The Image of God: A Biblical Case for the Sanctity of Life

AMAC Magazine Exclusive

You don’t have to be religious to be against abortion. If you believe in human rights, you can see that these rights apply to all humans, including those at the earliest stages of life.

According to our biology textbooks, from the first moment of conception, a unique human being with its own DNA is present. An embryonic human being is no mere “clump of cells” any more than a fetus, infant, child, or adult is a “clump of cells.” These terms only designate at what particular stage of development a human being is.

But do we have to value the right to life? The increasingly secularized Western world is not so sure anymore. Even those who defend human rights are less sure about when those rights begin.

That’s why, even if science and reason can still produce a strong argument for the right to life, it is helpful for Christians to examine what God teaches us about that right in Scripture. There we find that, no matter how big or small, young or old, human life has “sanctity” or holiness.

Created in the Image of God

While all created things bear their creator’s stamp, human beings bear it uniquely. Genesis 1’s creation account repeats after each day that what God has made is “good”—from light and dark to seed-bearing trees, from sun and moon to sea monsters, birds, and cattle.

But only after the sixth-day creation of man, “in His own image, in the image of God . . . male and female,” do we read that God looks on his work and finds it “very good” (Gen. 1:27, 31).

Mankind—male and female—is the crown of creation. Made in God’s image, we are his representatives, commanded to “be fruitful and multiply” and steward all creation. And, as Genesis 2 depicts, God created and set us up in a garden home as a father does his own children. Luke’s genealogy of Christ goes back ultimately to “Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38).

Images of God Protected in Law

Though the Bible tells us that even innocent animals can be killed for our use, as God’s special images, men cannot.

God’s covenant with Noah after the flood clarifies that in the introduction of capital punishment: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). Murder is wrong not because it breaks a social contract, but because it effaces God’s visible image.

Children are images, too. The Law given to Moses specifies particularly that the children of Israel shall not kill their children in sacrifice as surrounding pagans do: “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). Again, the killing of a human child profanes the name of God.

The Little Prophets, Saints, and the God-Man

We can learn from more than just legal codes when we inquire about the Biblical case for the sanctity of life. In Psalm 139, David praises God for his own being “fearfully and wonderfully made” even before he was born:

For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb. (v. 13)

Lest we think that is hyperbole, the Scriptures give us a series of titanic figures introduced as infants—or even earlier. The nation of Israel takes its name from Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, whose birth while grabbing at his twin brother’s heel foreshadows his becoming the one who wrestles with God—what his new name, “Israel,” means.

The lawgiver Moses’ origin story begins as a child saved from slaughter after his birth by two clever Hebrew midwives. His importance is signaled in Hebrew by the “basket” in which he is put to float down the Nile. In Hebrew, it’s the same word for Noah’s boat—teva, or “ark.”

The whole of Israel, it would seem, rides in this little boat of bulrushes and pitch, just as the whole of humanity did in Noah’s ship of gopher wood.

Many more children in the Old Testament are marked out by miraculous pregnancies and callings as children—Samson, Samuel, and even Jeremiah. But the supreme witness to the sanctity of life is the greatest of the prophets and the One to whom he points.

Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel, who tells her the Holy Spirit will come upon her and cause her to conceive a son to be named Jesus, who “will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

Afterward, she goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, also pregnant under miraculous circumstances. The famous greeting, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” is explained by Elizabeth as due to her wonder that “the mother of my Lord” should come to her.

Elizabeth’s recognition, she says, is because, “when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1: 42, 44).

Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist, is fearfully and wonderfully made to know even in the womb when the Son of God, the true “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) after whom all humanity is made, is present—also in the womb!

It is the perfect lesson for us. No mere clump of cells, this prophet cries out even in his mother’s womb, preparing the way for the Savior, whose blessedness John detects even in Jesus’ mother’s voice.

The Holy One of God and his forerunner are identified as holy in the womb so we might know the holiness of every human life, at whatever stage.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a senior contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.