On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court handed down its infamous “Roe v. Wade” decision. That decision struck down a number of state anti-abortion laws, elevated the issue of abortion to the federal level and essentially made abortion legal in the first trimester anywhere in the United States.   That was thirty-nine years ago today. As a result, especially for the last thirty-nine years in our country, the issue of abortion has been one of if not the most contentious, divisive social issues on the scene.

I suppose I personally have been interacting with the issue of abortion off-and-on for my whole life. My mother was cautioned against having a third child, being warned that it could be dangerous for her if she did. When she became pregnant with me, the doctor shared with her that he had a legal obligation to offer abortion to her as an option given that the pregnancy could be dangerous. She refused.

That was in 1974, a year and four months after Roe v. Wade. My wife was born in January of 1972, a year and two days before Roe v. Wade.  She and I talk on occasion about the fact that she legally could not have been aborted in the first trimester and I legally could have. That’s how momentous the events of January 1973 were.

I remember as a student in high school when a teenage girl in our church became pregnant. Her father, a member of our church, was pressuring her to abort the child. I well remember the day when my parents informed my brothers and me that they had decided to offer to adopt the baby if she would refuse to abort the child.

Ultimately, she chose not to have an abortion, much to her father’s chagrine, and went on to raise her baby. But I’ll never forget my parents’ offer. It made quite an impact on me, especially as we were all in high school and would, in a matter of a few years, be out of the house.

In some way or other this issue has touched me as a pastor as well. I well recall, early in my ministry, my naivete concerning how widespread abortion was. I discovered the reality of the pervasiveness of abortion early on after preaching a sermon against it only to find that, to keep it vague, it was a present and painful reality in our church. Coming face to face with abortion has happened all along the way of my pastorate. I have seen grieving faces repent over abortion and I’ve seen angry faces stay defiant on it. I do not think I’ve seen any faces that are indifferent on it.

Of course, none of this is unique. Abortion has touched every one of us in some way or another. It is a painful and touchy subject. Quite honestly, it makes you want to avoid the issue altogether, the way many of us avoid the issue in company where we’re not sure of a shared opinion.

In fact, I have once or twice talked myself out of this very sermon. Would you like to know why? Well, honestly, it’s because things are going pretty well. We’re growing, there’s peace in the family and I have no desire to threaten peace. Furthermore, I am not a political preacher. That’s not because of cowardice. That’s because of priorities. I don’t endorse politicians and I would oppose anybody endorsing any politician from our pulpit. That’s because I believe the only thing we should endorse from our pulpit is Jesus and His gospel.

And yet, we all somehow know that the issue of abortion isn’t just a political issue, don’t we? Somehow we know it’s also an ethical issue, a moral issue, a spiritual issue. After all, we’re talking not just about a legal reality, we’re talking about the very definition of life…and that is a very biblical kind of topic.

I’m tempted by another way out too: the ugly way that some people oppose abortion. First of all, there are, tragically, extremists who, in the name of “Pro-Life,” actually murder doctors. Well, that seems very wrong to me and also hypocritical. And then there’s the whole stereotype of the red-faced, screaming, attacking Southern Baptist preacher who bears down on some terrified young woman at her wits’ end. I don’t feel like that and I don’t want to be that.

The greatest temptation for avoidance is also the most awkward reality: the almost certain-fact that some of you have been directly touched by this. I have no desire to drag up old sins that have been repented of and are covered by the blood of the Lamb and make somebody feel terrible. On the other hand, I have no desire to be silent on sins therefore paving the way for somebody else to commit them.

It’s all very difficult…but only to a degree. For against all of those reasons not to preach on abortion, there’s one compelling reason to preach on it: the church of Jesus Christ commits treason against her Lord if she does not speak prophetically against crimes that dishonor Him, that take human life and that wound those who commit them. In other words, I do not exaggerate when I say I think that we simply must speak.

