We have a tough subject to talk about this morning,
so it's good to start with prayer and with worship.
We're talking about the issue of life in the womb
and the issue of abortion in our culture today.
When you engage with people today
about the issue of abortion
and you come at it from a biblical perspective,
one of the responses you will often hear from people is,
well, abortion isn't found anywhere in the Bible.
And we know why hostile people do this.
It's because they haven't really studied the issue,
nor have they actually studied the Bible.
Most of the time, what they've done
is they've seen a couple of social media posts
or they've listened to a podcast,
and now they believe they're informed.
And so they're ready to throw out that silly statement.
The Bible never mentions abortion,
not realizing that the word abortion is a modern word,
not used until the 1500s
to describe what we would call today a miscarriage.
And not found in any medical textbook until the year 1823.
These are the same kind of folks who will say to you,
dinosaurs aren't in the Bible
because I don't see the word dinosaur,
even though that is a word that wasn't actually coined
until the year 1841.
The other thing that arguers don't usually realize
is that abortion in the sense that we know it today
was very rare in the ancient world,
primarily because the medical technology
was not there to do abortions.
But in the historical record,
you will find scattered records
of some type of, some form of abortion,
and mainly among the elite women of Roman society
who would do it one of two ways,
either through a potion using certain plants or herbs,
or try to abort their child
through dangerous physical exertion.
But the more common practice in biblical times
was actually infanticide through the abandonment of a baby
after its birth.
That shows up quite often in the ancient writings,
and in fact, Roman law and Roman religion, for example,
saw nothing morally wrong with abandoning a newborn baby
in a garbage dump,
letting them die of exposure,
babies who were unwanted or sickly or deformed in some way,
or even just the wrong sex.
Primarily in that day, girls would be abandoned
much more than boys because they were born
more than boys because they were seen
as less valuable to the family.
Men who we often call great historically
actually promoted infanticide as a benefit to society.
Cicero, for example,
the great Roman first century statesman and order.
Also the Stoic philosopher Seneca,
who once wrote, and I kid you not,
this hideous statement.
He wrote, mad dogs, we knock on the head.
Unnatural progeny we destroy.
We drown children at birth who are weakly and abnormal.
Aristotle in his day recommended that babies
should be compelled by law to be exposed until death
if they had a birth defect, compelled by law.
Later, the historian Plutarch agreed saying this,
it's neither for the good of the child itself
nor for the public interest that it should be brought up
if it did not from the very outset
appear to be healthy and vigorous.
That is the depravity of man on display.
But from the beginning,
Christians saw this issue differently,
and we can be very proud of the historical record
when it comes to our ancient brothers and sisters
who fought the righteous battle in their day
for the value of human life.
Tertullian of Carthage, the great second century theologian,
tells us in his writings that Christians
would seek out the tiny bodies of newborn babies
from the dung heaps and the garbage dumps of ancient cities.
And they would do one of three things.
Number one, if the child had already passed away,
they would give it a proper burial.
Two, if the baby was sick and dying,
they would care for it until the last breath.
Or, best case scenario, they would actually take them in,
adopt them, and raise them as their own.
And in fact, even today, if you go to Rome
and visit the catacombs under the city,
you'll find places that look like this.
Many Christian burial tombs with inscriptions
that read the adopted son of or the adopted daughter of.
And these correspond with the many babies
and young children Christians rescued
from the trash heap over the centuries.
In one catacomb alone, the Catacomb of Penphilo,
there are 111 tombs, 83 of them.
83 of 111 were tiny spaces reserved for babies and children.
And as you know, the appalling practice
of discarding human life like trash is alive and well
in the country we call home today.
It is the great moral issue of our day.
It's the closest thing we have to the moral failure
of slavery that was taking place
in the colonial days of this country.
Yes, it's that big a deal.
And the statistics are stunning.
Since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was established
get this as a federal law, can you imagine?
The lives of more than 45 million unborn babies
have been extinguished in our country.
So as horrified as we are at the Greco-Roman culture
by their callous nature, that pales in comparison
to the way our culture where we live today
views life in the womb.
According to Planned Parenthood's own numbers,
they admit this, in 2020,
in 2023 there were 1,026,700 abortions.
That is 2,800 babies each and every day.
Let that number sink in.
And just to give you perspective,
every seven and a half months in this country,
more babies are killed than the number of American deaths
in the Revolutionary War, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, World War I, and World War II combined.
