Today I want to show you arguments from Scripture against abortion. They are not primarily rooted in biology; for example, when is life viable. That's a good argument, but that's not the way we're going to approach it. Nor in sociology—the effect on society of abortion. That's a good argument, but that's not what we're going to talk about. I would like to root what we talk about today in theology—what we believe about God.

This is not a debate. I want to challenge you if you're on the fence on this subject. This isn't about my opinions versus some other good-thinking person's. I'm going to have you open your Bibles, and if you cannot see the logic of what I tell you as rooted in Scripture, then you don't need to listen to me. Then I speak as just another concerned citizen. I come to you with the Bible in my hand today, and I'm going to do my best to show you that a pro-life position is rooted in the way the Bible, and thus the mind of God, thinks about this subject. My goal is to show disciples of Jesus that abortion is incompatible with a biblical understanding of life.

We're going to look today at a few verses in Psalm 139. This is a psalm where David the psalmist is reflecting about how well God knows him and, in the end, that he wants to be known. It says in verse 1, "O LORD, you have searched me and you know me," and it ends in verses 23 and 24, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." This is a psalm about wanting to be known by God, saying to God, "I want you to know me and to tell me what you see."

In the stream of his thinking in this great psalm, he speaks for a while about how God knew him before he was even born. And it is from these verses that we can draw principles that give us help in understanding where we ought to be on the abortion issue. We're going to look particularly today at verses 13 to 18:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

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

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.

This passage teaches the sanctity of life. I'm not sure the word sanctity registers clearly in our minds. We don't use that word often. So let me use a synonym in summing up the point of these verses. The life of every unborn child is sacred. It is God-owned and God-imprinted. So abortion strikes at the heart of God. Let me give you three reasons why the life of an unborn child is sacred.

Every unborn child is a wonder.

First, in every unborn child God creates a wonder. A human embryo is not simply the union of a sperm and egg. It is an act of divine creation through human means. When David says, "You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb," that is not a display of ancient naïveté about where babies come from or how babies develop. David may not have known about DNA, but he did know about sex, and he did know how babies were born, and he did know babies were born in natural development. Nonetheless his whole orientation is that this is a creation of God.

Do you see the words there? You created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. The biblical mind is that a human being, from his earliest day, from her conception, is, to be sure, a natural act of creation, but an act of creation by God. It is a work of God. But God's creation of a person in the womb is not just about the miracle of how bones and muscles and nerves and blood vessels come to be. Such things are in animals as well, which are creations of God, but they're different. For not only does every person, like all the created order, display the genius of God the Creator, we also and alone among all of creation from the moment of our conception show not only the genius of God, but we carry the image of God. Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

When God knits a human embryo together in the womb, he not only weaves the bones and muscles and capillaries and nerves, but he creates in us a moral sense of right and wrong, a creative genius, a nobility that is not kin to anything else in creation. And it is found, if I may put it so, in the very chromosomes of God. We bear the image of God. It isn't just the miracle of the human body and psyche that causes David to say, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." It is this stamp of the image of God upon human beings that exalts us beyond all else that God has so marvelously and ingeniously created.

The response to this in this text is what? I praise you! I praise you! To hold a baby, this perhaps most marvelous of all God's creations, prompts even unbelievers to praise God. Even the atheist with a baby in her arms looks helplessly to heaven for somebody to thank. A child, a human being, is a theology lesson wrapped in flesh that displays the glory and praiseworthiness of God. Now, these verses lead to some implications for this abortion question we face.

l. Abortion silences praises due to God.

One implication is that abortion is wrong because it silences praises due to God. Those parents and grandparents and neighbors will never say, "Look at that beautiful child. Thank God for this." No one will ever marvel Godward at that child's unique sense of humor, her genius for problem solving, his musical talent or tender love of animals. And that person who is never born will never be able to echo the words of David to God: "I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Not only is that a horrible crime against a child and others—to rob them of an opportunity to praise God should they have the sense to—but more than that, by far more than that, God is robbed. He made something, like an artist, which deserves praise, and it is destroyed.

