Designer Made

Centuries before, we could actually see the unborn baby sucking on its thumb and playing in the womb and responding to sounds as well as painful stimuli.

Centuries before medical technology would discover that a preborn baby is emitting brain waves almost identical to the adult brain waves when it's just turning 39 days old. David says, You O God, we're at work, weaving me together. How does life originate? When did your life begin? Are you the end product of millions of years of evolution? In other words, are you essentially here by random chance? Or is there a more intentional explanation? Are you the creation of a loving God?

Well, the Bible has clear answers to all these questions. And that's our theme today, here on Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen Davey is your Bible teacher for this daily program. Today, Stephen takes you to Psalm 139 verse 15 with an important message for our culture.

This message is called Designer Made. One of the editors of an evangelical magazine recently interviewed Peter Singer. Dr. Singer is a philosopher of bioethics and has been called one of the most influential philosophers in our generation. Bioethics is a field of study that is now literally saturated with an evolutionary worldview and thereby nearly devoid of any kind of ethics based upon a Judeo-Christian perspective. Which makes it, to me, even more ironic that this philosopher is the son of Austrian Jews, yet he has openly abandoned the Old Testament's description and revelation of a creator God.

You may recognize his name. He's caused quite a bit of controversy with his views, views that are, by the way, now more and more becoming acceptable if not appreciated. He's gone on record, and he isn't alone, by the way, that since we're really nothing more than highly evolved animals, it is now morally acceptable for a baby to be put to death within 30 days of its birth, completely left to the will of the parent or guardian. Which if you know your church history, you remember in Rome, that was acceptable. They could leave the child they didn't want on the front porch. Animals, of course, abandon their young, kill them if they want to, so why not humans? Dr. Singer further said that doctors and parents should actually be allowed to kill one-year-olds that evidenced any kind of mental or physical disability. He also stated in this interview that killing children specifically to harvest their organs for the benefit of older physically ill children is morally acceptable.

And I quote him, they are not doing anything wrong in itself. Now, at this point, you probably along with me would agree with the journalist who said if Peter Singer is the most influential bioethical philosopher alive, we're all in a lot of trouble. Now, if that isn't strange enough, Peter Singer doesn't just teach at Princeton University. He heads up the Division of Bioethics at Princeton and was awarded just a few years ago the honored position as head of Princeton's Center for Human Values. This is one of our country's leaders and policy influencers on issues relative to sex discrimination, animal welfare, foreign aid, and abortion. Imagine somebody like this in charge of the Center for Human Values when in reality has little regard for any value of human life, yet he gets appointed to that.

It's like appointing a wolf as a leader of the henhouse. Time Magazine named him to its list of 100 most influential people. In June of 2012, he was awarded by his home country of Australia for his work in philosophy and bioethics. I say all of that to give you the background to ultimately get to this core issue of his philosophical perspective that leads him to such bizarre conclusions, which really aren't that bizarre based upon his philosophical presupposition. He made it clear in one interview, and he said, and I quote him, we can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation made in the image of God and singled out from all other animals, end quote.

That really says it all, doesn't it? In other words, let's abandon the biblical declaration of origins and the concept of a caring, dedicated, creative, personal God and his designer creation. And if you do, and this professor is proof, you will be led to logically conclude that humans are really animals, in fact, we're really just crowding the planet like any other animal if a parent wants to feed them to their siblings or abandon them in the wild. There really isn't anything morally wrong in any of that, and that's ultimately because God had nothing to do with their creation anyway.

It's ironic to me to consider the fact that this is a son of Jewish immigrants who had narrowly escaped Hitler's program, who himself had traveled, as you know, his story deep and long into the dark perversions of evolutionary logic and the survival of the fittest. We're just animals, and God had nothing to do with it. God has nothing to do with us. Not so, says David, the king of Israel. In fact, without apology, David writes, God had everything to do with us. In fact, God had everything to do with everything about us, all of it. David is obviously going to sing from a different sheet of music as he composes one of his most famous songs I never thought we'd spend four sessions in this psalm, Psalm 139. It's arrested our attention now for several weeks.

Go to there. Go to that psalm, Psalm 139. If this is your first time with us in this psalm, David is taking us to extol the glory of an omniscient God and omnipresent God and omnipotent God. And in order to teach us of his omnipotence, he's not just showing us the greatness of creation out there. He's showing us the greatness of his creation in the womb. So he takes us not into the delivery room of a newborn. He takes us into the womb via divine inspiration to see the beginning of the beginning of a person's life.

Notice how he writes just for the sake of a quick review back in verse 13. For you, he sings to God, formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. David pictures God at the weaver's shuttle choosing his colors and his thread and weaving away at us. Verse 14, I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well.

Remember, fearfully could be rendered amazingly and wonderfully could be translated uniquely. The next verse in the song, verse 15, he says, My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret. Now we'll slow it down here. We pick it up here where we left off. Every term referred to as our frame, as you would imagine, is referring to our bony substance or skeleton.