Every seven and a half months.
Takes us less than a year to match those horrific numbers.
And for me, when I sit back and look at it,
as somebody who tries to process things
both biblically and logically,
it's the wicked inconsistencies that our culture adopts
about an issue of life and death that is, for me,
the most frustrating part.
The intentional blindness that they show.
The failure to deal with the reality
of murdering a baby in the womb,
turning away, refusing to look at the gory details
of what an abortion looks like.
It makes you sick to your stomach
if you stop and process it for too long.
Everybody understands medically
that a person is deemed to be alive
if they have either a detectable heartbeat
or a brainwave activity.
Things that in a baby in utero
happen between five and six weeks
from the point of conception,
and yet virtually all abortions take place after that.
You may not know that.
Between eight and 20 weeks is when most abortions take place.
By any universally agreed upon medical standards,
outside of scripture, medical standards,
that is snuffing out the life of a human.
And by the way, that's why there are laws
in the books in every state that apply manslaughter
and even murder charges when an unborn child is hurt
or killed with premeditation.
And we cry out, doesn't that happen every day
in our abortion clinics?
None of it makes sense unless you factor in
what the Bible says about human nature.
The depravity of man, the fallen nature
of the world we live in, and absolute spiritual blindness.
So why does the state not call abortion murder?
Well, it's because of who brings about
the death of that baby.
Listen to this now.
You can catch a murder charge for taking the life
of an unborn child if the mother wants the baby.
But it's perfectly legal to kill that child
if the mother doesn't want the baby.
Make it make sense.
In the first case, the law applies the right to life
to the unborn child, but in the second case,
the law says that child, because it's unwanted,
has absolutely no human rights whatsoever.
The only difference is whether the child is wanted or not,
which think about it now, means the mother
has the sole power to declare that that life
is human or not.
That's why you'll often hear our opponents say,
it's not a baby, it's just a fetus.
As if applying that different label changes the moral
situation whatsoever.
The fact is the baby has no power,
no authority to cry out, please let me live.
I'm a human being.
Instead, what is it that we affirm that the older,
stronger person prevails?
The weak and the vulnerable suffer at their hands.
And in every other situation our culture faces,
we reject that equation.
But in the case of abortion, we celebrate it.
That the older, stronger person
prevails over the weak and the vulnerable.
And that raises just another huge inconsistency.
If our culture were intellectually honest,
our opponents would acknowledge that according
to their little G God, which is science,
a baby in the womb is a separate and unique human life
apart from the mother.
Separate and unique life apart from the mother.
Now obviously that mother is hosting that life
through an exchange of not only the child,
but the mother is hosting that life through an exchange
of natural processes.
But for a woman to claim it's my body
is not scientifically accurate.
The baby's heartbeat is not the mother's heartbeat.
The baby's body parts are not the mother's body parts.
That baby has a unique set of fingerprints
that do not belong to the mom.
Her DNA, his or her DNA characteristics
are different from the mom.
It is a separate and unique human life,
which means as close as that bond is between mom and baby,
and we love that, she has no right,
biblically or legally, to choose to end that life.
And really the only difference between a baby developing
in the womb and a baby developing outside the womb
is time and location.
That's it, time and location.
The essence of that life, the humanness of that life
is no different from there to there.
We need to understand these issues, friends, as Christians,
because we're all having conversations about this
or we should be.
When you dig in and examine the reasons and motivations
behind the so-called choice movement,
you begin to see why so many in our culture
are literally grasping onto abortion
as if it's the most important right that they have.
Imagine that.
The most important right I have
is the right to kill my child, imagine.
But it's rooted in their own selfish wants and desires.
James talks about this.
James 4 literally speaks to this.
What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you?
Don't they come from your passions
that wage war within you?
Look how pressing this next statement is.
You desire and do not have, so you commit murder.
You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and wage war.
Here's what that looks like.
You want to fight and you want to kill.
You want to fight and you want to wage war.
Here's what that looks like.
Why are children aborted today?
Again, Planned Parenthood gives us the statistics.
In spite of this being the most consistent argument
against the Christian position, only 1% of abortions
in the US are products of incest or rape, 1%.
Another 1% happened because of fetal abnormalities.
4% because the doctor recommended an abortion
and we have to remember that is the second
most common objection we get.
But altogether, that's how many?
