Please consider just what the prerequisites are for life. Then see how God has reflected His very self in our anatomy.
About 5 years ago as I write, say 2002, I was listening to one of the debates on TV about the ethics of human embryo research. The panel had a “Human Rights” representative along with medical, legal and industry representatives. No representative from the Church. A major moral issue and no-one felt the need to have the Church represented. Well, why bother – don’t get God dragged into this – we can make up our own minds. Anyhow, the Human Rights representative had it nailed – when the sperm hits the egg, it becomes a life and so experimentation on the subsequent embryo is murder!
I started to wonder what the Bible had to say on this seemingly very technical issue. And there it was! But it did not seem to me that anyone else in the Church saw it. I asked some good friends – really keen believers, and they pretty much accepted that when the sperm hit the egg it became a life. Though there is no biblical concept of conception, these dear friends were not even prepared to entertain my suggestions. They had made up their own minds and they did not want to change. I think it was also a passion position as well, because if you weaken your stance on conception as the start of life then you open the door to abortion.
In the following section I’ll suggest just when I think the Bible describes life as starting. For the moment, don’t take this on as a teaching that you must accept or reject, but look at it as a challenge. If you don’t like it, then find a better biblical precedent.
I’ll put down some bullet points and you see if you can connect the dots before I try and spell it out.
OK, you get the idea. The Bible says that life starts in the womb. I have heard some commentators suggest that with our greater technical insight, that we can push it back into the vagina where the egg is fertilized. But after it is fertilized it has to move up the fallopian tube into the womb and then attaches itself to the womb. I’ve seen video of this process and the embryo literally buries itself in the side of the womb.
I saw a fascinating TV series exploring the human body. The commentator pointed out that even for women with normal fertility, this process of the embryo attaching to the womb was hit and miss, with perhaps only one out of three successful attachments. So here’s the dilemma – if you believe that life started at fertilization then you are saying that from the beginning of time, twice as many embryos have simply been flushed away as the total population of mankind. Since these embryos never got a chance to accept Jesus as Lord, then on the last day they will all be raised up and cast into hell! And if you think God might make an exception for these embryos then there was no need to send Jesus to be crucified.
...Still want life to start at fertilization?
I made this suggestion to a good friend who has considerable wisdom and he immediately came back at me with good generic stuff – how God alone can make that judgment and He is merciful blaa, blaa, blaa. My good friend, who I greatly respect, was not prepared to face the consequences of his assertion that life started at fertilization and simply side-stepped the issue. Certainly God will make the judgment and whatever you and I decide here won’t matter. But you get the idea – there is very serious consequences if life starts at fertilization.
But I’m saying that God does not see the embryo as a life until it successfully moves into the womb and attaches and starts drawing life/nutrient from the mother. The John 12:24 scripture where Jesus likens himself to a seed that must first falls to the ground, has several hints. We know that the seed is first pollinated (fertilized), but only becomes a new life by falling to the ground and drawing nutrient from the soil. This is equivalent to the embryo attaching to the womb and drawing sustenance from the mother.
The “I in you and you in me” scriptures tells us that life is a two-step process –– the sperm in the egg and the egg attaching inside the womb.
God sees life as is in the blood. Leviticus 17:11 spells it out clearly. We also understand that Jesus’ life (blood) was poured out on the Cross. The embryo develops a heart after just three weeks – it starts pumping blood and till that heart stops the person is alive! Is it coincidence that about the same time the baby’s heart starts pumping blood, the mother realizes she is pregnant because of the absence of her period (blood) flow?
Do you recall how God took a rib from Adam to create Eve? Our technical insight now tells us that both red and white blood cells are created in the bone marrow. Wow, God chose a rib as the starting point for Eve because it carried with it the essence of life as He sees it – the blood. So the life/spirit that God breathed into Adam was transferred to Eve.
A simple Bible search for “bones” in the Old Testament reveals how much care the Israelites had for this non-perishable part of the body. (Non-perishable just as the spirit life is non-perishable.) But perhaps the most dramatic incident is in 2 Kings 13:20-21 , where a dead body comes into contact with Elisha’s bones and comes back to life. There is some ambiguity here about whether we should talk about the “anointing” on the bones as different to the spirit life, but it is sufficient to observe that life giving power was transferred via the bones. I don’t want to start another debate by suggesting that perhaps we need to wait for bones to appear in the foetus before there is life. I just want to reinforce how the blood which originates from within the bones – in the marrow – is associated with life, as God sees it. And we must wait weeks after conception before blood is present. Exactly how long I don’t know.
