak and fatherless, to maintain the rights of the oppressed and needy. Your job is to rescue the powerless and stand up for them, to deliver them from all who exploit them!” (Psalm 82:2-4).

God Hates Evil. The mistreatment of women, the dishonoring of God’s image, the degrading of human sanctity, certainly qualifies as evil in God’s eyes. As we continue to grow in our relationship with God, we discover that we yearn to progress in loving what God loves and hating what God hates.  If we are not growing in those two areas of God’s character, it’s doubtful we even have a relationship with God to begin with. Following the example of Jesus in the gospels, loving the sinner while hating the sin itself is crucial to our growing in the character of the Lord. If God finds certain behavior morally disgusting, but we find it acceptable, then we are not where we should be. It might be surprising to realize that God can have hate in His heart. We know that God is full of love, that He is in fact Love. But hate? That is a difficult concept to digest. But think about it more, and it starts to make sense. Like the Father He is, God loves us so much that He hates whatever might be destructive to us, whatever might come to harm us or our relationship to Him. God’s hatred for evil comes out of His eternal protective instinct. Another thing to think about… God is purely righteous, virtuous, filled with goodness through and through. Out of His goodness, He established a moral universe. Since the profoundly tragic fall of mankind, the overall moral universe remains, but immorality has to be dealt with and judged. Because of the way God created the world, there are rights and wrongs, the moral and immoral, the righteous and the unrighteous. God hates the wrongs. It’s no wonder the early Christians called them the ”deadly sins.” God wants to give us life, the evil one wants to give us death. God hates whatever might be deadly to us. God hates whatever in the world was not a part of His righteous plan for the world. Simply put, God’s hate comes out of His righteous love for us and His world. Yes, God hates. But He hates whatever is worth hating. God speaks plainly in His Word about what He loves and what He hates, about what God embraces and what He rejects. Naturally, as we are becoming aware of what God hates, we will also learn what God loves. The truth is, if we are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus and thus the character of God, we show our fearful love of God by joining Him in hating what is evil. “To reverently honor the LORD is to hate evil. I hate pride, arrogance, evil behavior, and twisted speech.”(Proverbs 8:13). Or, as the psalmist proclaims in Psalm 97:10, “Let those who love the Lord hate evil.”

ABOMINATION: (Hebrew, “towebah”). The mistreatment of God’s beloved creation, which of course includes the glorious woman, is biblically termed abominable. An abomination in Scripture is any activity that God considers morally disgusting; a detestable behavior; any action or attitude that is loathed with a passion by God; behavior that God has judged as spiritually abhorrent and unacceptable; something that God hates and finds deeply repugnant; something that is deeply offensive to God’s sensibilities; any action or attitude that God thinks is repulsive, revolting and utterly alien to God’s nature.

A Catalogue of Ways Women are Being Mistreated: Since women are “the bearers of life,” when they are mistreated, then life itself is eventually degraded and dishonored. The following would qualify as abominations in the eyes of Creator God, which means He is divinely disgusted with mistreatments like these:

1. Birth Control: The contraceptive “Pill” hit the American market in earnest in 1965. By 1967, nearly 13 million women in the world were using it. And by 1984 that number would reach 50–80 million. Many Christians continue to believe that artificial contraception is wrong because: it is against ‘natural law’; it degrades the sexual gift of womanhood and leads to them being merely a sex object; it breaks the natural connection between the procreative and the unitive purposes of sex; it turns sex into a non-marital act; it gives human beings the power to decide when a new life should begin, and that power belongs to God; it leads to widespread immorality; it damages the institution of marriage; it reduces male respect for women; it gives human beings the idea that they can have complete power over the body. Many Christians believe that the Pill started our culture on a slippery slope to where we are now in terms of the blatant disregard of human life.
2. Abortion. Abortion is the inhumane killing of an unborn child developing in the womb of a pregnant mother. It is morally equivalent to child sacrifice and is the ultimate child abuse. As of 2026, there are a million murders of unborn babies a year (400,000 in abortion centers and 600,00 chemical abortions at home) in the United States, and 70 million abortions since 1973. Globally, there are more than 42 million abortions every year. Abortion is a barbaric violation of the sacred intimacy between mother and child, and is a grotesque abomination in the eyes of God. But of course abortion’s effects on the mother are equally important. Abortion is extremely harmful to women and is hardly a healthy sign of women’s empowerment or autonomous freedom. Documented research on post-abortion women reveals that there is a 40% greater risk of breast cancer; double the risk of alcoholism, suicide, and sleep disorders; a 20% greater risk of psychological difficulties such as anxiety, rage, grief and depression; a much greater risk of guilt, regret, shame and PTSD because of the inevitable hormonal imbalances as well as the conscience-driven thoughts after the fact; drug abuse is five times more likely. Legal abortion is the 5th-leading cause of maternal deaths in the U.S., due to infection, excessive bleeding, pulmonary embolism and anesthetic complications.  Abortion can be devastating for future pregnancies as well: a 60% increase in risk of miscarriage; 3% greater risk of very low birth rate and premature deliveries; 7% increased risk of uterine bleeding. Teens are three times more likely to have a stillborn child in their first pregnancy after an abortion. Need we mention that the flourishing abortion industry is beloved by such stalwart citizens as sex traffickers, predators, abusers, and irresponsible males?
3. Chemical Abortions. Because the at-home abortion pills Mifepristone and Misoprostol now perform about 65% of all the abortions in the U.S., this deserves a special highlighting of mistreatment all its own. This chemical process is known as RU-486, was legalized in 2000, and now is the leading choice for women looking for an abortion, as opposed to medical abortions or surgical abortions performed in clinics or hospitals. This abortion conveniently done in the privacy of the home, generally during the first trimester of the pregnancy, involves the two chemicals mentioned above. The first chemical is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, which cuts off the fetus’ blood and nutrient supply, and eventually kills the unborn baby through starvation. Misoprostol is also synthetic, and is ingested 2-3 days after Mifepristone, inducing contractions and forcefully expelling the dead fetus in an early delivery. Pro-abortion proponents claim this chemical abortion to be completely safe but that is simply untrue. There have been at least 24 deaths reported, literally thousands of injuries to the pregnant women, and its complication rates are 4 times higher than a surgical abortion. These harmful effects of chemical abortions are now being documented: 10% of women reported a continuing pregnancy; 29% reported an extreme bleeding event with fever; 43% needed to quickly seek subsequent medical help from a qualified medical professional; 18% of women required a subsequent surgical abortion. In all cases, there are common abdominal pains for several days, and the heavy bleeding usually lasts between 9-16 days afterwards. 8% of the women reported the severe bleeding to last at least 30 days. There are many, many women who require hospitalization because of the acute hemorrhaging and the risk of infections. The truth is… chemical abortions at home kills the unborn baby and is a serious danger to the mother as well. It’s obvious that the abortion pill is another callous and degrading attempt to place a priority of taking unborn life over the health and welfare of the pregnant woman.
4. Abuse and Exploitation. 2,400 women were murdered by men in 2022 in US, and 87% knew their killer; 29% of women in US have recently experienced rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, and 35% of women have experienced those forms of abuse in their lifetime; 4 in 5 victims of domestic violence were female; 35% of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults. The horrific stats regarding human trafficking include: It includes forced labor, sexual exploitation and organ removal, and is the fastest growing form of commerce in the world, making $245 billion every year as of 2021; the forced labor aspect is a modern slavery business worth $150 billion yearly in the US; 50,000 women and children are forced into sexual slavery every year in the US; 90% of the females trafficked are for sexual exploitation. Human trafficking is reported in every state in the US, and is a component of prostitution, live sex shows, stripping, pornographic videos, and sexual tourism; 71% of all trafficking victims globally are women and children.
5. Pornography. What could be more degrading for women, more abominable in God’s eyes, than the scourge of pornography?  It’s as if the evil one himself walked pompously into each man’s mind and offered something that looked like this… ‘Men, have I got a deal for you! Here’s my easy way to get personally involved in an activity that will: (1.)  become an addiction that might develop into an obsession that would be tremendously difficult to break; (2.) rewire your brain in such a way that you become increasingly self-centered, distant from others, prone to depression and anxiety, and lose your willpower and self-control; (3.) cause you to think of women as sex objects and not made in the image of God; (4.) warp your appreciation of pure feminine beauty; (5.) make it very difficult to have healthy, self-giving romantic relationships; (6.) give you a flawed understanding of masculinity and manhood; (7.) make it difficult for you to distinguish between love and lust; (8.) increasingly separate you from the ones who love you the most, such as parents, siblings and grandparents; (9.) trade your 12 minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of loneliness, emptiness, and twisted thinking; (10.) give you increasing cravings that still prove to be unsatisfying at a deep level; (11.) enable you to support a billion dollar business dependent on degrading and using women who then lose all sense of dignity as a sacred human being; (12.) make you develop an impure version of God’s great gift of sexuality; (13.) numb you to the glorious reality that surrounds you. This doesn’t sound like such a great deal for both men and women, does it? Pornography, which is viewing or reading explicit material intended for the sole purpose of stimulating erotic feelings and producing sexual arousal, does all that and more. Yes, sexual brokenness has been around forever in human history, but why is it so pervasive now? Porn seems to have been accepted now as an innocent, victimless recreational activity because, with the onset of the internet, it is anonymous, private, easily accessible, and culturally accepted at an increasingly younger age. The porn industry rakes in $13 billion a year in the U. S., and one porn site reports 81 million visits per day. The relaxing of laws and guidelines regarding obscenity is only making matters worse, and leads us down the slippery slope to depravity. The biblical idea that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak has never been more pronounced. We live in a hypersexualized culture, and the triggers of temptation have never been more obvious. Over 60% of adults in the U.S. use porn on a regular basis, and 77% of weekly users are unaware of the harm it does to them. Professing Christians are proving to be just as vulnerable to porn as the general population, with 75% of pastors reporting that they regularly minister to believers in their congregation about their struggle with porn. Tragically, only 19% of professing Christians using porn on a regular basis are trying to stop. The demonstrated cultural decline that comes with pornography is obvious. This is another battleground in a spiritual warfare, and every one of us must go out of our way to intentionally combat it. Pornography degrades and dishonors women and can permanently warp the minds of men. Everyone can be tempted in this way, and we could certainly heed the word of Jesus…  “The eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is.” (from Christ’s ‘Sermon the Mount’ Matt. 6:22-23).

“Where sin has superabounded, grace has hyper-superabounded!” (Romans 5:20). Yes, there is sin, sin and more sin. But that only means there is the far-surpassing presence of grace, grace and much more grace! When the devil seems to be overplaying his hand, that only means he’s running scared. For each material step backward, there are ten spiritual steps forward. For every flame of sin, there are bonfires of revival. Pray that we won’t allow what seems to be the worst of times to blind us to what could actually be the best of times!