6% of abortions.
94% are rooted in issues of personal wants and desires.
94% from the source itself, the ones doing the abortions.
I don't want to be a single parent.
I can't afford a child.
Having a child will destroy all of my life plans
and I'm not here to pass judgment.
I'm sure some of those situations are heartbreaking
and difficult, they're very real,
but to use reasons like that as a justification
to slaughter another human being is beyond comprehension
and we need to understand that.
And of course this all points back to basic
biblical principles about sex, about family,
and about the consequences for sin.
83% of all abortions are a product of sex
outside of the marriage covenant, 83%.
So it turns out there are consequences
when a culture begins to trivialize recreational sex,
when it begins to reject the notion
of a biblically ordered family.
Who knew?
Well God did, God knew.
And by God's grace we know, don't we?
Grab your Bibles, long introduction.
Sorry.
Okay, grab your Bibles, let's turn to Psalm 139.
I'm just glad I got through that
because last night as I was writing I was just in tears.
This is heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking.
Psalm 139, by the way it's no accident
that we're at this particular passage on the same weekend
as the Santa Clarita Valley Pregnancies Walk for Life.
No accident that this is happening on the same day
that we dedicated two babies.
No accident that Adam and I just did a podcast episode
on the issue of abortion in the church.
But here's the amazing thing.
When I was sketching out the Psalm series,
I put this down on the calendar,
I had no clue about any of those things happening.
God completely orchestrated the timing on this.
He is involved, he is sovereign over all the details.
Amazing stuff.
Now this morning we're gonna study verses 13 to 18,
but I wanna read them in context
so let's go back up to verse one.
So we're making the right connections
between the first two stanzas and the one
we're gonna study today.
So here's the word of the Lord.
A Psalm of David, verse one.
O Lord, you search me and know me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up.
You understand my thought from afar.
You scrutinize my path and my lying down
and are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
Even before there was a word on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it all.
You have enclosed me behind and before
and laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.
It is too high, I cannot attain it.
So if you were with us last Sunday,
you know that we summarized these first six verses
under the title of God's Omniscience.
The fact that God sees and knows everything
about David's life, his thoughts, his motivations,
his words, his actions, all of it.
And then as we get to the second stanza from seven to 12,
we're gonna see a second great attribute of God,
his omnipresence.
The equally amazing truth that God is present
everywhere all at one time.
And always present with his servant, David.
Verse seven.
Where can I go from your spirit?
Rhetorical question, right?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there.
If I make my bed in Sheol or the grave,
behold, you are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand will lay hold of me.
If I say surely the darkness will overwhelm me
and the light around me will be nigh,
well even the darkness is not dark to you.
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are the same, are alike to you, oh Lord.
So what comes next?
How do you top that, right?
Well in the next six verses, David now turns
to emphasizing a particular aspect of both
God's knowledge and his presence.
He goes back to life in the womb.
Life in the womb.
And once again, we're gonna see how personal
and intimate his words are.
And it starts with the word four in verse 13,
a very important causal particle, a key in Hebrew,
but it's very important because it connects the stanza
to what's come before it.
Verse 13, for you formed my inward parts.
You wove me in my mother's womb.
I will give thanks to you for I am fearfully
and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works and my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret
and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance
and in your book were written all the days
that were ordained for me,
when as yet there was not one of them.
How precious also are your thoughts to me, oh God.
How vast is the sum of them.
If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with you.
So do you see it here?
God's intimate knowledge of David as a human person,
even in the womb,
before he was physically brought forth into the world
and then God's intimate presence with him,
shaping and forming who David would become
and ordaining all the days and years of his life.
So even though all of that process in the womb
was hidden from human eyes, God saw it.
In fact, God was orchestrating all of it.
So let's dive deeper.
Go back up to verse 13.
And I'll just sort of walk you through
with a bit of an outline on the screen.
Verse 13, you formed my inward parts, you wove me,
or we like to say you knitted me together.
How many of you guys knit?
Anybody knit?
It's a pretty cool process, right?
Very intricate.
You knitted me together in my mother's womb.
So friends, listen, for every believer
who plans someday to engage in a discussion
with a family member, a friend, a coworker,
this simple, straightforward verse has to be memorized
and absorbed deeply into the heart
if you're gonna speak biblically about the issue
of human life and abortion.
Memorize it, know it.
Again, the Bible never mentions abortion, they say, right?
