Is it just me, or is the empowering choice sold to women today an echo of the desperate pleas of ancient mothers to Baal? It’s the old-age offer to surrender your child in exchange for prosperity. This seductive vow, dressed in clinic brochures and celebrity testimonials, promises career triumphs and boundless freedom. Yet across millennia, from Canaanite fires to modern waiting rooms, the bargain has delivered only regret and cultural decay. History unmasks its hollow core, but we seem to keep forgetting it. Not knowing it, makes the lie an easier sell, so here is a brief and clear expose of one of the worst lies ever told to human kind.
Ancient Roots of the Bargain
Child sacrifice scarred pagan civilizations as a desperate bid for divine favor. In Canaan around 2000 BCE, Baal worshippers offered infants in high places, their remains unearthed at Gezer include charred bones in temple foundations and vows etched for fertility and victory. Sadly, child sacrifice is not exclusive to one culture, civilization, or even time period. This practice has spread everywhere as the devil continues to state the old-age lie of encouraging the killing of our own in exchange of personal gains and a bright future.
Scripture condemns it starkly: Leviticus 18:21 forbids Molech's fire; 2 Kings 16 details King Ahaz burning his son for royal gain. Phoenician Carthage's tophets held thousands of infant urns, parents thanking Baal-Hammon for bountiful harvests or safe voyages. The Christian God may ask for sacrifices, but it does not ask for murder and the breaking of His commandments.
Protecting children (including the unborn) has been the forefront of the constant spiritual battle that our world has forever faced. Consequently, across empires, the pattern held. From Mesopotamia to the Inca capacocha who sent drugged children to Andean peaks for empire strength; Aztec ziggurats demanded hearts for Huitzilopochtli's rains. Elites often spared their own, offering the poor and vulnerable.
The promise rang loud and clear, but it barely delivered its promise as these societies continually crumbled. Carthage razed by Rome in 146 BCE, Aztecs felled by Cortés. Moral decay eroded bonds and invited their collapse.
Modern Echoes in Clinic Waiting Rooms
Today's abortion industry, valued at $1.5 billion in the U.S., mirrors this transactional idolatry. Planned Parenthood campaigns frame abortions as essential for "your future." Everything from career climbs, dream pursuits, and greater autonomy unlocked.
Women cite "career interference" (74%) or timing, per Guttmacher data, framing abortions as an investment in self. Celebrities share their testimonies on how abortions paved their paths towards stardom. There is no doubt. The modern narrative around abortions places the choice of aborting as a worthwhile sacrifice for degrees and jobs. This current and quite vivid cultural reality echoes Baal's grim vows throughout recorded history. Now, abortion rates signal delayed families, isolation looming, and an inevitable cultural decline.
This is the recycled deception: a child's erasure for your brighter tomorrow. In exchange, women receive absolution since the sacrifice was in the name of ambition. As if ambition was the ultimate virtue, and even then, the means don’t justify the end.
When The Pagan Gods Fail to Deliver
Imagine the Canaanite mother, arms emptied on Baal's altar, scanning barren fields for the promised harvest that never came. Millennia later, the echo lingers in quiet regrets whispered over careers climbed and lives built on unsteady ladders of solitude. History has proven time and time again that these civilizations always end up in collapse. Gibson, the great chronicler of the Roman Empire mentions this in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the book, he emphasizes that Rome’s fall was not born in a single catastrophe but in a slow erosion of civic virtue, discipline, and shared belief.
Gibson famously observed that prosperity ripened the seeds of decay, and that as public spirit yielded to private indulgence, the empire, though vast and magnificent, hollowed from within long before the final blows were struck. It similarly happened with more cultures and civilizations. It wasn't mere historical footnotes or coincidence, but a common denominator: cultures trading their future for fleeting gain sowed their own undoing.
The child sacrifices were never enough. The false gods stayed silent, harvests failed, cities fell. Today's parallel unfolds subtly; empty cribs amid boardroom triumphs, a kind of prosperity that hollows the soul. The ancient lie persists, but its fruit remains as bitter as ever: not abundance, but an aching void where laughter should resound.
The True Culture of Life and Prosperity
In contrast to the blood-soaked altars of anxious civilizations stands the living mercy of the Christian God. The God revealed in The Holy Bible is not a deity who barters blessings for offerings, nor One whose favor must be purchased through loss and suffering. He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He is a Father who gives not because He is compelled, but because He delights to give. His generosity flows from His nature, not from our performance.
This does not mean that sacrifice disappears from the life of faith. Rather, sacrifice is transformed. It is no longer a desperate transaction but a loving response. Christians give, serve, fast, and surrender not to secure God’s affection, but because they already possess it. Love, when genuine, always offers itself freely. The difference is profound: in pagan fear, sacrifice attempts to manipulate the divine; while in Christian devotion, sacrifice expresses gratitude toward a God who has already given everything for each one of us.
Yet divine generosity does not eliminate suffering. The same Scriptures that proclaim mercy also tell of crosses carried and trials endured. God can be extravagantly generous despite our weakness, inconsistency, and even selfishness, but loving Him faithfully does not exempt anyone from hardship. Prosperity in the Christian vision is deeper than comfort and sturdier than circumstance. It is the flourishing of a soul rooted in divine love; it all comes down to a life sustained not by appeasing a god of scarcity, but by trusting a God whose abundance is inexhaustible.
Breaking the Ancient Bargain
We are told we are freer than any generation before us. We have degrees, platforms, corner offices, and curated independence. But freedom severed from truth is only another form of bondage. The ancient bargain, one of the oldest lies in the book, has simply been rebranded. It’s no longer carved into stone idols, but printed in glossy pamphlets and spelled out through cultural scripts that equate motherhood with limitation and ambition with virtue. And yet, the cost remains hauntingly the same.
A civilization reveals what it worships by what it is willing to sacrifice. When the smallest and most defenseless are offered up for convenience, timing, or image, we should not be surprised when loneliness deepens, communities fracture, and joy feels strangely out of reach. You cannot build a flourishing future by erasing your future. No empire ever has.
The better way has always been sturdier, and far less glamorous. It is the way that honors life as sacred, that sees children not as obstacles but as inheritance and precious gifts, that understands love is not a hindrance to greatness but the very foundation of it. The Christian vision does not promise ease, but it does promise meaning, purpose, and a ton of love. And unlike ambition, neither of these expire, fade, nor have negative side effects.
The ancient fires have gone out, but the choice before us remains. We can continue trading life for the illusion of control, or we can reject the lie entirely. Real prosperity is not purchased with sacrifice; it is cultivated through courage, faith, and a refusal to call darkness light. The future will belong to those who choose life, not because it is convenient, but because it is true. So if you are willing to make a sacrifice in exchange for prosperity consider the sacrifices that come with welcoming new life.
