Why Did You Bring Me Out of the Womb?
Notes
Transcript
This morning’s Scripture lesson is just one verse, in fact, it is just the first half of one verse! Turn with me to Job 10:18:
“Why did you bring me out from the womb?
Would that I had died before any eye had seen me
If you recall, in last week’s sermon, I expounded upon the truth taught to us in Scripture that our days are numbered by God before the foundations of this world. This of course, raises questions in many people’s minds. For example, some ask, “If God numbers our days, why does He ordain some to die in childhood or infancy?” At the other end of the spectrum, some ask, "If God ordains the number of our days, why does He ordain some of the elderly to linger so long in what appears to us as useless suffering?” We have all struggled with these questions, so it is without a doubt that the question Job asks is indeed one of life’s most important questions. So where do we begin? We must begin at the beginning!
You Are God’s Masterpiece
You Are God’s Masterpiece
I want you to notice that I am personalizing the main points of this sermon. The context of our Scripture lesson from Job is one of personal despair. The more I worked and prayed over this sermon, the more I felt called by God to personalize it to the individual needs of my hearers. I realize that some of you are hurting in the way Job hurt—you are despairing for life itself.
With that said, I want you to realize everything Scripture says about you, is true of others. You and everyone you meet are masterpieces created by the hand of God! We find this truth most powerfully and clearly taught to us in Psalm 139.
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
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 is being taught in these verses goes against everything our modern, materialistic, secular society is teaching us. For example: Everyone my age and under, was subjected to state mandated indoctrination call “Sex Education.” The way reproduction is taught in our public schools (and sadly in many Christian schools), is a gross misunderstanding of reality. Modern materialism that purposely takes God out of the picture. Reproduction is seen in purely a naturalistic, mechanical way.
Now while it is true that God uses secondary causes to accomplish His will, He is always the first cause. It is God that caused your life to begin within your mother’s womb. In fact, it is God that is causing you and everything else to exist this very moment. Preaching before the philosophers of Athens, Paul said this:
for
“ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
“ ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
You are not just the offspring of your biological parents, you are the offspring of God! This gives all life, but especially human life great value. Moreover, that life began, according to Psalm 139, at the moment of conception! There is a great debate going on in our nation as to when human life begins, there should be no debate within the church! Human life begins at conception!
So why did God bring you out of the womb? It is because you are His masterpiece! Other people may not value you, but God does!
This alone should move us from despair to hope, but there is more, you are one of God’s image-bearers!
You Are God’s Imagine-bearer
You Are God’s Imagine-bearer
In the creation story found in Genesis, God has created the heavens and the earth, as well as all the plants and animals, then He says this:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
There has been much confusion over what it means to be made in the image of God, but there shouldn’t be. The text before us is very clear, to be an image bearer is to be made in the likeness of God and to exercise His dominion. In the ancient world, there would have not been any confusion as to what this means, it means we are God’s royal vice-regents, who are to represent Him and exercise power and dominion on His behalf.
You probably didn’t realize you were of noble blood, but you are! More than that, you don’t serve some petty king, you serve the King of kings!
This is why murder is such a serious crime. On the horizontal level, it robs other people of their most precious possession—their life! On the vertical level, it is an attack on God’s authority and honor. To kill a king’s regent is to invite his wrath! This is also why abortion is THE defining issue of our day. A society that legalizes and celebrates that wholesale murder of its weakest and most innocent and members is a society soon to be destroyed by God’s wrath!
Please understand this: abortion is not primarily a political issue, but a REALITY issue! To see yourself or anyone else as less that an image-bearer of God, is to live in a fantasy world of your own creation. It is to be out of touch with reality. This was Paul’s point in Romans 1. There he writes:
Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
So why did God bring you out of the womb? He brought you out of the womb to be His image-bearer! You have value and dignity beyond your wildest imagination! You also have purpose.
You Have a Purpose
You Have a Purpose
As I pointed out earlier, as image-bearers we are created to be God’s vice-regents on this earth. This implies that we have a job to do, we have a purpose!
Too many people live boring, directionless lives because they do not believe their life has any purpose. Others find meaning because they have adopted some “cause”, but at the end of their lives, they discover their lives were indeed meaningless, this because the “cause” they devoted their lives was not the cause God had created them for. They were like the proverbial square peg trying to fit into the round hole! No wonder so many people such frustration and futility!
What a glorious thing the Gospel is, it aligns our lives with reality once again. In moves us from self-deception to divine illumination! In Romans 8:29-30, we read these glorious words:
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
This is not an isolated example, Paul speaks of our being recreated in the image of God in Romans 8:29, 1 Corinthians 11:7, 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Colossians 3:10.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, do not let the miseries of this life lead you to despair. As I was preparing this message, my mind kept returning to these words of David:
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
till the storms of destruction pass by.
I cry out to God Most High,
to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
Just like Job, David calling out in distress to God, but O, how different the tone of his cry was! David cried out, not in despair, but in faith. Faith in God’s steadfast love and mercy.
Many things in this life can seem to threaten, even destroy, God’s good purpose for His people. Things such as a miscarriage or early death of a child. Things such as birth defects or debilitating accidents. Things such as persecution or hardship. Things such as dementia or cancer. All these things and many more cause us to ask, “Why did you bring me out of the womb?” In all these things, David was confident that God would fulfill his purpose for him; are you?
You can be if you believe the Gospel. Paul writes:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Yes, my friends, God has numbered your days and when we and our household are numbered among the covenant people of God, we can be assured that God will fulfill His purpose for our lives!
Let us pray.