But this verse and others like it are direct
and compelling evidence that God has spoken clearly
on the issue of life in the womb.
It's right there in black and white.
He's told us about his care and his concern
and his sovereignty over every moment of our lives
and that starts long before we're physically born
into this world.
He's actually known believers from before
the foundation of the world, right?
David affirms that God formed all that is within us,
every inward part and then in this beautiful poetic form,
he describes God as like a skilled craftsman
who gets in there and is working his divine power
to intricately weave us or knit us together.
But above all, make sure you see this fact
that God sees, that God knows, and that God is present with,
listen, a unique individual human person
in his mother's womb.
A unique individual human person in the womb.
That's what God affirms in this passage.
Now, deep breath.
We're gonna go off on a theological rabbit trail here.
And some of you guys know what I'm about to talk about
because I like to talk a lot about this issue
because to me, first of all, I had to write
a massive paper on this back in seminary.
And it was so hard.
But it's a really important issue and it squares
with what we're talking about here today.
So let me build a foundation.
We know from the creation account in Genesis
and other passages of scripture
that human life comes from the hand of the creator
and that each one of us is made in the image of God, right?
That's a very important statement.
The Imago Dei, the image of God.
That means that we as humans are the pinnacle
of God's creative works.
We are the pinnacle, the height.
And that means we are the highest possible value
in his eyes.
We also know that man is unique among all of God's creatures
because we have both a material body
and an immaterial soul that allows us
to commune with our maker.
We're the only species that can do that.
So there's an image and likeness that we have from God
that mirrors him, although very imperfectly,
our intellect, our emotions, our will, our moral framework.
We've also been given certain communicable attributes
that again mirror in part God's attributes.
Obviously not nearly as perfect as his,
but things like we have a capacity to love,
to show mercy, to seek justice,
to be truthful, to relate to others in fellowship.
Those are communicable attributes from God.
So having established all that,
let me now ask you a question.
Let me now ask you a question
that perhaps you've never thought of before.
Where did your soul come from?
How did you get your soul?
And if your knee-jerk reaction is God,
because that's always the right answer, right?
Well, God created my soul.
I want you to go a little bit deeper
and think about the implications of that.
Because your soul is tainted with sin, right?
What part do parents play in multiplying the human race?
Do parents create just the physical aspect
of their children, their bodies,
or are they involved in creating the soul as well?
Or does God create the body and the soul
and exclude the parents completely,
or is there some middle ground?
By the way, this question has puzzled theologians
since the beginning.
And there's great disagreement
so I'm gonna give you my opinion.
I think what makes the most biblical sense,
but just know that there are some
different opinions on this.
Let me explain the conundrum here, okay?
Couple important principles.
Romans 5, Paul tells us that sin and death
entered the human race through one man
and therefore death spread to all.
That is a part of all of us.
And a part of my offspring,
and any offspring you might have.
David says in Psalm 51 that he was brought forth
in iniquity, he was already sinful
at the point of conception.
What does that say about God creating
our body or soul?
Now the vast majority of Christians
will usually guess at this.
They'll say, well, okay, here's what I think happens.
The parents pass along the physical aspect
of their children, but it's God who creates the soul.
But that leads to some troubling questions.
Because again, the soul is tainted with sin.
God doesn't create tainted things, right?
He doesn't create sinful things.
Okay, well maybe the parents produce the body,
which is tainted with sin,
but then God creates a perfect soul
and then boop, drops it into the tainted body,
thereby tainting the soul.
That's one explanation you might hear.
But if that's true, and this term is called ensoulment,
when does God do ensoulment?
When does that happen?
It's not described anywhere in the Bible.
We're not given any details about that.
Now I'll give you a couple of objections to that idea.
First of all, in Genesis two,
we're told that God rested from creating on day seven.
When did he start creating again?
Did he start creating on the eighth day?
Is there any mention anywhere in the Bible
that God started to create souls after that day of rest?
365,000 people are born each day on planet Earth.
Is God creating souls at that pace
and then boop, dropping all of them
into tainted physical bodies?
Interestingly, I cannot find any place in scripture
where it tells me that God began to create again
after the seventh day.
Adam and Eve are commanded to do what?
Multiply and fill the earth with the earth.
Adam and Eve are commanded to do what?
Multiply and fill the earth.
No mention of God creating souls.
