Grant Van Leuven

Ultrasounds and Sonograms Save Babies’ Lives—A Call to Support Pregnancy Care Clinics

According to a recent newsletter by the Pregnancy Care Clinic (PCC) in San Diego, “Providing free ultrasounds is an essential service that we offer …”  No surprise therefore that California has sought to stop any physicians practicing as sole proprietorships from being allowed to perform ultrasounds with its AB1720 amendment petition.[9]  The Devil knows what he’s doing as a lying murderer.  Ultrasounds save children’s lives.

Editor’s Note: Pregnancy care clinics in San Diego County—the author’s residence, have recently been under serious attack to be shut down.  Please see the footnote below about today’s December 5 meeting with San Diego County Supervisors and how to influence them.[1]
My wife and I had determined we fully filled my quiver this January with the delivery of our daughter.  So, I was quite surprised this June when she hinted that another little reward was likely awaiting us in her womb!  I responded, “That’s impossible!”—not out of desperation, but confusion about how it could have happened during the identified month of conception.
Yet, indeed, next March we are expecting our eighth covenant child.[2]  We learned through an early blood test that he will be our fifth son, and we are now praying for him by his name, Gaius Ezekiel Van Leuven.[3]  Naturally, we ask of the Lord that our “Little Guy” makes it to full term healthy and strong.  How frightful that such prayer cover proved important for him just to survive my wife’s first gynecology visit!
Right at the start, the lady doctor asked if we had planned the pregnancy.  When my wife sheepishly admitted that through natural family planning we had tried for her not to become pregnant,[4] the doctor cavalierly responded, “Do you want to be?  You don’t have to be.  This is California.”
Thus, she lectured my wife while our then eight-month-old daughter, grinning her fresh cut choppers, giggled and bounced upon my knee—whom the doctor had already googled over upon entering the other end of the cramped patient’s room where we were tucked into a tight corner behind the door waiting with Mamma awaiting her checkup on the examination chair.  My wife and I were flabbergasted; but she quickly reacted resolutely confirming that we would gladly receive our gift from God.
The doctor, a mother of one young daughter who was filling in for my wife’s normally assigned and supportive gynecologist, shockingly defaulted to this sly rhetorical implication and pressure: “No, you don’t, do you?  You have too many children already.  You’re forty years old and you just cut your last child’s umbilical cord only a few months ago—her belly button has surely barely healed over.  Let’s end this now.  You don’t need this.  You don’t want it.”[5]
But after seeing that her preliminary temptation was a lost cause, the doctor conceded to the second selection column of her mental checklist and wheeled over the ultrasound machine, flicking on its hum and beeps and blinks.  As she guided its scanning wand over my wife’s gel-lathered tummy, we watched in wonderment while our son kept kicking with his Mamma’s long legs and his strong heartbeat pulsed and scratched across the screen in real time!  It is always amazing.
I couldn’t believe how this medical professional who would have taken the Hippocratic Oath could now hypocritically look at our baby and enjoy him with us on the monitor just minutes after first offering to kill him; and frankly, robustly suggesting we take her up on that offer.
But what really struck me later as we strolled toward the hospital elevators and paused outside its entryway—repeatedly smiling over the sonogram strip of baby pics, was this: the doctor did NOT propose turning to the ultrasound machine in the room so we could see our living baby until AFTER we had affirmed we would keep him alive.[6]  And that timing it seems to me was strategic.
Had we expressed uncertainty and been led toward aborting our baby, very likely we would never have been presented with the choice to look at him moving on the monitor before the deed was done and he was dead—nor have to face his little face in the aftermath.  How could we see his heart beating and then have the heart to crush it?  Of course, the doctor didn’t provide the pregnancy scan possibility during her initial inquisition!
But how many uninformed others hear no mention of the ultrasound machine before naively leaving it unplugged in the corner and then silencing a baby’s voice forever? —because of the powerfully persuasive and prejudiced push of a snide doctor’s urging?
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New Releases from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

