Timothy Keller - On Birth

Born to raise us from the earth;

Born to give us second birth.

HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING, CHARLES WESLEY

The Christian faith teaches that every person should experience two births. In ones first birth you are born into the natural world. Then, in what Charles Wesley calls our second birth, which Jesus himself describes as being born again (John 3:3), we are born into the kingdom of God and receive new spiritual life. The first birth is ours because God is our Creator; the second birth can be ours because God is also our Redeemer. The Lord is the author of both.

In light of this, we want to consider the spiritual issues surrounding both births. What does it mean to receive a new human life from God? What are the responsibilities of the family and the church to newborns? How can we help our children who are with us through the first birth come to experience the second birth?

Rather than directly creating each new human being himself, the Lord bestowed on the union of male and female the unique power to bring new human beings into the world. No wonder then that newborn babies in the Bible are always regarded with wonder as signs of Gods blessing. The original charge of God to the human race was: Be fruitful, and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28). While God does not demand that all people be married, as Jesus himself and Saint Paul demonstrate, nevertheless, Genesis 1:28 explains why we feel so deeply that we are witnessing a miracle of God when gazing on a newborn child. Psalm 127:3 says that all children are a reward from God.

But there is another side to it.

God often sends heroes and deliverers into the world by giving them as newborns to couples who are disconsolate because they cannot have children. So Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, and Samuel are all born to women who previously could not conceive. And yet a quick survey of their lives, particularly those of Jacob, Joseph, and Samson, reveals that these children, who were direct gifts of God, were also great heart-griefs to their parents.

Something of this is seen in this famous passage in Psalm 139:1316: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made... Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book. As one Bible scholar put it: Our pre-natal fashioning by God [is] a powerful reminder of the value He sets on us, even as embryos, and of His planning our end from the beginning.

The phrase we are fearfully and wonderfully made is full of interest. Every baby born into the world is a wonderful creation, but at the same time a frightening one. Anyone who looks on a newbornrealizing this is a new human life in the image of the Creator, come into the world along with particular gifts and callings and a life planned by the Lord of historymust respond with a kind of fear and trembling. And no one should behold a child with more awe and fear than the childs parents.

When Kathy and I brought home our firstborn, I was surprised to see her cuddle him close and weep. Partly this was her hormones talking, she said, but partly it was a recognition of what we had let this tiny little person in for as a member of a fallen race. Yes, all the days ordained for him were written in Gods book, but as an adult she knew that our sons book would contain disappointment, hurt, failure, pain, loss, and ultimately his own death. All this would happen no matter how hard we would try to shield him. So she literally trembled before the responsibility of being a parent to this wonder of the universe. And when I thought about it, so did I.