And then we're given two very interesting statements
early in Genesis about procreation.
In Genesis four, Eve says,
I have created a male child with the help of the Lord.
That's instructive.
But then in Genesis five, we're told,
look at this, Adam fathered a son in his likeness
according to his image and named him Seth.
And all of Seth's genetic and biological information
would have been present at his conception
because we know Adam and Eve were creating
or producing full human beings.
To be fully human is to be dichotomous,
made up of two parts, both body and soul.
And that's what Adam and Eve were producing.
And that is something that Christian theologians
have fought for, what we call the psychosomatic unity
of our personhood.
That we can't separate body and soul.
The Gnostics did that.
They divided the physical body and soul
and divided the physical and the spiritual,
creating a duality.
But Christian theologians have always fought about that,
saying no, we are a unity.
We are one body and soul.
So how does this happen?
What I believe the correct theological solution
to all this is a position called traducianism.
You're all gonna Google it when you get home.
That's fine.
Very interesting to read about.
Comes from a Latin root that means to pass along
or transmit.
And it's a very simple solution.
This is how it's stated.
Both parts of a person, body and soul,
are passed along by the parents to their offspring.
Both parts, body and soul, are passed along
or transmitted to their offspring.
That is the only acceptable way to explain
how inherited corruption and sin
is transmitted through all generations.
It's the only way to explain how David
could have possessed a sin nature
at the point of conception.
Because his body and soul were inherited
from his father.
So the way a traducian looks at this is
as the pinnacle of God's creative work
made in the image of God,
his highest creation,
we have been granted the privilege
and the authority to generate both body and soul
in our children.
And that that privilege was built into Adam and Eve
from the very beginning.
Now, if your blood pressure's now rising,
because you're like, I've never heard this before.
This is freaking me out.
I'm gonna give you two bits of information
that might help.
First of all, I'm not making this up.
Some of the, I mean, you should ask that question, right?
Some of the best theologians in church history
were strong on this issue of traducianism.
Guys like Tertullian, Augustine, Luther,
Jonathan Edwards, today, Norm Geisler.
There's some really brilliant guys.
The only thing I hate about this
is Calvin did not hold to this
and I hate being on the wrong side.
Calvin.
But so there's disagreement on this.
Second thing, make sure you hear what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying that only the parents are involved
and that God is shut out of the process
because that would be impossible.
He's completely sovereign over everything.
So listen now, the Lord is the primary cause
of all things that happen in time and space, right?
And as with other things,
he uses secondary causes like parents
to fulfill his decreed will.
So our bodies and our souls
are still providentially superintended by God.
They're produced by him.
As David affirms here in verse 13,
the Lord is at work in us,
not in any way that connects him to human sin.
That's really the big issue, right?
He is at work, but not in any way
where he is touched by sin,
working first, listen now,
working first through the natural process
of human multiplication
and then weaving us together
according to a sovereign purpose and plan.
I already see some of you guys on your phones.
You're Googling it, aren't you?
No, hopefully it's still your Bible,
but I get it, I get it.
It's a very, it's the type of thing
that will rock your world.
And you say, Jeff, why are you sharing this with us?
Because guys, when we deal with hard things,
we have got to not just lay on the surface of it.
Let's dig in and try to make sure
that our faith is reasonable and defendable,
that we understand how these things work.
So I'll just let that sit for a while,
but let's keep going.
I want to break down the most famous verse in this section.
Look at verse 14.
I will give thanks to you,
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works,
and my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in secret,
and skillfully wrought, or I like the term,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
So let me deal with verse 15 first,
and then we'll come back to 14.
Verse 15 just continues the very same theme
that we just studied in verse 13.
God's knowledge and presence with life in the womb.
Only here, what's interesting is the emphasis is on
something that happens in secret.
And by that, David is talking about
how a baby develops in the womb.
Now, we're talking about 1,000 BC.
No ultrasounds, no sonograms.
So to the ancient person, this was completely hidden.
So much so that he compares it
to being in the depths of the earth.
Or as we would say, it's deep underground.
It's hidden from human eyes.
But David's saying, but God's not a human.
God doesn't have human eyes.
He sees everything.
He knows everything.
Things that take place in places that human beings
have no clue about, God completely knows it.
And he cares, and he guides the process.
He sees all these things in the secret place.
And David says, my frame, and in Hebrew,
that literally means my bones.
My frame was visible to you as I was developing in the womb.