But how? How should we speak about abortion? On an issue which seems to generate much more heat than light, on an issue that is so polarizing, so emotional, so divisive and so painful, I believe what we desperately need right now is a clear, simple, straightforward examination of what Scripture says concerning God, concerning creation and concerning God’s creation in the womb. So this will be my intent: to examine what, if anything, God’s Word might say about this issue.

Let us begin with the most fundamental question: does God’s authority and rule, God’s sovereignty, extend to the act of procreation and to the inner workings of the womb? Here we find ample evidence in the affirmative. The Bible is crystal clear: God’s sovereignty extends to the womb. Let us consider three ways in which it does.

·         God Opens Wombs

Scripture is abundantly clear that God is the God who has the authority to open the womb and that all life in the womb must be attributed to His greatness. For instance, in Psalm 17, the psalmist asks God to protect him from wicked men. In the process, he notes that even the wombs of the wicked are filled by God:

¹³ Arise, O LORD! Confront him, subdue him!
Deliver my soul from the wicked by your sword,
¹⁴ from men by your hand, O LORD,
from men of the world whose portion is in this life.
You fill their womb with treasure;
they are satisfied with children,
and they leave their abundance to their infants.

Notice that the filling of wombs with treasure is not an impersonal act of nature. It is rather an act of God. To be sure, there is a natural process, but let us remember that Christianity is not deism. God does not wind the world up like a clock then stand back in dispassionate observation. There is no conflict between natural processes and the sovereign hand of God. Nature, of course, is not God. Nature is fallen and awaits its own redemption when the Lord restores a new Heaven and a new earth. But God is present and work in the cycles and “laws” of nature and is the Lord of Heaven and Earth. Procreation, therefore, is no mere act of nature. It is an act of God, for the just and the unjust.

·         God Closes Wombs

In Genesis 20, after Abimelech, King of Gerar, took Sarah, Abraham’s wife, into his household (after being told that Sarah was Abraham’s sister), God struck all of the wombs of Abimelech’s house shut. Then we read this:

¹⁷ Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. ¹⁸ For the LORD had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.

God closes and opens wombs. And this is but one of many biblical examples of this truth. The Lord is the Lord of the womb and He opens and closes it.

·         God Knows and Commissions Us in the Womb

Furthermore, God is not disinterested in that which He creates in the womb. In fact, Scripture is abundantly clear that God knows the unborn child. He knows and commissions us in the womb.

For instance, in Psalm 22 the Psalmist writes:

 ⁹ Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.
¹⁰ On you was I cast from my birth,
and from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
¹¹ Be not far from me,

   for trouble is near,
and there is none to help.

“From my mother’s womb you have been my God.” I do not know where you stand on the issue of election and predestination. I believe many people speak of it and few people understand it. Regardless, it is biblically established that God knows His people from the womb. Now, you can work that out with the rest of your theology, but the biblical fact stands either way.

Furthermore, in Psalm 71 the Psalmist writes:

⁵ For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
⁶ Upon you I have leaned from before my birth;
you are he who took me from my mother’s womb.
My praise is continually of you.

This is a term of relationship: “Upon you I have leaned from before my birth.” It is reminiscent of the upper room scene in which John leans on the breast of Jesus. God knows us and, in retrospect, we see that we have leaned on Him all along.

In Isaiah 49 we find the great prophet saying:

¹ Listen to me, O coastlands,
and give attention, you peoples from afar.
The LORD called me from the womb,
from the body of my mother he named my name.

The Lord knows us, calls us, commissions us and knows our name…in the womb! What an astounding thought!

In the New Testament, you may perhaps remember the beautiful meeting between the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth recorded in Luke 1:

⁴¹ And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, ⁴² and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!

Ah, I am so glad that a modern person did not write this, or they might have written, “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the fetal tissue spasmed in her womb.” No, no, no! This is no spasm of tissue, this is a celebratory exclamation of praise from within the womb. Worship in utero!

Thus we see that God’s sovereignty extends to the womb.  But His sovereignty is no vague reality. On the contrary, God’s sovereignty is creative in its intent.