In “Trembling Joy,” Pastor Ryan Speck answers the question, “What if worship style were more than a matter of personal taste?” by showing how the Bible’s own definition and description of worshiping God should impact the church… Presenting the teaching ministry of Rev. Eric Alexander, “Hear the Word of God” has joined the Alliance’s Podcast Network.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals announces the release of its most recently published book, “Trembling Joy,” by Pastor Ryan Speck, and the launch of its newest podcast, “Hear the Word of God,” featuring the teaching ministry of Rev. Eric Alexander.
“We are delighted to provide these excellent new Reformed and confessional resources for Christian pastors, elders, and laypeople,” said Alliance Executive Director Bob Brady.
Trembling Joy: A Biblical Defense of Traditional Worship
In Trembling Joy, Pastor Ryan Speck answers the question, “What if worship style were more than a matter of personal taste?” by showing how the Bible’s own definition and description of worshiping God should impact the church.
The pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Columbia, Mo., Speck wrote the book “to challenge a new generation of worshippers to examine the spoils of a quickly won revolution, and to reconsider modern worship critically and Biblically.”
Rev. Terry Johnson, senior minister of Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Ga., says, “In this book, Ryan Speck has provided a thorough, well-organized, comprehensive case for worship as historically understood by the Reformed church. The friends of Reformed worship will be encouraged, the rest would do well to consider how their practice of worship might be strengthened by the content, forms, and methods that Speck advocates.”
Hear the Word of God Podcast
Presenting the teaching ministry of Rev. Eric Alexander, “Hear the Word of God” has joined the Alliance’s Podcast Network. Well known to many through the Alliance’s annual Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, the podcast begins with Alexander’s study in the Epistle to the Hebrews, guiding listeners through this sometimes difficult-to-understand book of the Bible.  As with the other seven Alliance podcasts, “Hear the Word of God” is available at alliancepodcastnetwork.org and on all major podcast providers.  Alexander was a minister of the Church of Scotland for over fifty years and a Council Member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
Grant Van Leuven is the Community Engagement Coordinator of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals
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Blood Cries, “Binary!”

Each cell in every boy declares his masculinity, “I am male!”  And each cell in every girl of her femininity, “I am woman!”  And no amount of medical mutilation and diplomatic manipulation from without can muffle these voices within our society’s collective conscience while our children’s blood always will be crying out about our mutually inherent and lovely differentiated binary sexual biology.

On the April 15 airing of SNL’s “Weekend Update,” the show’s first openly nonbinary cast member, Ms. Molly Kearney, though still using her singular female name yet celebrated being referred to by obliging backstage staff with the neuter pronouns “they” and “them” (reflecting “their” references to her elsewhere).[1] In so doing she not only defies her God-given and biologically determined female identity but also denies the obvious reality that she is not plural—exposing the arbitrarily ludicrous LGBTQ+ agenda being pushed to new schizophrenic heights.
While there is no mistaking Kearney’s unoriginal attempts at being the female version of Chris Farley in the segment, there also is no missing her intention to exit with the air of angelic authority being lifted up with ropes as she declared,
If you don’t care about trans-kids’ lives, it means you don’t care about…kids’ lives.
… They got my pronouns right [nonbinary “them” instead of “her”]! Let’s go!
What’s happening kids is wrong and you don’t need to be scared. Our job is to protect you and your job is to focus on being a kid…There’s a bunch of dudes asking you about your crotch and controlling when and where you’re allowed to pee. But if you just hang on you’ll look up and realize, you’re flying kid!
Trans rocks!
First of all, let’s hope parents in fact care enough about their precious boys and girls to guard their vulnerable worlds from being rocked by viewing SNL, let alone not to permit them to be confused and brainwashed into risking psychological harm and physical abuse in bathrooms and locker rooms or mutilation on operating floors.
The damage could go beyond corporal and emotional repair (see firstthings.com/article/2004/11/surgical-sex and firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/07/mutilating-our-bodies). And the truth is that rather than seeking to protect children, societal predators like Ms. Kearney are grabbing at their underaged zippers and pulling them by their immature ears to turn our minors into suicide bombers of political warfare and cultural launchpads for rocketing queer careers.
My wife, who is very thankful to be liberated from what she laments as her native land’s more deeply and widely infested culture of sexual degradation and transgender disfigurement, recently shared an Instagram video with me of a Brazilian woman whom I would have otherwise never questioned to be a man by all outward appearances. I couldn’t help but admit it was impressive how much mankind, made in God’s image, can so convincingly disguise sexual identity with modern technology. A mastectomy and hormonal manipulation had flattened her chest; broadened her face, neck, torso, and appendages; grown dark bristly hair on her tattoo-graffitied arms and shoulders; deepened her voice; and even topped her off with a receding hairline. (My understanding is that other methods were used to demolish and erect new pretend anatomy underneath her unmentionables.) It was shocking to see pictures of her feminine beauty before her deformation; she had even been a professional model. (One wonders if she tired of being objectified in a fallen man’s world, especially in her country.)
But with all the rejections of binary biological classification, a person’s maleness or femaleness can never be modified inwardly. Crossdressing homosexuals and spayed and neutered transgendered folk will never be able to reproduce themselves other than by Pied Piper child trafficking that deceptively coerces adoption of their dogmatists while stealing away unadulterated childhoods.[2]
Not only does one’s soul truly know what his or her body and organs and hormones testify outwardly, a man or woman’s DNA cannot be denied by his or her heart of hearts. What may be manipulated crudely from without can never be actually altered within. Every one of our estimated 60 to 100 trillion cells (amidst 200 cell types) would need to have an X or Y chromosome replaced; yet this utter impossibility would still not recreate functional physiology opposite from how one was born.
Rev. Terry Johnson appeals to our reason:
Follow the science…The culture is willing to do anything but follow the science…how about the normalizing of transgenderism and that you can be a woman trapped in the body of a man and a man trapped in the body of a woman? What does the science tell ya? The science tells ya that every single cell in every single body is either male or female. Your genes are either male genes…or they’re female genes. The science would say you are in terms of gender what you are in biology and that’s all anybody in the human race in all of recorded history has ever understood until the recent, like five minutes ago…[3]
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Promise: God Will Give You Strength