And even more than that, the entire structure of my being
was not just seen by you,
but was being skillfully woven together.
It's beautiful poetry here.
Again, what's the point to describe
that God is intimately involved in life in the womb?
And that that is a separate and unique person
apart from the mother, known by God.
Now, even back in David's time,
people recognized the absolute wonder
of pregnancy and birth.
I mean, I'll never forget the first time
Tani and I, well, Tani had a baby.
I was really good at giving her ice chips.
I was master of ice chips.
When Chandler was born, you stand back
and you go, what?
It just, like, I can't believe this.
This is, it's the, look, if you're not a parent yet,
trust me, it is the wildest thing that you will experience.
The wonder of it is crazy.
And this is what David, he's marveling
over the mysterious and divine process.
First, he describes being made as fearful.
And what he means by that is it's just so awe-inspiring
to consider, to reflect upon.
And then he calls it wonderful,
which is a word that basically says
it produces in us amazement and praise.
We are fearfully awe-inspired
and wonderfully with praise made by God.
And so David says, I'll give thanks to you.
I will praise your name for the miracle of human life.
And guys, that's what a believer does.
Those of us who belong to God,
we see the Lord's knowledge and presence all around us
and we are thrilled by the fact that God is with us.
Thrilled by the fact that his eye is upon us,
that he is guarding us.
And guarding us even back before we came into this world,
back in the womb.
And look what he affirms at the end of verse 14.
My soul knows this very well.
I have no doubt about what I'm declaring to you today.
Do you realize what a wonder the human body is?
I started researching it this week.
Tanya walked in a couple times like,
what are you looking at?
I'm like, the human body's amazing.
It really is.
Every single person who has ever lived on the earth,
millions of people,
every person has their own unique fingerprint.
Seriously?
How many patterns could there be?
That is bonkers.
The only,
every one of us has in our bodies itself,
sufficient evidence to believe in a creator.
Seriously.
If you've known anybody that's gone through
any amount of med school,
nurse or doctor,
how could they come out not at a minimum
believing in intelligent design?
It's wild.
Look how complex we are.
How finely tuned we are.
How our systems work together in harmony to sustain life.
And for anybody to stand back and go,
oh, this was random chance.
This just happened.
What?
It's ludicrous, is it not?
Blindness.
Augustine knew this in the fourth century.
Look what Augustine said in the fourth century.
He said, men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motions of the stars.
Look at this.
And they pass by themselves without wondering.
Augustine knew that in the fourth century.
The blindness of humanity.
Today the population on earth is around eight billion people.
Eight billion people.
And every one of them has a unique fingerprint.
You have somewhere around 36 or 37 trillion cells
in your body.
Each one is a tiny factory that scientists
are still studying and learning about.
Your body replaces around 330 billion cells each day.
3.8 million new cells every single second.
And if you want to know how vast and complex
your DNA structure is, Ross Anderson is your guy.
Talk to him after the survey.
He literally specializes in genetics and DNA.
How the amount of terabytes of information
in every single DNA molecule.
It's crazy.
How about the brain?
You've seen the brain, the physical brain,
but all that happened, fearfully and wonderfully made.
Every second more than 100,000 chemical reactions
that take place in your brain.
Probably a little more listening to this sermon.
Traducionism.
Like some of your chemical reactions went wah.
I mean part of your brain is regulating voluntary matters.
Things you choose to do, muscle coordination,
thought processes.
But at the very same time, another part of your brain
is doing all the things that you don't have to pay
attention to like breathing.
Right?
It's amazing.
Like digestion, like heart rate, like blood pressure.
All at the same time.
Your brain has 10 million nerve cells
to record everything that you're seeing and hearing
and your nerve impulses travel at a speed
of 400 feet per second.
Oh, no big deal.
All that information comes to your brain
through the miracle of the eye,
which has 100 million receptor cells in each eye.
Altogether the system makes billions of calculations
per second.
Billions of calculations per second.
Before an image even gets to the optic nerve
and then once it reaches your brain,
the cerebral cortex has more than a dozen
separate vision centers in which to process.
I had to read that because I don't get it.
I just don't get it.
It's wild.
Did you know your human eye can distinguish
between 10 million different colors?
What?
God made that.
The human heart, are you kidding me?
The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day
pumping gallons of blood through your body,
travels 12,000 miles a day in your body.
