If our time in the womb as we develop is called by God a “knitting together,” a complex process that takes place over time, an intentional and careful and loving process by the very hand of God, then this truth will teach us something about the nature of the inverse as well. If time in the womb is being “knit together,” then the act of intentionally subverting, interrupting, or undoing that knitting is an act of destruction. It’s the deliberate sabotage of a personal, intentional, meaningful creative work.

The Miracle of Life

Anyone who has ever held a newborn child in their arms knows the feeling of being overwhelmed by the glory of the miracle of life. A new life, a human being made in the Creator’s image, is a miracle. Life is a miracle each and every time, a miracle in the fullest sense. It’s a work of divine agency, a beautiful and welcome act given from above, something more than the sum of mere material and biological processes. Anyone who has held a newborn child knows something divine is at work, something beyond our understanding. When we see the beginning of a life, we understand that God has worked a true miracle – He did this in his original breathing of the breath of life into the lungs of the first man, but He also reworks the same miracle each and every time He speaks another unique human soul into existence. When a human being is conceived, God weaves together spirit and matter, He inseparably intertwines the immortal soul with the bodily flesh in the womb of the mother. This union will never be broken, each of us is a body as much as a soul, and though the two will briefly separate, God has promised we will someday be reunited with our bodies for eternity.

This is the humbling mystery: that when God performs His favorite and most impressive miracle, the bringing forth of new life, He chooses to do it through us – specifically, through women. This is perhaps the greatest natural honor that God can bestow on humanity, that he works through sinful, broken humanity to bring forth the miracle of the creation of life. God works a miracle at every birth, every conception, and continues working the same miracle of life throughout each lifetime as He sustains us, causes our hearts to beat, fills our lungs with air, and keeps us from harm until our days have run out. God brings us forth and sustains us, and the unbelievable gift is that this miracle is performed through sinful and unworthy intermediaries: us.

Knitting with Parental Threads

Scripture tells us that God knits us together in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139). This means that our formation was an intentional, deliberate crafting. We’re handmade, not just a result of natural processes. God directly and intentionally shapes and molds each of us inside our mother. There is of course a sense in which all such biological processes are a direct result of God’s intentional hand – after all, it is He who causes the sun to set, the rain to fall, and the Earth to turn. But there is a sense in which this is even more true for human beings than it is for any other natural or biological process. We are God’s image bearers, His representative here in creation. We are unique in our honor and place among the created things. When God knits each of us together in our mother’s womb, He gives each of us unique abilities, traits, characteristics, and personalities. The mind-boggling part of this is that in His sovereign working of all things, God chooses not to create each individual human ex-nihilo, from nothing. Instead, He chooses to form us out of our parents, using traits and characteristics from the mother and father in the creation of the child. Each of us to a degree looks, acts, and thinks like our parents – sometimes, one more than the other. God knits us with the threads of our parents, both physical as well as spiritual, emotional, and mental. God doesn’t start with a blank slate and simply choose characteristics from a list, but instead crafts us by His hand with aspects of our parents. Even our first parents in the Garden of Eden weren’t created from nothing, but formed from dust and rib, from earth and from man. We are by nature creatures with origins.

This truth is an incredible blessing and a burden. Because we are sinners, when our children are formed out of us, some traits they may inherit will be sinful tendencies. The struggles, issues, and sins that plague our parents can plague us too. The Bible speaks to generational sin, and when the Bible talks about sin, it means sin – not “trauma.” 

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