The Chinese government is exploiting the unique ability women have to become pregnant and bring new life into the world. It is doing this to destroy—at least in part—the Uyghur people. Beijing’s abuses against Uyghur women are one of the most significant human rights crises of our time, and we should be talking about that.

Last week, an independent tribunal in the United Kingdom released a judgment that found the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghur people to be consistent with the legal definition of genocide. Multiple governments have made the same pronouncement, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Belgium. But these countries didn’t release their legal reasoning or factual evidence. The Uyghur Tribunal did—and it is Beijing’s abuses against Uyghur women specifically that resulted in the tribunal’s judgment.
Days of public hearings featured witness and expert testimonies, and a team of international human rights lawyers, professors, and NGO leaders combed through the evidence. The evidence uncovered was then measured against the legal definitions of crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide. The Chinese government was found guilty on all three counts.
The suppression of the Uyghur ethnic and religious minority is nearly all-encompassing. High-tech surveillance watches their every move. Passports are systematically confiscated. At least 1.8 million Uyghurs are held in internment camps, and both detained and “graduated” Uyghurs are used as a source of forced labor. No Uyghur person escapes the consequences of Beijing’s brutal crackdown in the Xinjiang region. Even children are sent to be raised in state-run boarding schools. Yet, notably, the weight of China’s genocide is targeted toward women.
The Uyghur Tribunal determined that China was “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” one of the methods of genocide outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Earlier this year, the U.S. government came to the same conclusion.
Women bear the brunt of Beijing’s violent birth control policies in Xinjiang. One woman who worked at a hospital in Xinjiang in the late 1990s told the Uyghur Tribunal that approximately 100 women came for abortions every day, most sent by the government’s Family Planning Office and many in the late stages of pregnancy. She said that the aborted babies were disposed of in a garbage basket. Even after the end of China’s notorious one-child policy (and subsequent two-child policy), authorities in Xinjiang target Uyghur women for harsh sterilization and forced abortion policies.
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For four hundred years while the Israelites endured slavery in Egypt, every time they walked past Joseph’s grave, they remembered the promise that one day they’d take those bones to the Promised Land. Joseph’s bones were a visible reminder of God’s promise to the Israelites. Our grave is a reminder to all who pass by that these bones will one day be raised. Every cemetery is a testimony. Every tombstone is a reminder. Every dead body is a promise waiting to be fulfilled.

The postmodern axiom that utilitarianism is the highest virtue has been part of the reason some faithful Christians are opting for cremation when they die. Cemeteries, after all, take up precious land. Others opt for cremation because it is usually less than half the cost of burial. And still others choose to be cremated because cemeteries are just too eerie. They would rather be spread over their favorite mountainside than reside in a macabre cemetery. One man put his father’s ashes in a finger hole of his bowling ball, so his dad would be with him when he bowled a perfect game.
Environmental enthusiasts affirm California recently joining Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Vermont in legalizing human composting. After all, according to one estimate, cremation releases an average of 534.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air per body, totaling 360,000 metric tons of greenhouse gasses a year just in the U.S.
In composting, the body is put in a container and covered with straw, wood chips and alfalfa that allows microbes to break down the body in about 30 days. After curing for another 2-6 weeks, the family can use the cubic yard of composted-loved one to fertilize their flower bed.
Composting denies that each individual is a special creation made in God’s own image and precious in God’s sight. Treating the body as nothing more than part of the material world, denies the uniqueness and worth of each individual. Composting is not a new idea although its widening acceptance is new.
In the 1958 movie Houseboat, widower Cary Grant teaches his son the meaning of death. Holding a pitcher of water while they sit on the side of his houseboat, Grant tells his son, “The pitcher has no use at all except as the container of something. In this case a container for water which you can think of as my life-force.” Pouring the water into the river, Grant explains, “The river is like the universe, you haven’t lost it [life-force/water]. It’s just that everything constantly changes. So perhaps when our life-force, our souls, leave our bodies they go back into God’s universe and the security of becoming part of all life again, all nature.” In other words, the human body is just matter that can be recycled into a tree or garden.
Radical Feminist Rosemary Radford Reuther in the 1980s describes what happens in death in more academic prose:
[O]ur existence ceases as individuated ego-organism and dissolves back into the cosmic matrix of matter/energy, from which new centers of the individuation arise. It is the matrix, rather than our individuated centers of being, that is ‘everlasting,’ that subsists underneath the coming to be and passing away of individuated beings and even planetary worlds.
I recently explained to my young grandson that in the past churches often had cemeteries located next to them. As people entered the church, they were reminded that life on this earth is short, thus forcing them to adjust their earthly priorities in light of the eternal. I asked my grandson what it would mean if the church had a swimming pool next door rather than a cemetery. He answered, “Life is short, enjoy it while you can.” Perhaps that’s another reason for composting. The dead are out of sight and we can get on with our fun.
Composting and even cremation destroy the individual. They deny the truth in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting”. They deny Scripture’s truth, “For he [God] chose us in him [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons….”
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Biblical eschatology contemplates not that the kingdom of this world would be replaced by the kingdom of Christ, but rather a coexistence of two kingdom realities until the summing up of all things in Christ. (Ephesians 2:19ff; 1 Corinthians 15:22-28). What the Jews missed is something that too often escapes many evangelicals as well – that Christ’s kingdom is a present reality as the former things are passing away.