We all are already in the process of making our deathbeds and soon we will lie in them.  Thankfully, God will always carry Christians through the valley of the shadow of death.  For Proverbs 18:10 promises, The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.  And Psalm 18:2 emboldens us, The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God [El], my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.

It was 8 a.m. on a Saturday in Southern California while I was settling to watch my four-and-a-half-year-old son play basketball when I received a call from a sister in the Lord, Anne, dying in Minnesota.[1]
We never met, but similar difficult providences had connected us for counsel and we became fast friends.  She quickly embraced me and my family with a motherly care that felt like she had been waving with a smile from across our cul-de-sac for decades.
And now, Anne was reaching out for brotherly comfort while lying on her deathbed in hospice.  Her speech was slurred, slowing, and sleepy due to medications causing side effects of delusions and anxiety.  Not long before, she was only able to reply to my concerned cell phone texts by typing a few empty bubbles.
I was in the midst of studying one of God’s names for a sermon series: El, translated “God,” meaning “The Strong One.”  I took Anne to the Lord by this name through prayer and the Word, including Psalm 73:26: My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.  And she testified of being strengthened by her El.
We all are already in the process of making our deathbeds and soon we will lie in them.  Thankfully, God will always carry Christians through the valley of the shadow of death.  For Proverbs 18:10 promises, The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.  And Psalm 18:2 emboldens us, The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God [El], my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. 
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Promise: The Good Shepherd Promises to Always Provide for You through Affliction

Christ keeps His sheep rotating through different areas of sanctification, assuring us, I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10). Yet Phillip Keller notes that shepherds also take the sheep into deep wells of dark caverns for water: “Many of the places we may be led into will appear to us as dark, deep, dangerous and somewhat disagreeable.  But it simply must be remembered that He is there with us in it.”[8]

J. Douglas MacMillan shares how fisherman alerted him about one of his sheep stuck on a lonely cliff’s edge with nothing left to eat.  And having had no water to soften and digest the food, it later died.[1]
In contrast, Psalm 23 promises that God will always guide Christians where they can eat and drink, ensure that they do, and provide only what’s best.
Your Good Shepherd will always provide for all your basic needs and nourishment.
Verse one proclaims,  “I shall not want.”  John McNeill interprets the phrase as, “I’m looked after. Kept, provided for.”[2]
And in verse five, God prepares your table in advance.
Phillip Keller explains how he took his sheep to the “mesa” (Spanish, “table”) in the summer mountains, a high-topped plateau.  He suggests David may have had in mind how the shepherd first finds the best place for the sheep and labors to clear and cultivate it ahead of time.[3]  Just as God told the Israelites He had prepared Canaan for them with builded cities, ready-made and furnished houses, pre-dug wells, and farmed vineyards and trees.[4]
Christian, Jesus said: I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also (John 14:2-3). Meanwhile, He lays out His communion table to satisfy you with His righteousness.[5]
Sadly, we often lose our appetite.  So, as McNeill wisely comments, “He is preparing a place for us, and preparing us for the place.”[6]
Your Good Shepherd will always provide you with an appropriate appetite.
Verse three sighs, “He restoreth my soul”; literally in the Hebrew, “My soul he brings back,” translated elsewhere, “repents.”

