Why Every Human Life Matters to God
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There is something very important that we need to understand if we are going to deal biblically with the culture in which we are living.
What is the value of human life?
Where does the value of a human being come from?
Our culture has many different answers to that question. Some people determine the value of a person by their usefulness. Others determine it by their intelligence, their physical abilities, their age, their health, or what they can contribute to society.
But that is not how God sees human life.
The Bible gives us an entirely different foundation.
Human life has value because God created human life.
God is the giver of life.
And when we understand that, it changes the way we look at every human being.
God Is the One Who Gives Life
We have to go back to the beginning.
Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. And then God created mankind.
He didn’t create us as an accident.
He didn’t create us as a higher form of animal life that somehow evolved through a long process of natural selection.
God intentionally created mankind in His own image.
Genesis 1:26-27 says:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…'”
“So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
That is foundational.
We are created in the image of Almighty God.
That means our worth does not come from what we can do, how healthy we are, how much money we make, or whether we are young or old.
Our worth comes from the fact that God created us.
And that means every human being has value.
Life in the Womb Is Not an Accident
This is especially important when we talk about life in the womb.
Psalm 139:13 says:
“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb.”
David understood something that our culture desperately needs to recover.
There is life in the womb because God put life in the womb.
Life is not accidental.
There may be circumstances surrounding a person’s conception that human beings would call accidental or tragic. But that does not make the person an accident in the mind of God.
I gave the illustration in my teaching of Ethel Waters.
Her mother had been raped and became pregnant as a result. She could have looked at that pregnancy and said, “This child is the result of something terrible, therefore this child’s life has no value.”
But she didn’t.
She gave birth to that little girl.
That little girl grew up to become a great Broadway star. And later, when Billy Graham came to New York, she attended one of his crusades, gave her life to Jesus Christ, left Broadway, and became a singer with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
The child was not an accident in God’s eyes.
God had a purpose for that life.
And that’s true of every human being.
God Knows Us Before We Are Born
Psalm 139 goes on to describe how God knows us, He knows our days, He knows our lives, He knows us before we are ever born.
And Jeremiah 1 gives us another powerful picture of this.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.”
Think about that.
Before Jeremiah was formed in the womb, God knew him.
Before he was born, God had a purpose for his life.
God had a destiny for him.
And I believe that is something we need to understand about ourselves and about every other human being.
God knows us.
God formed us.
God has a purpose for us.
He has value and worth assigned to our lives because He is our Creator.
That is why I cannot accept the idea that some human beings are more valuable than others.
But It Doesn’t Stop at the Womb
If we are going to say that human life has value because God created us, then we have to be consistent.
That value doesn’t disappear when the child is born, someone gets old, becomes sick, or can no longer work.
Human value is not based upon human usefulness.
I’ve watched our society increasingly measure people by what they can produce.
But that’s not the biblical standard.
I believe we need to honor the elderly because they have wisdom and experience that we desperately need.
Many of us are standing on the shoulders of people who came before us.
They taught us.
They sacrificed for us.
They developed skills and knowledge that have been passed down to us.
We should honor, respect, and value them.
Their value didn’t disappear because they got older.
And we must also give honor and value to people with disabilities.
Whether someone became disabled through an accident, through sickness, or whether they were born with a disability, their value hasn’t changed.
Why?
Because God created them.
They are still made in His image.
They are still precious to God.
They still have worth and value.
What Does This Mean for Us?
This is how we deal with what I have called the “death culture.”
We don’t begin with the culture. We begin with Scripture. We begin with the Creator.
- God created mankind in His image.
- God formed us in the womb.
- God knows us before we are born.
- God has purpose and destiny for our lives.
And because God created us, every human being has worth and value.
From the womb throughout all of life.
That means the unborn child, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the one who cannot care for themselves, and the one who feels forgotten – they all have value.
And you have value.
This is the biblical perspective of human life.
And I pray that we will never lose sight of it.
Because when we lose sight of the value of human life, we lose sight of something fundamental about the character of the God who created us.
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