God's Hand In Creating Life

GOD’S HAND IN CREATING LIFE

Ecclesiastes 11:5

INTRO: Throughout the Old Testament, the development of a child in the womb is described as God’s creative act of making a new person. The means by which a single cell becomes a baby is one of the great unsolved mysteries of biology.

Although we know that there is a natural process at work which scientists may one day understand and explain, we also know from the scriptures that divine power is at work making not a mere biological entity, but an eternal being capable of fellowship with the eternal God.

I. FETAL DEVELOPMENT IN GOD’S WORK.

In one Psalm, the writer says, “your hands made me and formed me” (Ps. 119:73). Another Psalm says, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). The Prophet Isaiah speaks of “...the Lord, who formed me from the womb....” (Is. 49:5). The 71st Psalm says, “You brought me forth from my mother’s womb” (Ps. 71:6; 22:9). Job speaks of God as, “...He who made me in the womb....” (Job 31:15).

Where the Bible speaks of fetal development, it usually talks about God making a new person. We can conclude that the formation of a child in the womb is the sacred work of God. He personally fashioned each of us in the womb just as surely as He fashioned Adam and Eve in the beginning.

ILLUS: An abortion advocate on a radio talk show was asked, “Does God make mistakes?” The pro-abortionist quickly responded, “Well, I don’t know about God, because that is a matter of your own religion. But I do know that people make mistakes, and when people make mistakes, they need a way to fix the mistakes.”

That answer reveals the major difference between the pro-life and the pro-abortion views. The pro-abortionist, in his humanistic view, cannot see the working of the invisible God behind the visible biology of human reproduction. He believes that man only comes from fallible man, and therefore a human life can be a mistake.

The Christian believes that regardless of the human actions and the circumstances surrounding the conception of a child, every new baby comes from the perfect God and is fashioned in His image. Therefore, human life is sacred.

“It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). Isn’t it striking to realize that mankind’s desire to be his own source is nothing new? Several thousand years ago the psalmist noted this same tendency, this same mode of prideful rebellion against God.

Mankind wants to imagine that he can take credit for his own existence. But man’s exaltation of humanity paradoxically leads to a diminished regard for the value of human life. Refusing to acknowledge God, he tries to fix his “mistakes” with solutions like abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, which destroy innocent human life.

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Prov. 14: 12). Abortion is heralded as the solution to poverty, overpopulation, and teenage pregnancy, but it is a death solution. Its perpetrators minister death not only to the unborn child, but also to the second victim, the woman who is persuaded to abort.

ILLUS: A Christian leader from the second century, Clement of Alexandria, said that women who procure abortions “abort at the same time their human feelings.”

Millions of women have proven the truth of that statement as they suffer the painful, life disturbing aftereffects known as “post-abortion syndrome.” Hundreds of women, who have suffered tragic long-term trauma from abortion experiences and later found healing in Christ, have now written down their stories for entry into the Congressional Record by pro-life legislators.

II. LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION.

When does human life begin? The Bible has only one answer. As we examine the passages about prenatal life, we can see that it is regarded with no less reverence than postnatal life. Science has only one answer.

Since over a century ago, when the development of microscopes made possible the observation of the fertilization event it has been obvious that human life begins at conception and nowhere else. New technologies, such as ultrasound imaging of the unborn, have only lent more strength to the fact that unborn children are living members of our human community.

Any search for a hypothetical dividing line that marks the beginning of personhood as some point later than conception is fruitless.

ILLUS: One Jewish doctor, who could not find such a dividing line, made an apt comparison of his search for the beginning of personhood with the traditional ceremony that marks the beginning of manhood for a Jewish boy at age thirteen. He said, “There is no Bar Mitzvah in the womb.”

There is no point at which we cease being “pregnancy tissue” and suddenly become human beings. Starting at conception, each of us gradually passes through the various stages that make up the human life cycle. Each of us, the newly conceived, the fetus, the newborn, the toddler, the adolescent, the adult, the elderly, are at some stage in that gradual process.