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Promises: God Will Discipline You

While God promises not to treat us as our sins deserve, He also promises not to stop treating us like His children.  This is why one of the three signs of a true church of Christ is said to be discipline.[6]  Therefore in Hebrews 12:6 it is explained that while sanctification often smarts, Whom the Lord chasteneth He loveth.[7]

R.C. Sproul wrote, “The great lie of Satan is that if you really love a child, you won’t discipline him.  In fact, normal discipline is often considered ‘child abuse.’  But the greatest abuse you can give a child is to let him do whatever he wants without any correction, chastening, or discipline.  A truly loving and caring father will rebuke, admonish, and chasten his children … The Father never writes us off.”[1]
In fact, Hebrews 12:5-10 makes the point[2] that we should be encouraged when we are painfully disciplined by God as His covenant sign of adoption in Christ.  So in Numbers 26:1-65, God reminds us He is faithful both to punish and preserve His Church.
The English name for the book, “Numbers”, reflects the census of Israelites in chapters 1, 3, and 26.  Nearly 40 years later in chapter 26, their population is about the same number, yet an entirely different people.  As a result of God’s discipline the second generation proceeds with a prosperous future.
God will severely rebuke His Church in any generation.
A father will make good on his promise to spank so his children take him seriously.  Thus Paul writes in 1 Tim. 5:20, Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.
God shows His Church that He followed through on Numbers 14 the first time they were near Canaan.  In verses 63-64, their parents at the first census in Sinai aren’t here for this second one in Moab (with Eleazar having replaced Aaron as high priest); and this is just as He said it would be (verse 65).
Notice two parenthetical reminders of His killing greater rebellions in vss. 9-10 (Dathan, Abiram, and Korah in chapter 16) and in vs. 61 (Nadab and Abihu in chapter 10).

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Psalm 133: Behold our Blessed Brotherhood

Every Christian Sabbath, don’t miss it.  Admire, adore, and appreciate one another and our eternal union in Christ.  And then sing Psalm 122 while you to come to church glad to worship God together united in Christ and unified with the mind of Christ, praying for the peace, happiness, and prosperity of Jerusalem. 

Psalm 133:1 extols, Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!  It teaches us to appreciate how God’s good blessings are especially experienced in the worshipful union and communion of His saints.
This pleasantness is something Christians enjoy in local congregations as well as in the broader fellowship of Presbytery, General Assembly, or Synod gatherings.
See that God bestows His blessings on and through His Church united in worship.
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul describes how the Church is Christ’s body united together, and how it is as one that the members survive and thrive.  They walk with God there.
Psalm 133 is labeled in its title as a song of ascents, part of a themed “mini-series” within Psalms 120-134 believed to be sung by Israelites as they ascended the road to Jerusalem where the Temple was to unite in offering sacrifices and worship.  Verse 1 teaches that such is a great blessing, and verse 3 notes that God commands his blessing there forever.  As well, verse 2 recognizes it  “ran down” from God, or in verse 3, it “descended.”
Blessings flow down from God and gather where He determines.  Thus, assembling together for Christian worship each Lord’s Day and at His table is special fellowship (1 Corinthians 10:16).  And God provides two illustrations of this blessed encounter as His gathered, communing people.
First, see that God sends blessings within His Church through Christ’s priestly propitiation.
Oil brings vigor and vitality back to our skin, with a shine and glow.  It was used to anoint kings, prophets, and priests from and for the Church.
In verse 2, the oil dripping down Aaron’s beard represents his anointing as high priest ministering in the Tabernacle (and Temple), where God brought atonement of sins, forgiveness, restoration of fellowship with God, and union with His saints.

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Psalm 128: The Lord Blesses Those Who Fear Him

“Those whose blessed state we are here assured of are such as fear the Lord and walk in his ways, such as have a deep reverence of God upon their spirits and evidence it by a regular and constant conformity to his will…God blesses them, and his pronouncing them blessed makes them so.”

