Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Articles

Kelly Derringer
01/01/23 - Monthly Article

By Kelly Derringer

“The happiest days are when babies come”. That’s a quote from a well-known movie. For those of us

who have children, we know how true this is (even when they’re teen-agers). We have had some recent

births in our congregation and have at least two more on the way. One of these is in my own family,

which is why this has been on my mind lately.

There are two things about this to which I would like to draw your attention.

First, God values unborn life. Consider the following verses:

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. Psalm 139:13-14.

Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our

mothers? Job 31:15.

And Luke writes about John the Baptist responding to Mary’s voice from within his mother’s womb (Luke 1:41).

God values life because all life is made in His image. Sadly, many people do not feel this way. When maximizing pleasure is the core pursuit of one’s life, anything that inconveniences that pursuit must be diminished. We see that in our society today in the callousness of many towards the unborn, and even children in general. There was a time when the motto for the pro-abortion advocates was “safe, legal and rare”. Even if you disagreed with them, you could at least appreciate the tribute given to wanting to keep it “rare”. Now, it is celebrated as a virtue. The enthusiasm on display at many pro-abortion rallies make you wonder that if they offered to perform live abortions on stage, there would be no shortage of volunteers. I don’t use the King James Version, but I have always liked how it renders Romans 1:31 with the phrase “without natural affection” when describing the minds of those who have rejected God. I am no Greek scholar, but I recall reading once that it refers to the natural affection a parent (or mother specifically) has for her children. Many today lack this “natural affection”.

Second, the process of childbirth is powerful evidence for the existence of God.

Think about conception, when half the DNA from the mother combines with half the DNA of the father to form a brand new, unique person. Each of us has our own genetic code that contains chemically encoded information stored in a double helix structure that contains the instructions for our bodies to grow and develop. I won’t belabor the details of how DNA works, as that’s readily available online, but this was one of the most impressive arguments to me for the existence of a Creator when I left agnosticism. We are surrounded by information encoded and stored digitally, and no one questions that there is intelligence behind this. Yet this process pales in comparison to DNA storage and encoding. Do you really think that this just happened by random chance?

Someone who did not think it happened by random chance was Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, who was quoted as saying, “It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”