Psalm 8; 2 Timothy 3:1-5; 1 Chronicles 12:32
It is so easy to forget that it is God who meticulously crafted us in our mother’s womb and set us apart for His particular purpose. We so infrequently acknowledge or are comforted with the truth that we have been “fearfully and wonderfully made.” When we meditate on Psalm 139, we are reminded that neither the darkness of the womb nor its inaccessibility to human sight conceals personhood. The person in the womb is not something that might become a person but someone who is a person. One who is made in the very image of God, albeit a younger, tinier version. Irrespective of our parentage or handicap, we must know that we have not been manufactured on a cosmic assembly line, but have been personally shaped by the hand of God in the womb of our mothers. With God’s tender gaze into the womb, He does not see something that might become someone, He sees a person- a person who is equipped with every talent they need to do His will and bring glory to His name.
But what happens when we stop seeing the dignity of man and cease to recognize and acknowledge who created us? Theologian Helmut Thielicke stated, “Once a man ceases to recognize the infinite value of the human soul…then all he can recognize is that man is something to be used. But then he will also have to go further and recognize that some men can no longer be utilized, and he arrives at the concept that there are some lives that have no value at all.”
What happens to the value of that little person in the womb if God has been systematically airbrushed out of the story of life, and humanity becomes the arbiter of what is of value what is not? In man’s quest for meaning in life without God, he takes it upon himself to define what life is, when life begins and who can determine its significance and purpose. “John Calvin observed at the beginning of the Christian Institutes that we understand who we are only in light of who God is. God is the Creator and we are His creatures. Without looking at ourselves in this light, we will never come to an understanding of what it means to be truly human. At the same time, Calvin believed that we only understand God as well as we understand ourselves. At the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings reveal God more wonderfully than any other creature does. For this reason, we know ourselves as we learn of God, and we know God as we learn of ourselves” (Richard Pratt, Jr., Designed for Dignity, pp. 2-3).
But when God disappears, we understand neither.