Some of you might remember some years ago the furor in international news when a man went after Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome, this glorious and beautiful statue of Mary holding the dying Jesus. He went after it with a hammer, and the tragedy of that was all over the world. The artist's work had been marred. And that what God makes is destroyed is a crime against God, and it is among the most vastly underrated of all sins. Abortion robs God of praise he deserves.

2. Abortion destroys a person bearing the image of God.

Abortion not only destroys a divine creation in progress—burning a forest is that or crushing an eagle's egg is that—abortion destroys a person bearing the image of God. Listen to what Genesis 9:6 says: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed because in the image of God has God made man." That is why human life is uniquely precious among all other life because we bear the image of God. The fundamental reason killing a person is so terrible, the reason it is different than killing an animal, is that every person carries the image, the imprint of God, and that makes his or her life sacred.

Mother Teresa captured it well. She was a gutsy advocate of a pro-life position. She said on one occasion, "Every child has been created for greater things—to love and be loved—in the image of God. Once a child is conceived, there is life, God's life. That child has a right to live and be cared for."

3. Abortion denies God the chance to bring good out of heartbreak.

I would take you to one other implication. If all life is a creation of God and all unborn infants are fearfully and wonderfully made, then not even babies born out of the horrible violence of rape or incest ought to be aborted. I don't come to this militantly, and I recognize full well that someone who has faced this could look at me and say, "What do you know?" But I do know God is great enough to bring good out of a situation like that, and I do not believe the way to deal with one horrible heartbreak is to add to it another tragedy.

Do you remember the great gospel singer Ethel Waters? She was famous for her singing and jazz, but she was a Christian too. I remember her as this wonderful woman with a smile a mile wide singing at Billy Graham crusades "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." She wrote in her autobiography that she was conceived following the rape of her 13-year-old mother. Yet she too would have said, "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

In every unborn child, God maps a lifetime.

Secondly, the life of every unborn child is sacred because in every unborn child God maps a lifetime. In verses 15 and 16, David basically repeats the same ideas we've just heard, but this time he's not so much emphasizing that God creates the unborn child as that he monitors and watches the child's development. And then he comes to another conclusion: "My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body." That's a metaphor. David knows it's a metaphor. David doesn't think babies come from someplace in the earth, from a hole in the ground. That's a word picture. He says: I know where the secret place is. It's the womb. He understands that, but he is speaking in a poetic way here of the mystery of that dark and wonderful place where a baby is given life. Then he finishes: "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

Have you ever watched a sonogram? That is just incredible. There's this TV screen, blue and black and white. And a technician points with a pencil to this movement and says, "There. That's the head." And you look and you go, yes, as if you didn't know what was actually growing in there. And he says, "I think that boy's going to be a soccer player." And she says, "Look at those long fingers. Maybe she'll play the piano." Before a sonogram would show anything, when the body is yet unformed to any human eye, when the cells are just beginning to multiply, David says: God's eyes saw my unformed body. God oversees the unborn child's complete development even before there is shape and form. We debate when the fetus is viable; God is involved with that fetus before the mother even knows it's there.

And in his creation of a child, God creates within us a map for all our days. Verse 16: "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." The Hebrew languages vagaries make this a little difficult. It's not so much trying to say that God has counted out the number of a person's days, though that is true and taught elsewhere, but that God has mapped out by the very way we are designed, by his hand, what our lives will be like. I think the point is something like this: Even before our birth day, before we breathed our first breath, God had set within our bodies the blueprint of our lives—our appearance and talents, our personality and propensities, and our weaknesses and failures.

This means the difficulties we're born with by genetics, even those that have their root, in one sense, in some sinful act of human beings, are under the control and care and plan of our Creator. Neither birth defects nor a bad home are matters that are written into the margins of God's plan. They're part of the text. Job's suffering was great. He wished he had never been born. He said: I wish the sun had never come up that day. But he was wrong. Do you remember the story in John 9 of the man born blind? The disciples said to Jesus, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" He said: Neither. This man was born blind so the work of God might be displayed in his life. He doesn't necessarily mean that blindness doesn't somehow have its root in a sinful world—because in a perfect world there will not be blindness —but that God uses these things for his purposes in the lives of people.

