A listener by the name of John writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, can we reasonably draw moral parallels between abortion in America and the extermination of Jews by Nazis in World War II?" There are non-parallels, and there are parallels. And it might be good just to name a few, because evidently the question is coming out of a sense of there are people that get upset about this correlation, and there are other people who feel it's natural.

So let me try to get inside the skin of both people. There are non-parallels. The Holocaust was overwhelmingly a hatred of Jewish people, not only, but overwhelmingly a hatred of an ethnic group and a religious group. This is generally not the case with the unborn. The unborn are killed across all ethnicities and religions.

Secondly, there's a non-parallel in that the Holocaust was carried out mainly by one nation, while babies are being killed in every nation of the world. There's a non-parallel in that the Holocaust was mainly carried out on mature, rationally aware human beings, rather than pre-rational babies. And so the horror of contemplating their end was vastly greater for those who were killed in the Holocaust.

And there's a non-parallel in that the Holocaust had a beginning and had an end, though ethnic persecution, of course, hasn't ended while the killing of babies goes on. So those are a few, and I'm sure there are more that we, if you just spent time, we could think of the non-parallels.

But here are the parallels that I think are, in fact, completely valid. One, there's a parallel that both involve precious human beings created in the image of God, Jewish people and others that the Nazis despised, and then the unborn. They're both human beings. There's a parallel in the fact that they were slaughtered.

I'm not even going to say like animals, because it was worse than animals in both cases. It was worse than animals. It happened in the concentration camps with medical experimentation. I've been to Dachau three times, Tony, because it was right outside Munich where I lived for three years. And I've read and seen the pictures of being frozen to death to experiment with how quickly people would freeze to death, or hanging, or asphyxiation, or all kinds of horrible experimentations that were done.

And so it was a kind of slaughter that was worse than the killing of animals. And so it is with babies in the womb. Most of them are dismembered limb from limb. There's a parallel in scope. The numbers are in the millions, and they are unimaginable in both cases.

There's a parallel in rationale, the diminishment of personhood and dignity. The non-Aryan race was deemed increasingly subhuman, or at least not the kind of human who was worthy of life. That's exactly the same rationale for the killing of the unborn. They are subhuman, or at least they're not the kind of human that is worthy of life.

And I would add one more parallel. The time will come when the generations will look back on ours with even more unbelief that we could have let it happen than we look back on Germany in the 1930s and 40s and marvel that they could let it happen. God hates murder then, and he hates murder now.

He condemns it in his Word, and so that's another parallel that God will in the end make everything right. He will settle accounts. Nothing will be swept under the rug in this universe. Yes, amen. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to us at PastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

Visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.