13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
This psalm began with David celebrating God’s total understanding of him, as well as, his every thought and word and deed. Here, David focuses on God’s knowledge of him from the time God made him in his mother’s womb. Some ethicists distinguish between a human person and a human being and claim that while an unborn baby is a human being, they’re not yet a human person entitled to human rights, because they don’t have the same mental capacities as older humans. But the Bible defines our humanness not in terms of our mental capacities, but in terms of our relationship with God, the one who makes us in his image.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
We see God’s attention to us from the moment of his conception and how God already saw the whole of our lives even before conception. God makes each of us fearfully and wonderfully from the first, and he loves us from our embryonic stage.
