Church Resources
God at the Outer Limits of Life
Dr. Stan Mast
Psalm 139:13-18
I have chosen Psalm 139 for our reflection on this Right to Life Sunday because of its
pro-God focus. So much of the battle surrounding abortion and other termination of life issues has been shaped by the terms, “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Psalm 139 is pro-God. Those words about being fearfully and wonderfully made have often been quoted by pro-life people, but it is really about God, about God at the outer limits of life. And that has a lot to say about this whole business of abortion and related “life issues.”
“You hem me in—behind and before,” like bookends, like parentheses, or, better, like a fence or a wall surrounding our lives. But not a fence or a wall. That’s too impersonal. God is not there as an impersonal force or a disinterested observer. “You have laid your hand upon me.” That might refer to God’s hand of blessing laid gently upon our hearts, or God’s hand of supervision placed firmly upon our shoulder, or God’s hand of punishment pressing hard upon our soul, or God’s hand of protection shielding our lives from ultimate harm. The point is that God has laid his hand upon our lives in a personal way. He is in touch with us, always and everywhere.
God is there at the outer limits of life, both in terms of where and when. In lovely, haunting poetry, the Psalmist reminds us that no matter where you go in the universe, God is there. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” The Psalmist speaks there not as a terrible sinner who wants to flee from God’s judgment, but as a mere human who is overwhelmed by the awesomeness of God, the sheer Godness of God. Where can I go where I shall not encounter the touch of your hand upon me? He mentally flees to the vertical extremes of life—the heights of the heavens and the depths of the earth. And he flees to the horizontal extremes of life—the wings of the dawn (the east) and the far side of the sea (the west). But no matter where he goes in this universe, God is there. “Even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” God is there at the outer limits of the space in which we live.
Even if I try to hide in the darkness, God is there. Some scholars think that the Psalmist is thinking there of dark powers, of supernatural powers, of magic, like when Harry Potter and his friends pulled that magical cloak over themselves to become invisible. No matter what powers you may use, the very powers of darkness, or even the powers of science, or science fiction, God is there at the outer limits of life and his hand is upon you.
Thinking about the darkness makes the Psalmist think of the darkness of the womb and the other outer limits of life—not the “where,” but the “when.” Verse 15 says, “When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.” And not only did your eyes see me there at the beginning of my life, but your hand made me. The Psalmist continues his wonderful imagery of God’s hands to communicate how God was there at the outer limits of our life’s beginning. God knit and he wove my bones and my sinews and veins. He began with my unformed body, which means literally that time in my life when I was just a ball of cells, an unformed mass of molecules, undeveloped and undifferentiated, with nothing that would distinguish me as human, just a piece of matter, some would say. But “your eyes saw” me that way and your hands gradually, carefully knit and wove, one thread, one vein, one bone, one organ, one system at a time. And it was always me. At the very beginning of my life, at that outer limit of what science would call human life, you laid your hand upon me. Me.
Some of you have seen that incredible picture entitled “The Hand of Hope.” Dr. Joseph Bruner of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee was performing a very delicate and risky surgery on Julie Armas. She was pregnant, 21 weeks pregnant to be precise, and her baby, Samuel, had been diagnosed with spina bifida, a hole in his spine that would leave him physically and mentally disabled. He couldn’t be removed from the womb for surgery to repair the hole in his spine. But Dr. Bruner has developed a very complicated surgical procedure in which he removes the womb from the mother by C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby in utero. Dr. Bruner successfully completed the surgery, but before he could sew up the incision, the womb began to move, though no one was touching it. In a split second, a tiny hand, a 21-week-old hand reached up through the incision. When Dr. Bruner touched it, little Samuel, in a motion that recalls Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, tightly squeezed the doctor’s finger. I’ve seen the picture. That hand is not bigger than a match head, but it is firmly grasping that finger. An attending nurse asked what had happened. When the photographer explained, she said, “Oh, they do that all the time.” At the outer limits of life, God’s hand was upon that little one. And me. And you. And all of us.
That is also true for the other extreme of life, the outer limit of death. Even there, even in the shadow of death, God’s hand is upon us. Indeed, says verse 16, “all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Now that’s a mind-boggling thought. It raises all kinds of questions about God’s plan and human choice, predestination and free will, questions I don’t know how to answer. The Psalmist speaks for all of us when he says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.” That doesn’t mean such things are nonsense—impossible. It means that we are human, merely human, and God is God. And we ought to respond to such mysteries with the kind of hushed awe that leads the Psalmist to say in verse 17, “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.” And if I were to fall asleep pondering these mysteries, you would still be there when I awake. Your hand is still laid upon me.
So, mysterious as it is, all the days of my life, all the days ordained by God for me, were written in your book before one of them came to be. The day of my conception and the day of my death and all the days in between were ordained by God. What a thing it is then, what an awesome, godlike thing to interfere with the days God has ordained at the outer limits or the middle of life. Some of you have read the wonderful story passed along by our own Dr. Peter Tigchelaar, professor of biology at Calvin College. Last year, a young woman approached him before class. She asked if he still had the 3-month fetus encased in plastic that he used to show his classes at the appropriate time. He said he did and asked her how she knew about it and why she wanted to see it. She said that he had shown it to her mother a generation ago. Unknown to Dr. Tigchelaar, that young woman had been pregnant when she saw it. Confused and panicked, she had visited Planned Parenthood and was told about the “product of conception” and “the contents of the uterus” and was advised to have an abortion. But after viewing the 3-month fetus in Dr. Tigchelaar’s class with tiny fingers and facial features and liver and eyes, she realized that this was more than “the product of conception.” She decided not to have the abortion. And, said the young girl who wanted to see the fetus Dr. Tigchelaar had shown her mother, “I was that baby.” She is now living out the days ordained for her.
Now I know that this is a very complicated business, and not only for the theological and philosophical reasons I mentioned before. The fact is that the hand of God has put into the hands of human beings the right to take life in some circumstances. Romans 13, for example, talks about the power of government to wield the sword as an agent of God to bring punishment upon the wrongdoer. That has implications for such things as capital punishment and war. And there are other examples, extreme ones, of the necessity of taking life to save life. So, when you get down to the details of a particular situation, you need the wisdom of Solomon.
But the complexity of real life situations doesn’t change the fundamental truth of this text. It is God who gives life, and it is God who takes life. At the outer limits of life, we are treading where God rules. When we take life, even at its outer limits, in the earliest moments after conception or in the latest moments of terrible suffering, we are walking in God’s territory. It is holy ground, and we must take the shoes off our feet and proceed not with a passion for human freedom or with the best of humanitarian intentions or with the most advanced scientific precision or even with the authority God has given us, but with reverence and wonder and humility. Above all, we must be pro-God and let God be God, the giver and taker of life at the outer limits, the sustainer and savior of life always.
When I come to the end of all this, I find myself repeating the Psalmist’s last words. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” The way to everlasting life begins with such a humble prayer, acknowledging that I am as guilty as any of the people I might single out as enemies of God and life. And it comes to completion when we cast our sinful selves into the nail-pierced hand of the Author of Life saying, “Lord into your hands, I commit my life.” Then no matter where the way of life may take us, even to the outer limits of human experience, we can say with deep relief, “You hem me in—before and behind; you have laid your hand upon me.”