At Work in the Womb
Yet you brought me safely from my mother’s womb
and led me to trust you at my mother’s breast.
I was thrust into your arms at my birth.
You have been my God from the moment I was born.
(Psalm 22:9–10)
The psalmist writes that the Lord has been his God forever, even from his mother’s womb. Look closely at those words. David is seeing himself within the womb and coming forth from it as being answerable to the God who created him and developed him during the nine months he was within the womb.
Even during gestation there was this sense of God’s hand and God’s accountability in the psalmist’s life. This is vividly illustrated in the most eloquent passage supporting life in the womb in all the Old Testament: the central section of Psalm 139. I’m referring to verses 13–16.
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
It is as if the Spirit of God had taken a divine fiberoptic probe and reached into the womb, revealing the tender, all-powerful presence of God at work in the fetus.
I wish time and space permitted me to describe the anatomical beauty, the variegated colors that are represented in the Hebrew words. It is pictured in the original language as if the bones and the arteries, the muscles and the structure of the body, are all divinely woven together. In addition, his personality was being designed along with other details like facial features, color of hair, and color of eyes, right down to toenails and fingernails, eyelashes and eyebrows. Small wonder he exclaims that he is “fearfully and wonderfully made”! Though tiny, the fetus receives God’s careful attention.
Let me pause and summarize the three major points we have discovered thus far:
- God sets apart human life as unique, distinctive, and valuable.
- He therefore preserves and protects human life as no other life on earth.
- That kind of life begins at conception and continues to develop in the womb where God is at work, shaping the child into the precise kind of person He desires it to be.
Taken from Sanctity of Life by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright 1990 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc.
