Subject: The Bible and Abortion Part 2: America’s willing disregard for human life

Psalm 139:15-16 “My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

The Old Testament book of Psalms actually is a collection of 150 individual Psalms, each one a poetic song of prayer written mostly by King David of the nation of Israel. This book is known by most scholars of ancient literature as some of the most beautiful and descriptive writings of history. The Psalms convey three main themes – 1) God is active and personal, 2) humanity must respond to Him as He makes Himself known, and 3) the beginning to knowing God is by fearing and trusting in Him.

Our verse this week from Psalm 139 makes one thing absolutely clear to everyone reading it: God is the creator of every person and personal designer of each person’s life even before they are conceived in the womb. To help us further understand the magnitude of what David is teaching here, and at the risk of boring some of you, let’s forget we are westerners and read this text as a Hebrew, as is the original intent:

The Hebrew word for ‘wrought’ in verse 15 is “râqam”. It means embroidered, as in needlework. David tells us that God put me together – my veins, sinews, bones – everything – in an intricate design of embroidery.

The Hebrew word for ‘unformed’ in verse 16 is “gôlem”. It means incomplete. Here David tells us that God ‘sees’ me before I become a fully formed physical creation. In other words, I am a soul, a spiritual being, who is created in a physical body. And God knows me before I appear in a physical form in the womb.

And finally, the Hebrew word for ‘fashioned’ in verse 16 is “yâtsar”. It means formed or molded into shape, as in potter purposefully working with clay to shape it. Charles Spurgeon, in his preaching series on the Psalms entitled ‘The Treasury of David’, explains for us the meaning of verse 16: “My form, my shape, and everything about me were appointed by God before they had existence. God saw me when I could not be seen. He wrote about me when there was nothing of me to write about.”

Knowing that the God of the Bible defines every conceived baby as human life, on February 2nd the United States House of Representatives failed to gain enough votes to override President Obama’s veto of the bill entitled “Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act” (H.R. 3762), which would have denied Planned Parenthood their annual $554 million that we (taxpayers) pay them through Medicaid.

With abortions accounting for 86% of their non-government revenue (this staggering figure comes from the September 30th testimony of current president Cecil Richards to House Committee investigating Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in baby body parts), this means America’s leading abortion provider will continue to be funded by Americans to end the lives of nearly 40 children in the womb every hour.

Why are our elected officials continually voting to allow the murder of innocent unborn children? Do they view the baby in the womb is not human? Dr. Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and public abortion advocate, honestly answers that for us in his book ‘Practical Ethics’: “It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.”

Dr. Robert P. George, Princeton University’s McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and one of our nation’s leading advocates for the life of the unborn child, echoes the determination of those of us who grieve at the continued disregard of God’s command to protect the lives of our unborn children: “We in the pro-life movement have no enemies to destroy. Our weapons are chaste weapons of the spirit: truth and love. Our task is less to defeat our opponents than to win them to the cause of life. To be sure, we must oppose the culture and politics of death resolutely and with a determination to win. But there is no one—no one—whose heart is so hard that he or she cannot be won over. Let us not lose faith in the power of our weapons to transform even the most resolute abortion advocates. It is the loving, prayerful, self-sacrificing witness of so many other dedicated pro-life activists that softens the hearts and changes the lives of people.