If you were to lay out, oh this one.
I had to triple check this one
because I thought it was bonkers.
If you were to lay out all the blood vessels in your body,
capillaries, arteries.
I'm looking at Ross, all of those things.
They would stretch 60,000 miles
twice around the earth in your body.
I triple checked it.
Ross before the service even said,
yeah that's about right.
You take around 22,000 breaths every day
and your lungs take in 2,000 gallons of air,
automatically breathing in the right amount
to give you life healing oxygen
and the perfect proportion to our atmosphere.
Your kidneys filter 200 quarts of blood every day.
Your stomach has 35 million glands
which secrete the right amount of juices
to allow your body to digest food
and convert it into stored energy.
And then so that it doesn't digest itself,
your stomach produces a new lining every three days.
Who came up with that?
Who?
God.
I mean I could go on, I should go on.
The body's immune system.
Your immune system is constantly fighting stuff off
that are just trying to harm you.
All the time it's fighting for you.
From the most minor repair like a DNA thing
to recovering from a major accident.
You're not even gonna know until you get to heaven
how many times your immune system
saved you from certain death.
The skin of a human being regenerates itself every 40 days.
We shed 30 to 40,000 particles of skin every hour.
Excuse me, excuse me.
One square inch of your, just a couple more.
It's wild.
One square inch of your skin has 625 sweat glands
and 19,000 sensory cells
all working in coordination with your brain
so that you'll maintain a 98.6 degree temperature.
And then so that it doesn't digest itself,
your body's immune system
will have a higher temperature.
Oh, that's not precise.
The human nose can recall 50,000 different scents.
And by the way, just like fingerprints,
the pattern on your tongue is specific only to you.
Now wouldn't you think all of that data,
that's what we call hard science,
might get the attention of an atheist?
It should.
It requires more faith.
Seriously, this is a question you need to pose
to your friends when you're talking to them.
Which option requires more faith?
Because atheism, don't let them lie to you
and say it's not a religion.
No, it has its own principles.
Does it require more faith to believe
that all of that came about by random chance
or by the hand of a loving creator?
Come on, come on.
And that's just the physical part of us.
I haven't even talked about,
you can make a stronger case
that the immaterial part of us,
the human soul, points back to a creator.
Because all these questions now,
if we're just evolutionary creatures,
why do we love?
Why do we show mercy?
Why do we forgive?
How do we instinctively know right from wrong?
Where did that come from?
Why do all people across all ages worship?
Why do they all speak of an afterlife?
Where did that come from?
The immaterial part is actually a stronger case
than the material and the material is wild.
All right, is that enough fearfully and wonderfully made?
Are we good?
Okay, let's keep going in our passage.
We'll do this quick.
Verse 16.
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance
or when I was formless.
And in your book were written all the days
that were ordained for me.
And this is so awkward.
I'm just gonna read it from the CSB.
All my days were written in your book
and planned before a single one of them began.
Let me read it again from the CSB.
All my days were written in your book
and planned before a single one of them began.
This is just more evidence.
That God is claiming to be aware of life at the moment
of conception.
While the human embryo is still what David calls unformed.
And the larger point he's making here
is that the Lord has marked out the exact number
of his days going back to his formless embryo,
to the physical last moment of his life
and then on into eternity.
God has marked all of it out and for you too and for me.
Every detail decreed by God written in his book of life.
All of God's plans to work through David,
to accomplish certain things through David,
he will finish that work.
This is spoken of not just by David but of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah also of Isaiah,
also of Paul in the New Testament who says,
I was set apart from my mother's womb
and called by grace.
This is how God operates through his son.
And so then as David closes this, stands out,
he ends predictably, he ends with what?
With praise.
Right?
Over and over again we've seen this in the Psalms.
How precious are your thoughts to me, O God.
How vast is the sum of them.
If I should count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake, I am still with you.
And this is the reality for us, friends.
If we stop long enough,
we're gonna be able to see the truth.
And this is the reality for us, friends.
If we stop long enough in this crazy,
fast-paced world we live in,
if we stop and take stock of who we are,
how we've been designed,
how God has sovereignly weaved us together
and sustained us,
we would just break out in praise.
The problem is our life moves so fast
that we don't often do that.
To just stop and praise him.
How precious, David says,
are all God's thoughts of him.
How valuable are God's intentions toward him.
How much of a basement and adoration here.