The implications of these verses are these: One, if ordaining the days of life is God's right, it cannot also be a mother's right. It's true that she can choose in these days, but not that she has the right to choose. The right to make a choice may exist before conception, but not after.

Another implication. To abort a child because someone determines that its "quality of life" will be impaired by family situation or handicap shows a complete misunderstanding of what brings quality to life. First, nobody can say that no life is better than a difficult life. Secondly, in the biblical way of looking at things, as opposed to the way our world thinks, the quality of life does not consist in ease or health or prosperous circumstances. Life's quality is determined by our submission to God in any and all of life's circumstances. And to deprive a child of the right to choose what they're going to do with God in life is wrong. I believe aborted children go to heaven by the mercies of God in Christ, but even if that is true they will never be able to say they walked with God. They will never be able to say they found God faithful in the difficulties of life. They will never be able to tell how God worked through the circumstances of life to bring them to Christ, because someone other than God decided their fate.

God does amazing things, as in the story of Ethel Waters, with people who we might think don't have quality of life. This brief story called "Autumn Dance" is written by Robin Jones Gunn. She writes:

She stood a short distance from her guardian at the park this afternoon, her distinctive features revealing that although her body blossomed into young adulthood, her mind would always remain a child's. My children ran and jumped and sifted sand through perfect, coordinated fingers.

Caught up in fighting over a shovel, they didn't notice when the wind changed, but she did—a wild autumn wind spinning leaves into amber flurries.

I called to my boisterous son and jostled my daughter. "Time to go. Mom still has lots to do today."

My rosy-cheeked boy stood tall watching with wide-eyed fascination the gyrating dance of the Down syndrome girl as she scooped up leaves and showered herself with the twirling rain of autumn jubilation. With each twist and hop she sang deep, earthy grunts, a canticle of praise meant only for the One whose breath causes the leaves to tremble from the trees.

"Hurry up. Let's go. Seatbelts on." I start the car. In the rear-view mirror I study her one more time through misty eyes, and then the tears come—not tears of pity for her.

The tears are for me, for I am far too sophisticated to publicly shout praises to my Creator. I am whole and intelligent and normal, and so I weep because I will never know the severe mercy that frees such a child and bids her come dance in the autumn leaves.

In every unborn child God maps a lifetime.

In every unborn child, God invests infinite thought.

Finally, the life of every unborn child is sacred because in every unborn child God invests infinite thought. We've already seen that God puts extraordinary thought into the unborn child in creating and watching from the very beginning. So what David prays next in this psalm is natural. Verses 17 and 18 say, "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you." What thoughts of God's was David thinking of? What did he mean? Well, given this context about how God knows him, he's not thinking about all of God's thoughts, all the things God thinks about—politics or nature. He's thinking particularly of God's thoughts about him, about David: How precious are your thoughts about me. I can't count them. They would count more than the grains of sand. God has invested innumerable thoughts in every person, and he begins thinking even before conception.

"Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," God said to Jeremiah. Before. And in Ephesians 1:4-5 Paul speaks about those of us who know Christ in particular. He says, "For he chose us [in Christ] before"—when?—"the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will." We were viable before conception. He says that God's thoughts about us are precious to us because, as the commentator Kidner puts it, "They are proof of God's own infinite commitment to us." God thinks about us so much because he cares about us so much.

No matter when we turn our attention to God, no matter when you happen to think about him and turn toward him—in this moment or at three in the morning or while you're driving—you can turn to God and he can say, "I was just thinking about you." Isn't that wonderful? It's a miracle of the mind of God in his infinite greatness, but it is also an expression of his love for us. He doesn't think about us that way just because he can't help it, just because he's got everything in his head. He thinks about us because he cares for us. That's what makes his thoughts precious. And did you see that last line? "When I awake, I am still with you." It seems like it ought to be "you are still with me." But it's the other way. David says: When I wake up in the morning, I am still with you. I am still on your mind, and I have been all through my sleeping hours. Some see this phrase as a promise of resurrection after death—when I awake from death, I will still be with you. And that's certainly a truth in Scripture. I don't know if that was David's intent here, but I do know that for those who are saved by the grace of God it is true that even when I wake from death, let alone when I wake in the morning, I will still and forever be with the Lord, be on his mind.