That which grows within the womb grows under the hand of a sovereign God. He creates life in the womb! In Job 31 we find Job speaking of God’s creative activity in the womb as the great equalizing force among all of humanity:

¹³ “If I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant,
when they brought a complaint against me,
¹⁴ what then shall I do when God rises up?
When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him?
¹⁵ Did not he who made me in the womb make him?
And did not one fashion us in the womb?

Yes! Yes, Job! The same God that made you and fashioned you in the womb made and fashioned your servants as well. From the highest to the lowest, all must recognize that they are created by an awesome God!

Our key text this morning from Psalm 139 bears repeating here:

¹³ For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

 ¹⁷ How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸ If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.

Truly astounding! Notice the creative terms: formed, knitted me together, fearfully and wonderfully made, I was being made, intricately woven. God creates that which is within the womb.

Again, Isaiah says the same in Isaiah 44:

¹ “But now hear, O Jacob my servant,
Israel whom I have chosen!
² Thus says the LORD who made you,
who formed you from the womb and will help you:
Fear not, O Jacob my servant,
Jeshurun whom I have chosen.

And five chapters later in Isaiah 49

⁵ And now the LORD says,
he who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him;
and that Israel might be gathered to him—
for I am honored in the eyes of the LORD,
and my God has become my strength—

Isaiah says that the Lord God “forms” and “makes” life within the womb. Jeremiah says the same in Jeremiah 1:4-5:

⁴ Now the word of the LORD came to me, saying,

⁵ “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Interestingly, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 11 speaks of the animation of the bones in the womb:

⁵ As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.

And that is precisely the point: “God who makes everything.” God is Creator, Lord and King. He is sovereign God. Every sphere of life is touched by His creative power, no place more miraculously than the womb. As amazing as this is, it is not even the most amazing aspect of God’s creative work in the womb.

In Genesis 1, we read:

^26a Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… ²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The biblical doctrine of the imago Dei, the image of God, is the fundamental theological foundation for a high view of life. What it asserts is mind-boggling, for it asserts nothing less than that that which God in His sovereignty creates in the womb He creates in His image.

This does not mean that man is a reflection of corporeal God. God does not have a body. God is spirit and those who worship Him worship Him in spirit and in truth. Furthermore, if the image were physical it would create real problems since v.27 says, “male and female he created them.”

No, the fact that God creates man and woman in His image means that he endows them with divine reflections of His own character. He gives us the capacity to love, to self-sacrifice, to think intelligently, to reason and, maybe most of all, to share in the act of creation. The doctrine of the image of God is that which makes man unique from animal life and so gives us a sanctity that is Heaven born.

R. Kent Hughes put it nicely when he said:

So consider this: Though you could travel a hundred times the speed of light, past countless yellow-orange stars, to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light-years below the plane of the Milky Way, though you could slow to examine the host of hot young stars luminous among the gas and dust, though you could observe, close-up, the protostars poised to burst forth from their dusty cocoons, though you could witness a star’s birth, in all your stellar journeys you would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being. For a tiny baby girl or boy is the apex of God’s creation! But the greatest wonder of all is that the child is created in the image of God, the Imago Dei. The child once was not; now, as a created soul, he or she is eternal. He or she will exist forever. When the stars of the universe fade away, that soul shall live.[1]

What this means for the abortion debate is significant. Man is created in the womb, by God, and he is created in God’s own image. I oppose the wanton destruction of life in the womb because life in the womb bears the very imprint of God. In this sense, abortion is always and ultimately an atheistic act, for it seeks to deny the reality of God as creator as well as the reality of the image of God within human beings. Perhaps this is why Dorothy Day said, “The true atheist is the one who denies God’s image in the ‘least of these.’”[2]

We dare not deny God’s image in the least of these. And, God help us, we dare not destroy that life which bears that image!

Oh God give us a love for the unborn and an understanding of the great miracle of life!

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