The four part drama of creation, fall, redemption and consummation is not just soteriological but eschatological and covenantal. This is to say, the whole of redemptive history is according to promise and fulfillment. Yet perhaps less familiar to many of us is that redemption in Christ has made the future now present.
With respect to promise and fulfillment, at the heart of God’s redemption is a foretaste of things to come – a spiritual reality that is enjoyed now in proportion to the extent in which it is perceived and believed. As we await the final adoption of our bodies on the last day, believers have already entered into the age to come. As enlightened believers who are born from above, the communion of saints on earth already taste of the heavenly gift, the word of God, and even the powers of the world to come as members of Christ’s body who share in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 8:23; Hebrews 6:4-5)
Back to the garden, a refresher on how it all began:
The first covenant God entered into with man was a covenant of works. (Hosea 6:7) Although life was promised to Adam and his posterity upon the condition of one man’s perfect and personal obedience, the terms of the covenant were nonetheless a matter of divine condescension. Adam was the recipient of unmerited favor by virtue of having been created in original righteousness, holiness and with natural religious affections. Perpetual faithfulness would have ultimately resulted for Adam and his offspring in further blessedness, perhaps even consummated communion with his Maker. Yet in God’s unsearchable wisdom, Adam fell from his original state of sinlessness according to God’s eternal and unchangeable design.
After our first parents plunged themselves and the human race into sin, misery and death, God revealed his eternal decree pertaining to the redemption of creation. In the protoevangelium God speaks into existence a deep seated enmity between two seeds, Christ and Satan. As a result of the fall and by divine fiat, the spiritual antithesis would now extend beyond the King of Kings and the prince of darkness unto their respective spiritual offspring – God’s ordained objects of divine mercy and wrath. (Genesis 3:15; 2 Corinthians 11:3; WSC 13)
Grace without the sacrifice of righteousness:
The second covenant, more commonly known as the Covenant of Grace, was established with the incarnate Son and, through eternal identification, those chosen in him. Christ, the second Adam by divine appointment, would be the chosen race’s new representative before God. It is Christ who would perfectly obey God’s law, even vicariously on behalf of those given to him by his Father. Accordingly, the terms of the second covenant were not discounted. There was nothing cheap about the second covenant compact. Christ would indeed earn the redemption of his people, even as life was offered to Adam beforehand. (Genesis 17:7; Galatians 3:16,29; Romans 9:8; WLC 31)
Similarities with striking differences:
Although the second covenant is called a Covenant of Grace, its gracious nature would not pertain to the second Adam but only to the recipients of his vicarious work on their behalf. The difference between the two covenants is all the more striking precisely because its righteous demands were not lessened. The incarnate Son took on the demands of the covenant of works on behalf of sinners, even in an oath of self-malediction. (Genesis 15:17)
Yet with the fall of man life alone could no longer be offered, for there were none righteous from below. Any offer of life would now have to be accompanied by an offer of deliverance from sin’s penalty and power. If life were to be offered, it would be accompanied by salvation through One who must come from above.
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