Ecclesiastes 11:5 is very interesting. Many versions are like the NASB that describes how we don’t know the path of the wind nor do we know how the bones form in the womb. However versions like ESV translate this as we don’t know how the spirit enters bones in the womb. The Hebrew text does seem open to interpretation here, but the ESV text seems to add less words in English to make sense of the Hebrew. It is also consistent with other texts that describe the spirit within the bones and so I favour the ESV here. Pretty obviously it follows that life starts when the spirit enters the child in the womb.
All the previous discussion shows that life/spirit is associate with blood, and those are linked to the heart and bones, all of which start well after conception, typically when the embryo embeds itself in the womb.
God does not see a life until the embryo attaches and probably not until its hearts starts to pump blood. This means that...
Now, I am not happy with embryo research or the morning after pill. I don’t see it as murder though it sets precedents that are dangerously close and likely to be over-stepped! But I also don’t want to overstep what the word of God says.
It’s a few years later, 2009, and I just read some articles passionately opposing embryonic stem cell research because it was the destruction of human life. I can just imagine how those people will hate me for seeming to give such researchers an excuse to proceed. I feel for their position, but please read on. My position is what the Bible tells us. I’ve seen people make that assertion and in fact have been perverting the Bible by focusing too narrowly, usually on Old Testament law scriptures. Perhaps that is what you feel, but look at what I have said and then find a better Biblical precedent for your position before letting such hatred creep in.
Now if you want to stop embryonic research then it seems that technically this will be of no benefit unless they first clone the intended recipient of the stem cells. Now I’m dead against cloning and can find no Biblical support. That is a better front to fight on. Further, we should also consider fighting on the front of harvesting a woman’s eggs. Harvesting is not a transplant. It’s not taking a renewable resource like blood. Researchers will justify the use of left-over embryos from IVF programs, but that is not where they plan to leave it. The ends do not justify the means.
I know exactly what you feel like. Let me argue your side for a moment...
Sure the Bible has these parables but under a microscope I can see that sperm embed itself inside the egg. You can see it and measure it – it’s deterministic. After that, the embryo starts to divide and grow and there is no clear point at which you (meaning man), can say there, that’s when life starts. Yes, the embryo does move through several different environments, the vagina, inside the womb, embedded within the womb, then in an embryonic sack and finally, into the outside world. But although the environment changes, the embryo just keeps on growing – one continuous life.
OK, some questions. As soon as the sperm gets into the egg, a chemical change causes the egg’s surface to block entry to any other sperm. Is that the moment of new life? Then the sperm’s chromosomes and egg’s chromosomes merge. Is that the moment of new life? Then some more changes and the egg divides into two cells. Is that the moment of new life?
There are two issues here...
Placing the emphasis on conception is expressing a desire to understand and be in control of the process. This is the battle between man’s way and God’s way. Many other articles on this site affirm that the life that God sees is life in the spirit and this is something different.
Can you see how emphasising the exact instant that various chemical interchanges occur as the moment of new life, tends to fall into the trap of implying that all the subsequent life is just one big chemical reaction. So what’s the big deal then if someone is murdered – it’s just a chemical reaction. Ultimately, this is what evolution reduces life to, and I’m totally against that!
Remember the seed? First it’s pollinated; then it grows, dries out, and falls to the ground where it remains unchanged until it rains. It lays there dormant. As water soaks into the seed it germinates. After that you can decide when to call it a new plant. Is it the root or the stem appearing, or the stem drawing energy from the sun rather than the seed? The point is, that from the moment of pollination the seed held the potential for a new plant, but the potential remained dormant until germination.
Another example. How many times might you read a passage of text, especially from the Bible, and then suddenly, in a moment of revelation, you see what it really means. The life that is in the words is suddenly in you. The potential of that revelation lay dormant in the text until the right time. Isn’t that God’s way?
In the same way, from the moment of conception, the potential for life is present but dormant in the embryo until the right time. So it’s OK to value the moment of conception, the joining together, as a key step to new life, but it is not yet a new life.
