Smoodock's Blog

As I claimed in previous studies in this series, nearly every argument I heard that claims to speak of abortion from a Biblical perspective, actually argues from an emotional point of view. When the Bible is used, it is nearly always taken out of context and forced to support a conclusion already made by the You Tube program creator. I’ve been on both sides of this argument. I was once pro-life, but not Biblically. I merely assumed God thought like I thought (cp. Isaiah 55:8-9), but I was mistaken. I had to read the Bible and thoughtfully consider what he says there to understand how he thinks and what’s in his heart. I’m often an emotionally driven person, but I’ve had to stop and really consider what the Bible says about human life to know what God thinks about us.

One of the most common texts used to say the babe in the womb is an actual person is Psalm 139. “For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13)! Now, how could that not be speaking of a true image-of-God bearing person? Nevertheless, the text doesn’t really say that. What it does say is, God caused all life to be fearfully and wonderfully made and in the context of Psalm 139:13, that life happened to be human. Watch any video about plant life, or animal life and consider the intricacies of what makes each of them what they are and try to say that God isn’t awesome. Yet, just because all life points to God, all life isn’t one of God’s children. Yet, you may claim that Psalm 139 is really speaking of one of God’s children being formed in its mother’s womb, so this proves he or she must be a person from the very beginning of its days. Nevertheless, this conclusion is contrived. The text simply doesn’t say the babe in the womb is a child of God. Quite the contrary is so. Notice Psalm 139:16… “Your eyes saw me when I was inside the womb. All the days ordained for me were recorded in your scroll, before one of them came into existence..” In other words the Lord ordained how long the babe would live before it was born—“before one of them came into existence!” If the babe in the womb is a viable image-of-God bearing person, whose life as a person had already begun, how is it that his days aren’t numbered until after he or she leaves the womb? None of those days that the Lord ordained for the life of the person were numbered, while it was being formed in the womb.

Let’s pause for a moment and think about the inconceivable, or at least we don’t like to think of such things. What if the babe, that was fearfully and wonderfully made, was deformed at birth for whatever reason, mom’s fault, the doctor’s fault, a bad or destructive gene – whatever! The babe is born without a part of its body, consider the thalidomide births of the 1960s. Is the babe less a human being than a fully formed healthy baby born on the same day in the same hospital, but of different parents? I hope and believe all of us would agree that the missing body parts don’t constitute a lesser human being. Therefore, we could say a person is fully a person, even if he or she doesn’t have arms, legs or if he or she later had a accident and lost one or both eyes etc. You get the picture, don’t you? We are not our bodies. We are something more than what we use in life to enjoy this world, while we are here.

In November of 2018 I lost my mother at age 94. She was a wonderful woman, and I fully believe she is with the Lord. At the funeral I celebrated her life, rather than mourned her passing. Certainly tears were shed, but they were shed over remembering her life, when she brought me up in the ways of the Lord. As I gazed at her remains in the coffin, I considered her 94 year old frail form and thought about what I was actually seeing. What was lying in the coffin wasn’t my mother. If her eyelids would have somehow opened, the gleam that should have been there would not have been there. The frail form of my mother’s remains could no longer smile or tell me she loves me with “all of my heart!” I loved her more than I could put into words, but I did what I would never have done to my mother. I buried her beautiful, frail remains in the ground. Yet, that frail form was once a babe in the womb of her mother, my nana. She was living, could move and could feel uncomfortable and even feel pain, or jump in the womb, if startled. Yet, her life as the person who would become my wonderful mother didn’t begin, until she took her first breath outside my nana’s womb (cp. Psalm 139:16).