Science can tell us amazing facts about life—what it's made of, how biological systems work together, and what people are like before birth. For instance . . .
• Your heart will beat more than 3.2 billion times over your lifetime.
• It began beating when you were 3 weeks and 1 day old
• Before you were born, your heart beat approximately 54 million times!1
But, while science can only speculate on life's origin, the Bible is definitive: Life is from God! In fact, John 5:26 says the Father "has life in Himself." He is, after all, "the living God" (1 Timothy 4:10). All life—eternal and physical—is from Him and of Him. We celebrate life in all its forms because it is His gift.
1. "Interactive Prenatal development Timeline," The Endowment for Human Development, www.ehd.org/science_main, accessed 12/2/2016.
What's special about human life? Why do we talk about it as being "sacred"?
Again, science can tell us amazing things about the human being, but only guess about our significance. Aside from God's Word, there's little to go on other than all the impressive things we can do that other creatures cannot.
How does the Bible help? In Genesis 1, God uses one pattern of speech to describe the creation of plant, bird, and animal life:
The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
....God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
...God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
He used a different pattern to describe the creation of mankind:
God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." . . . God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. . . . God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.
He gave man dominion over the other forms of life and later continued the “image of God” pattern when describing procreation:
In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created. When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. (Genesis 5:1-3)
Human beings beget other human beings – not after their kind, but in the image. Specialness is passed from one generation to the next.