At the end of this article I add some more background to this concept of dormancy.
The preceding sections dealt with the radical issue I have raised in regard to conception. It shows that scriptural principles are reflected in the very origin of our life. This section is referenced elsewhere and was made into the article “God’s Anatomy”.
Having introduced this new word I had better establish Biblical precedence for it. You won’t find “dormant” as such in any translation, but let’s look at its synonyms: latent, sleeping, hidden, resting, or inactive. These concepts abound...
So again, at least as God sees it, many things are established or present in some way but wait until the time is right before we see their fullness. It applies to eternal life as well as new life, and even to Jesus’ victory over Satan which was won at the Cross but we do not yet see its fullness. But let me leave you with this example...
Let’s review things...
I felt I was finished, but my attention kept coming back to the moment of salvation. Here are just some of many powerful terms used to describe the life changing transition that occurs...
These spoke powerfully of a new life. But wait, haven’t I just demonstrated that life, as God sees it, started in the womb? Well, that life is a slave to sin and destined to judgement and hell, but at the moment of salvation it turns off the highway to hell, onto the narrow path to life (Matthew 7:13-14). Yes, that’s it, the life that started in the womb is actually being redirected; it’s just a turning point in our life.
Well, try as I did, I could not convince myself that salvation was a mere turning point or a clean-up, as if something good still lay under a grubby exterior. You see, if I view salvation as just a turning point in my existing life then all those powerful statements are just colourful metaphors merely to emphasise the importance of this turning point. But all my experience in these articles over several years, and the witness of the Holy Spirit, is that the things that often appear symbolic to us are actually the way God sees it. And God sees salvation as the end, washing away, death, of the old life and the beginning of a new life. And if that is how God sees it then that is what it is!
If you still want to see salvation as a change, a total make-over, of your existing life then you can still get to heaven, but I think you are dramatically under-selling what Jesus did for you on the Cross. I know that it just feels like a change, and sometimes it does not even seem that obvious to us at first, but God sees us as new. Perhaps you have always seen it this way. Perhaps I’m getting excited because I just figured this out driving home from work tonight!
In regard to life starting in the womb, after conception, this powerfully shows how God sees our new life in Christ starting not as we would, and should make it easy for you to accept life, as God sees it, starting after conception.
I again felt this was finished. Then I decided to add some clarification as to why certain references in the Bible to birth should not be taken to imply that life starts at birth. At the time I was not even conscious that someone might try to use this to justify abortion. I began this article only thinking about life starting at conception or a couple of weeks later. But I had some spare time, and that is very rare, and I came across the following article that had been in a CMI Info update I received a couple of months earlier, and never read because I was busy. It was about some extreme views on abortion that are being promoted. I’m sure it was in the Lord’s timing. Maybe you shouldn’t even read it. I was grieved for days.
Why bother expounding the Bible when such horrors go on and some nominal Christians even support it. It was obvious that unbelievers will find some excuse to justify whatever they want – but a believer?
Modern science affirms that the baby in the womb is not part of the mother, though dependent on her for nutrient. And after birth it is equally dependant. Why can we betray this life entrusted to us just because it is still in the womb? Ultra-sounds and the like enable us to see the child while still in the womb. Most mothers, my wife included, were quite conscious of this new independent life within them during the pregnancy. Even birth is initiated by the baby releasing various chemical triggers – it’s not initiated by the mother’s body.
Where do we teach responsibility, because that is what the law of love is all about – not your rights? So many couples are desperate to adopt. I have heard accounts of women later in life totally distraught because they had an abortion and now realise what they did and regret it bitterly. Why does counselling of women and girls who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy limit itself to possible medical side-effects and not the life impact? Why is the baby made the victim? Why does our health-benefits contribute towards the cost? I would wish that no doctor, sworn to preserving life, could be found in this nation to perform the procedure. Why do people use the small percentage of cases like rape, or when the mother’s life is threatened, to justify the vast majority of convenience abortions?
As grieved as I am, and desiring all the above measures to support girls, women, in distress, I cannot find it in me to use legislation to enforce my, and God’s, desire. The law never solves problems – only knowing God’s grace and forgiveness can transform a heart.