Guys, imagine the Creator knowing you personally.
How immense is God.
Yet he knows you by name.
He knows where you live.
He knows the number of hairs on your head.
He knows what you had for breakfast this morning.
He knows what he's gonna accomplish through you next.
He knows it right now.
He knows the final day of your life on this planet.
He knows it all.
Guys, the Lord God thinks of you all the time.
He thinks of you continuously.
Yeah, him.
And yeah, you.
God thinks of you.
That's what David's saying, all the time.
Listen to what Spurgeon,
this is a great quote from Spurgeon.
Look what he says.
He says, you know that people are very proud
of the fact that a king has merely looked at them.
I have heard of a man who used to boast all his life
that King George once spoke to him.
Now he only said, get out of the road.
But it was a king who said it.
So the man felt greatly gratified.
But you and I beloved can rejoice that God,
before who kings are grasshoppers,
actually thinks of us and thinks of us often.
Amen.
Whew.
Man, put that verse on your mirror at home.
And just be reminded of God's care and concern for you.
All right, so let me close.
I'm just gonna run down a quick summary of
sort of the steps that every true follower of Christ
has to have in his or her mind
to oppose the practice of abortion.
And before I do that, let me just say something
that I wasn't sure I was gonna say,
but I'm gonna say it now.
If you're here this morning
and you've had an abortion in your past,
God's grace is sufficient to cover that sin.
This message is not intended to condemn you
or to hurt you in any way.
God's grace is sufficient for all of our sin.
Amen.
But, Christians, let's talk about this.
Remember, we believe in the sanctity of life.
What God knits together, we dare not destroy.
And that conviction comes from multiple places
in scripture, right?
We see it in the creation narrative.
We see it in the prophets.
We see it in the psalmist.
We even see it in the authors of the New Testament.
That's number one.
Number two, we hold a fundamental belief,
there it is, that human beings are the pinnacle of creation,
made in the image of God,
and therefore every human life
must be fought for and protected, period.
Number three, Christians believe that human life
does not have to be protected.
Human life does indeed begin at the point of conception.
And friends, wherever unbiased science is done,
that truth is born out.
I say unbiased for a reason, but that is true.
Number four, we believe that if a woman is pregnant,
a life has begun in her womb,
and that life must be protected,
regardless of the circumstances that led to the pregnancy.
We have got to be consistent on this.
I understand the emotional argument of incest and rape.
I understand the emotional side,
but the principle of life stands.
We dare not compromise that principle.
Number five, that life must be protected,
even if it's shown that the baby
may end up with special needs,
or likely has some type of deformity.
None of that information changes the basic principle
behind the value of life in the womb, period.
Number six, Christians believe
that children are a blessing.
Children are not an inconvenience.
Children are not a liability.
Children are not a problem.
A child is a gift from God and worth sacrificing for.
It is hard.
Being a parent is the hardest thing
that God has given me to do.
It's worth sacrificing for.
And finally, Christians advocate
for alternatives to abortion.
We not only argue against abortion,
we argue for fostering and adoption.
For this simple reason,
A, life is precious,
and B, the best path in life for every child
is one that ends up with a family
and a home that is filled with love.
We argue against snuffing out that life
and praying that God will put them in a home
where they will be filled with love
and with the message of Christ.
And there are stories after stories you can read about
of people who, their mothers were going to abort them
and then didn't, and they are game changers
in this world we live in
because their mothers made the right choice.
Amen?
May the Lord continue to grant us more and more victories
in this worthy fight.
Let's pray together.
Father, I thank you for our time this morning,
Lord, just to scratch the surface
of the difficulty of this subject.
Because it is so emotional, Lord,
it is so filled with past experiences
and logical inconsistencies.
And Lord, our desires of the flesh mix in there as well,
and so this is difficult, Lord.
I pray that today has been helpful,
that David speaking in your word into this subject
might be clarifying for us,
and may your spirit continue to drive us
into deeper levels of truth about this.
Father, we are grateful that you are aware
of all that takes place in the womb,
that you are caring, that you are concerning,
that you are at work there.
And we thank you that your grace is sufficient
for those who have stumbled and sinned in this area,
but are redeemed because of the blood of Christ.
So thank you for our time this morning, Lord.
May we praise you now as we come back to singing,
praise you and thank you for how glorious you are.
We love you, in the name of Jesus we pray, amen.