As my wife and I anticipate our seventh covenant child (and third daughter) joining us early next year, I told our other children that it is their fault that we’re having another baby!  Because they are all so amazing—so wonderful and so precious, and so we wanted to love another of them in our family and church to impact this world for Christ!  Yes, it is a lot of work to care for them, as the world wants us to worry about in fear, but they are also a great blessing from the Lord to we who fear Him.
In fact, God best blesses those who respect Him with many children to build their families and His Church.[1]  So God promised Abraham more children than stars in the sky and sand on the seashore as reflected in his new name, “father of many nations.”  And God gave the Israelites easy births of an enormous amount of babies to outgrow their Egyptian persecutors (and also blessed their faithful midwives).
The Scriptures can hardly imagine anything as a greater temporal blessing than being bestowed with more children.  Thus Psalm 128 expresses this in verses 3 and 6; yet having many children is an illustration of what the Psalm focuses on—people whom God blesses and makes happy:
Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD; that walketh in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee…Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD. The LORD shall bless thee out of Zion: and thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life (vs. 1-2, 4-5).
Imagine having the most powerful soldier personally standing guard around you and your family always.  Psalm 34:7 says, The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.  Those that fear Jesus (who trust in and serve Him) enjoy His happy, blessed protection and provision.
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God Personally Cares for Children in the Womb and Prescribes Punishment for Aborting Them, Rewards for Protecting Them

May we beware of such an abhorrent affront to God’s own personal handiwork upon each child in vivo by our nation (too often amidst a complacent and thus compliant church) and pray not only for no federal mandate of its toleration, but even more, for a national law enforced against it and upon every state of the union.

Commenting on Exodus 21 and capital offenses, Umberto Cassuto notes that “The Torah wishes to affirm and establish the principle, in the name of Divine law, that human life is sacred, and whoever assails this sanctity forfeits his own life – measure for measure.”[1]
The civil right of human liberty was emphasized first in this chapter, and is followed by upholding the value of human life.  We must respect and protect all lives;[2] and according to Exodus 21:22-23, this includes the defenseless infant maturing in mother’s womb.
If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,
Those who wrongly induced risky premature labor were to cover the consequential costs—what’s more, perpetrators who caused a miscarriage had to be executed![3]  This should not surprise us, for God Himself is mysteriously there in utero, personally forming the baby from his or her earliest existence.
Psalm 139:14 reads: I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.[4]  Verse 13 qualifies this making as God’s intimate molding, For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.  And verses 15-16 elaborate: My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
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Denial of Sex Distinctions is a Symptom of Evolution

A source of the modern sexual identity crisis explosion is the touting of the theory of evolution, which undermines God’s creative plan and lets “survival of the fittest” function as we see fit.  If we evolved into men and women, we can continue changing.

God reveals Himself not as “Mother,” but “Father,” and so fatherhood is foundational[1] as is maintaining Biblical gender designs during the annual Gay Pride Month this June.
While prototypical man and woman were in many ways the same, they also were given sex distinctions so that they could fit together and function as one amazing whole.
Mark 10:6 reads: But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.  Here, Jesus instructs that correct marital (and thus sexual identity) roles are determined by referring back to God’s pre-fall creation design of mankind as unalterably male and female.
We are wise to go back to Genesis 1:27; 2:18, 21-23; 5:2 to appreciate received gender designations.  Notice, “helpmeet” for woman means “counterpart”.
Indeed, woman has a God-given way about her that is self-evident.  Her gender’s distinctions, with myriad superior subtleties, are of no little significance.
Females are unmistakably and wonderfully not masculine. They exude more feeling in a manner that feels like more.  They smell different.  They sound different. They move differently.  They look unique and look at things uniquely.  Their ears and hearts have nuanced sensitivities that round out their coarser counterparts.  They touch us, both men and fellow-women, with a distinctive instinct that is meaningfully softer and smoother.
Only woman can be mother.  Only female can be wife.  Her nature is so naturally hers that both the Hebrew and Greek words in the Bible for “wife” are interchangeably “woman” and only discernible by context.
It is abnormal for men, as effeminate as many are today, to actually be feminine, and frankly, impossible.  What woman has inside her can only be cheaply imitated by a man to another man.  She alone can shine as female from within.  Only Hannah can cry and sing over motherhood.  Only Abigail can slow down David and make him marvel at her delicate influence.
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