The Meaning of Exploitation
“But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion.”
Jeremiah 22:17 (NIV)
Free peoples are rightly outraged by exploitation. When tyrannical dictators enrich their own coffers through the suffering and poverty of their people, advocacy groups and governments alike spring into action. Stopping oppression of the poor is a worthy goal, but too often ignored is an even more sinister form of exploitation: embryonic stem-cell research. What else can it be called when some people are killed so others can make their own lives more healthful, lengthy, or comfortable?
Jeremiah condemns the third-to-last king of Judah, a ruthless puppet of Egypt named Jehoiakim. Installed by Pharaoh Neco after the capture of King Jehoahaz (2 Kings 23:31-35), Jehoiakim had no concern for the welfare of his people. He concerned himself only with appeasing his Egyptian masters and providing for his own comfort. Most outrageously, Jehoiakim enslaved his own people to build himself an opulent palace. Jeremiah denounces him: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labor” (v. 13). Then, exposing the king’s selfishness and insecurity, the prophet taunts him, “Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar?” (v. 15). Instead of providing for his own comfort and soothing his own ego by the blood and sweat of his people, Jehoiakim should have followed the example of his father Josiah: “Did not your father have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. . .” (vv. 15-16a). But Jehoiakim refused, and God condemned him as a shedder of innocent blood, an exploiter of his own people.
Exploitation is the unjust and selfish use of another person for one’s own advantage. It is to treat human beings as tools and to see them as mere means to an end. Certainly there are economic conclusions to be drawn from Jeremiah’s words, but it would be shortsighted to stop at their economic implications. In fact, that would be to ignore altogether the deepest and vilest forms of exploitation. Civilized people are still repulsed by accounts of Nazi brutality in the 1930s and 1940s, “experiments” carried out on the mentally ill in the depraved hope that some medical advance might result from their torment. Except for the flimsy and suspiciously convenient assertion that embryos are somehow not people, it defies reason to explain how the logic of embryonic stem-cell research is any different. Harvesting stem cells from an embryo kills a human being; it forcibly wrenches away the embryo’s very life.1
Christians are not callous to the pain and despair of sick and broken people. Their Lord is the very one who went about “healing every disease and every affliction among the people” (Matt. 4:23 ESV). But Christian pastors cannot sit idly by while one group of people call for another group to be used like natural resources to be mined for the benefit of others. There is no one more defenseless than the unborn child, and in the face of the ravenous exploitation of human embryos for their stem cells, the Church cannot remain silent.