Table of Contents
Our middle child is expecting her first baby next month. Our house was in a turmoil last week preparing for a baby shower, which 29 women and girls attended. It was a fun celebration of a new life (or so I’m told; I was hiking).
She is at the stage of pregnancy that is enjoyable. She is over the morning sickness, but her belly is not so huge that normal functions are difficult, yet. Others can feel the baby move if they have their hand on her tummy, which is fun for her husband and her younger sisters. Over the next month that will lose its novelty as the size and weight of the child increases.
A few weeks ago, as she was describing some of her son’s movements, she commented that it was often difficult to fathom that “I have this other person inside me.”
Her comment got me thinking about the value of human life and the source of that value.
The nature of value
Everything that has value is given that worth by something outside itself. Gold only has value because men consider it worth more than other metals. The value of currency is determined by its usefulness in the marketplace. Ideas are valued by the same outside measure of usefulness.
Value is determined by someone who considers the valued thing worthy of special consideration. Your family photos are valuable to you, but not necessarily to me. I have an old toy monkey that I played with as a child, and for which my grandmother knitted a special outfit to please me. I would not trade that old toy for anything because my memories give it value. It has value only because it is invested with part of my life. That monkey and its clothes are worthless to anyone else.
The value of human life
We often say that human life is valuable in and of itself, that each human life is valuable and worthy of protection and esteem, just by nature of being a human life. I agree that all human life is worth saving, and every human life has inestimable value. But where does that value originate?
Like anything else of value, the value of human life must be established by something outside itself. Honestly, your and my opinions of the value of human life have little worth, because we are also human. It’s rather self-serving. There are a lot of different opinions about human value.
Men calculate values for a human life based on production and estimated medical costs. But these are arbitrary attempts to justify decisions that may effect lives. But can we really put a number on a human life? Are humans even qualified to do that? Where does our life’s value come from?
The original value of human life
Who gets to determine our value? It has to be someone who has full knowledge of how we are made, the chemicals involved in our existence, and the worth of our activities. But we must acknowledge that we are more than just physical entities, that there is an immaterial part of us that must also be included in the calculation. Most of man’s calculations are a measurement of productiveness, not the value of the immaterial mind or soul.
Only God can assign value to the human life, and he expressed that value in the Bible.
In the beginning, God said mankind would be made in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27), which gave us more value than the rest of His creation. He added another distinction to mankind’s value in Genesis 2:7 when He breathed into Adam and made him “a living soul”.
God later said human life was so valuable that only another human life could pay for it.
I will surely require accounting for your life’s blood. At the hand of every animal I will require it. At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man’s brother, I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man’s blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his own image. Genesis 9:5-6 WEB
This great value for human life is based on the fact that God made man in His own image. God is the only one who can evaluate human life, and it is measured by God’s own image.
When do lives matter?
What is the value of an unborn baby? The discussion surrounding the scourge of abortion often focuses on the “viability” of the human fetus. However, God, who is the One who declares our value, tells us that a human’s value begins in the womb.
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
Before you were born, I sanctified you.
I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5 WEB
David states that God formed his “inmost being” in his mother’s womb, and that God knew his days before they started (Psalm 139:13-16). That “inmost being” can be interpreted as our physical guts or our inner man, which is renewed each day (2 Corinthians 4:16).
Our inner man, our spirit, is the eternal, unseen part of a human. Our physical bodies are temporary (2 Corinthians 4:18), but He put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). It is the part of us that God values more than anything. And our eternal nature is there from the beginning, at conception. I explained it this way in our book, Families from the Beginning:
God …created male and female bodies to come together to produce a living soul. This is the only process in the universe that creates something eternal and through it mankind displays the image of the Creator. God is personal and desires to have relationships to express His love. He created Adam and Eve to love Him forever, and made them in a way that their union would create more living souls to love Him forever.
The eternal life of a human baby sets it apart from all other life on the earth. …I don’t pretend to understand what starts eternity in the physical seed shared by a human couple, but every time human sperm and egg join there is a miracle that adds infinite potential.**
Unborn babies have eternal significance to God, even when they doesn’t survive the pregnancy. Miscarriages are painfully tragic, and are a too-common indicator of our fallen world. But the murder of any unborn child is a travesty of justice, and those that promote or condone it must repent or face God’s judgment, because He values the unborn more than we can understand.
By His calling, in His strength,
Dean
The Families from the Beginning newsletter provides twice-monthly insights and ministry updates. Click here to sign up for this email newsletter. Previous newsletters are here.
**Dean and Lynn Wickert, Families from the Beginning (Harrison, Ohio: Families from the Beginning, 2014), 45-46.