You could render it. In other words, God was not separate from the development of our skeletal structure. He was personally involved in choosing what that would be like. Further, we're intricately woven. You could translate that embroidered in the depths of the earth. The depths of the earth is a metaphor for the secret recesses of the womb. So with what we just looked at, just that amount of revelation is startling. Centuries before sonograms would show us a beating heart in a baby's body that would fit in the palm of your hand at nine weeks old.

You can see it beating. Centuries before we could observe the division of cells so rapidly that if a preborn baby didn't slow down in its development at the right time. In fact, by the time it is born, had it not slowed down, it would weigh more than a million pounds. Centuries before, we could actually see the unborn baby sucking on its thumb and playing in the womb and responding to sounds as well as painful stimuli.

Centuries before medical technology would discover that a preborn baby is emitting brain waves almost identical to the adult brain waves when it's just turning 39 days old. David says, you, oh God, were at work weaving me together from the very moment Mr. Sperm met Mrs.

Egg. I'm whittling this down so you can repeat it to your fifth grader later on if you want. And those cells began to divide. Now, is it life then? David would say life has thus begun and God is already involved. In fact, in an even stronger case, the next verse delivers to us this truth.

Look at verse 16. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. Unformed substance. Now, David, this is wonderful as it relates to inspiration, he's choosing a term that has more meaning to us because of what we know than he could have ever conceived. He's using a term translated unformed substance. In the Hebrew text, it's one word. It's a word that wouldn't have been able to have been chosen in his day.

It didn't exist. But the word now that best translates that term is the word embryo. Substance under formation in the womb. Human life being formed, not yet perfected, but living, developing, destined, that's what he's communicating here, we would use the word embryo. In fact, if you're careful to connect this phrase with the preceding phrase we just read, David is saying that God is weaving, intricately weaving our embryo.

Now, obviously, medical science is going to leave God out of the equation as they crusade for evolution. A universe without a creator, certainly a womb without a creator. But they have at least caught up with David's revelation here that an embryo is developing according to an intricate pattern, embroidered growth. In fact, the same term for intricately woven, your translation might read skillfully wrought.

It's the same Hebrew term used in Exodus where Moses referred to the sewing of curtains that would be used in the tabernacle as they would be crafted, sewn, put together, woven. David said then, in effect, that's it, we are growing in the womb according to some preexisting pattern, some preexisting information. A pattern uniquely created because your pattern is different than mine and everybody else in this room. One author wrote about this pattern, we happen to know it now as DNA. For years, scientists thought that many of these bits of DNA were useless. In fact, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, called this junk DNA. In other words, it had no purpose. So what do you do with that?

You put it in the attic, right? No purpose. So in the early 2000s, scientists still believed that as much as 97% of human DNA had no apparent function. But in September of 2012, a team of 440 scientists from 32 labs around the world collectively recorded startling discovery. As these scientists delved further than ever, they discovered a complex system that controls genes. In just the past two years, they have determined that 80% of this junk DNA isn't junk after all.

It is actually active and serves a purpose in controlling how cells, organs, and other tissues behave. They've given junk DNA another title, it's now called hidden treasure. That's great, isn't it? Where did this information about how you would be made, what that pattern would be, coated in information in trillions of little bits and pieces, so that you would become what you would become, you would look like the way you look, you would like certain things, you would like this kind of food, normally covered with chocolate, or you would like salad. I mean, what makes the difference other than just good, good trading? What's good, what's bad? What you like, what you don't like, what appeals to you, what doesn't appeal to you? What you would end up doing, what you would never want to do, how you could best glorify God, your creator, and a billion other things about you, designer-made you. Where did that information originate that came coated to your DNA through which you were embroidered according to this pattern and design?

Who designed the pattern? Where did the information come from? Well, David answered that too, by the way, without having a clue about DNA. Notice the next phrase, verse 16 again. Your eyes saw my unformed substance, note this, in your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. What he's saying is that the information about your life and the complexity about your makeup, even the length of your life, is already recorded in the book of your creator God. The information's there, this omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, your designer. So David then goes on in verse 17 and he says, he says, how precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them.

If I could count them, they are more than the sand I awake and I'm still with you. In other words, the complexity of the pattern must mean, logically then, that you, O God, had very complex thoughts about me. If I had been designed by this complex pattern, that meant that you designed in complexity what you wanted for me to be. And to think that you thought about me, he says, that's precious.

To think that you had those thoughts about me, personally, individually, and then I awake to my daily life, and you've designed that too, and the life to come, you've designed that too. That's precious truth. That'll lead you to worship. To reject this knowledge, to abandon God's revelation of God's design of human life, is to then embrace meaninglessness and tragedy and death. Probably no better illustration of that than the abandonment of Psalm 139, and the Supreme Court ruling in 1973 we know as Roe v. Wade, which endorsed abortion. Scripture was no longer allowed to be weighed in as credible evidence.

