Pro-Life in the Purest Sense

Your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
—Psalm 139:16

Second Kings 4:8–17 begins a story of Elisha and a wealthy Shunammite
woman. One day Elisha asked her, “What can I do for you?”

“I have a home among my own people” she replied, an idiom that suggests
quiet contentment.

But Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, detected a deep sorrow she was unwilling to
share. “She has no son,” he observed, “and her husband is old” (4:13–14).

Childlessness was a cause for deep regret and social reproach in the ancient
world. Jacob’s wife Rachel, speaking for many childless couples even
now, cried out: “Give me children, or I’ll die!” (Genesis 30:1).

Elisha, being a prophet and understanding God’s intentions, promised the
Shunammite woman that she would hold a child in her arms, “about this
season, according to the time of life,” as the King James Version says (4:16).
The text is difficult and has mystified many, but it suggests that the miracle
consisted of a normal sequence of conception according to the woman’s cycle
and nine-month gestation; the process appeared normal in every way.
This reminds me that every delivery is a miracle, even those for which we think
that everything depends upon us. Though a natural process appears to be at work,
it is God who forms the fetus in the womb (see Isaiah 49:5; Jeremiah 1:5).

Since I first read G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, I have been intrigued by
his idea that God is still creating the world and everything in it. He proposed
that just as a child delights in seeing a thing done again and again, God delights
in the repetition and “monotony” of creation every day. “It is possible
that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do
it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies
alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them . . . The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence;
it may be a theatrical ENCORE!”

It is possible that every new emergence—every blade of grass, every butterfly,
every billowing cloud—is a new and special creation invented out of
God’s wisdom, excitement, and artistry. He paints each pansy as it emerges
in the spring. He colors every leaf in the fall. He ponders every act of creation,
shouts “encore!” and the whole business begins all over again, the business of
creation that began “in the beginning” and is still going on to this day.

Thus, by analogy, every human conception is a creation. God says, “Let
us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”—and human
life springs into being! We think of the process as purely natural; we conceive
a child, and it grows to term on its own. In truth it is preternatural—a
miraculous creation. (It occurs to me at the same time that any given conception might be God’s final creation, in which case the human race would very
soon be extinct, for our existence, despite our heroic efforts to perpetuate
ourselves, is solely dependent on God’s creative handiwork.)

Chesterton suggested the idea of ongoing creation to me, but David,
Israel’s poet, convinced me, for he described God first “musing” and then
“weaving” David together in the darkness of his mother’s womb. He did
so, David insisted, “before one of them [the various elements that became
‘David’] came to be [were in existence]” (Psalm 139:13–16). The Hebrew text
for verse 16 reads: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance and in Your book
they [David’s ‘component parts’] were written day by day before there was
one of them.” The metaphor is that of a “journal” in which God wrote His
ideas of what David would become and then brought each idea into being
through His handiwork in the womb.

In other words, God created David out of nothing—no, out of himself.
He imagined the person who was to be and then brought that person into
being according to a preimagined plan.

Put another way, we begin as a gleam in our heavenly Father’s eye and are shaped by Love into a unique, immediate creation—immediate in the ordinary sense of “unmediated,” in that we come directly from the inventive heart and hand of God.

That means that I am special and so are you—and so is everyone else in
the world. This being true, I must be pro-life in the purest sense of the word
in that I sanctify all human life—Stanford University sophisticates and untutored semi-illiterates, Seattle socialites and skid-row derelicts, winsome
children and doddering curmudgeons, fundamentalist preachers and leftwing
political pundits, Muslims and Christians, homosexuals and heterosexuals,
antiabortion enthusiasts and pro-choice activists. Every person—of
any class, age, sex, and race—is a unique production of our Creator’s genius.

Which is why Jesus said we should never call anyone a “fool.”*

*Matthew 5:22. His word here means “worthless.”

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 4950l. All rights reserved.