Michael Card wrote a "Lullaby for the Innocents." The second verse reads: What your life might have been we'll never know. A miracle happened, but there's nothing to show. We're left with the sorrow but hope all the same in heaven there is someone who knows you by name." One implication of this is that to God every child is a wanted child. No matter how unwanted a child may be in this world, there are no children born or unborn that God does not ponder and prize. Another implication is that there is sin and damage in abortion to be sure, but there is no sin there that God cannot forgive.

Conclusion

There may be people in this congregation who have had abortions, or who have fathered children who have been aborted, or who have urged someone to get an abortion. And I suppose such people are in different places in what they feel about this. I think it was wrong. I think it was a sin. And I think the grace of God bathes that sin as surely as it does those terrible sins in my life. And there are people I know who have known the wonderful forgiveness of God for this too.

The Bible tells us that the blood of Christ can cleanse us from all sin. There's a little chorus by Michael Kelly Blanchard: There is no sorrow that God cannot heed. There is no damage that he did not feel. Moment by moment he's there where you hide tenderly holding you close as you cry. Jesus the Lord of the lonely inside. Jesus the Lord of all love crucified. Jesus forgives.

And what of the baby? Our text says, "When I awake, I am still with you." If that applies to all children in whom God has invested his precious thoughts, then it applies to that unborn baby too. I believe there is a solid biblical ground for assuming that by the grace of Jesus, not their innocence but the grace of Jesus, those children too are safe in the arms of our heavenly Father.

Some years ago Dr. Timothy Warner shared a story with me about a woman who had come to him for counseling. Many years earlier, long before she had been a Christian, she had gone to have an abortion. It wasn't legal yet. She'd gone to a clinic of sorts, and the abortion had not occurred, even though the procedure had been instituted. So when she went back to her hotel room, the baby was aborted there.

It was a horrible time, and the guilt and the horror of those moments had haunted her for years, as you can imagine. Even after she'd become a Christian and asked for forgiveness, it just wouldn't go away.

Through a time of prayer with Dr. Warner, he suggested an unusual thing. He said, "Let's go back. Let's just remember that again. Let's look at it. Play the video again, and let's pray that God will help you to see what you need to see."

So they did. She was transported in her memory back to that hotel room in those moments after the aborted birth. And then in her mind's memory she saw something she had never seen before. She saw a figure enter the room, and she knew that figure was Jesus. Without a word, he came, picked up that little baby, and held it close to his chest and left. And from thenceforward she knew her baby was safe.

It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if God cares as much as David says about a baby in the womb, then your child is safe, too.

For Your Reflection

Personal growth: How has this sermon fed your own soul? ___________________________________________

Skill growth: What did this sermon teach you about how to preach? ____________________________________________________________________________

Exegesis and exposition: Highlight the paragraphs in this sermon that helped you better understand Scripture. How does the sermon model ways you could provide helpful biblical exposition for your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Theological Ideas: What biblical principles in this sermon would you like to develop in a sermon? How would you adapt these ideas to reflect your own understanding of Scripture, the Christian life, and the unique message that God is putting on your heart? ____________________________________________________________________________

Outline: How would you improve on this outline by changing the wording, or by adding or subtracting points? _____________________________________________________________________

Application: What is the main application of this sermon? What is the main application of the message you sense God wants you to bring to your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Illustrations: Which illustrations in this sermon would relate well with your hearers? Which cannot be used with your hearers, but they suggest illustrations that could work with your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Credit: Do you plan to use the content of this sermon to a degree that obligates you to give credit? If so, when and how will you do it? ____________________________________________________

Lee Eclov recently retired after 40 years of local pastoral ministry and now focuses on ministry among pastors. He writes a weekly devotional for preachers on Preaching Today.