You consider the fact that in 1973 they still hadn't caught up to the prenatal revelation we just looked at. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun argued for the woman's right to remove fetal tissue from her body if she chose, it was her right to privacy. In other words, a woman had the right to remove the fetus as one might remove an appendix or a gallbladder. It is a non-person, a non-living human being, a lump of non-sentient matter, tissue. However, and rather tragically when you evaluate it now, decades later, Justice Blackmun admitted in the majority opinion that determining when life began was, and I quote, a difficult question to resolve, end quote.

And then he went on to argue for abortion. A difficult question to resolve. We're not sure if it's human life or not.

I mean, it could be, but we're not sure. One author put Blackmun's illogical reasoning into a simple illustration. What would he do if a hunter stood before him guilty of shooting a man to death while out hunting deer? This hunter kills another man instead of a deer, and the hunter's argument is, I saw movement in the bushes. I didn't know if it was a human being or a deer, and even though I was unable to resolve the difficult question, I pulled the trigger anyway. Any judge would argue back, well, shouldn't you have waited until you knew for sure?

Wouldn't you have gone the extra mile? Or certainly you wouldn't pull the trigger, would you? See, the truth is, even without David's description in Psalm 139, what we have learned in the last 40 years about life in the womb from medical science alone should put every abortionist out of business and change everybody's mind and reverse the Supreme Court decision. We know now it is a thinking, feeling, developing human being worthy of every extra precaution and protection. But it's become a moral issue, and the Bible certainly can't weigh in either. But by the way, the changed mind that comes on the heels of the data that we've learned in the last few decades has been compelling. That happened to a doctor by the name of Bernard Nathanson when science eventually caught up with Scripture.

It changed his life. Dr. Nathanson, after abortion was legalized in 1973, became the director of the Center for Reproductive Health. It's always ironic how they use positive terms to talk about basically aborting babies. So he took over as the director for the Center for Reproductive Health, which he even said was the largest abortion clinic in the Western world. Nathanson said, and I quote him, I knew every facet of abortion.

I helped nurture the creature in its infancy by feeding it great amounts of blood and money. But in 1974, in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Nathanson, this article said, expressed his growing uneasiness. He said, I'm already deeply troubled by my increasing uncertainty because I have presided over 60,000 deaths. There is no longer serious doubt, however, in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy. Now, his uncertainty only intensified with the invention of something called ultrasound technology that would be used in examining rooms. The ability to literally see the baby in the womb.

And he did. Nathanson said in an interview, and I quote, For the first time, we could really see the human fetus. Notice his language will change. We could measure it. We could observe it. We could watch it.

We could bond with it and love it. I changed my mind because this new scientific data persuaded me that we could no longer indiscriminately continue to kill what was now demonstrably a human being. He went from fetus to human being because of what he saw. The journalist interviewing him said this, Now this insight in his heart about the humanity of the unborn child had nothing to do with the Bible or religion. As a matter of fact, at the time he made these comments and changed his mind, he considered himself a Jewish atheist, but he stopped performing abortions and eventually went on to crusade for the pro-life movement because of what he'd seen inside the womb from the earliest weeks. And I've got to tell you this, because this is only 36 months old, but shortly before his death, just 36 months ago, at the age of 84, this Jewish atheist became a Christian. And when asked why he converted to the religion of Christianity and not some other religion, he said, and I quote, Because no other religion offers forgiveness.

Isn't that a wonderful thing about our religion? Because it's related to a person who became human to die, who rose again so that we could be forgiven. If you have had an abortion performed, that word works for you too. Forgiven. You can be forgiven. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from every sin. What is confessed, repented of, any sin, any crime, any misdeed, is taken away, though there may be lasting consequences and memories, but the sin is cleansed and you are forgiven.

By the way, I loved his language change. It isn't just a fetus. If you go online, as I did, to check out the Merrim dictionary definition of a fetus, here it is. Quote, An unborn or unhatched vertebrate, especially after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind. In other words, you can use the word fetus for any animal you like. But you are not carrying in your womb an animal.

You are carrying a human being, designer made. Let me close with a paraphrase of these verses. I found them in a commentary on the Psalms that I've enjoyed studying. For you, God, and none other, originated my vital organs. You knitted me together in the womb of my mother. My skeleton and my bones were not hidden from you when I was made in that concealed place of protection.

When my veins and arteries were embroidered together like fine needlepoint. Your eyes watched over me when I was just an embryo. And in your book, the days I should experience were all described and recorded.

The kind of days that would shape me into the person you want me to be. Even before I was born. How priceless and mighty and vast and numerous are your thoughts of me, oh God.

Should I attempt to count them, they would outnumber the sand on the seashore. And your plan isn't limited just to this life. Your plan for me includes the life to come. Throughout all of eternity, that also has been planned. By you.

For me. No wonder David can lead us in this song in the deeper worship of our omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God. Because of the importance of this message, Stephen has made this sermon into a booklet. Just like the sermon, this booklet is entitled Designer Made.

You'll find Designer Made in the resource section of our website. Or we can give you information when you call us today. This is an important resource, so call today at 866-48-BIBLE for information. We have one more message in this series, and that'll be next time. So come back for more wisdom for the heart. ...