Audio Transcript

Many questions in our inbox are questions that I could never anticipate — like this one today, sent to us by a listener named Jessica. Here’s what she writes: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast. I was recently confronted by an abortion advocate about a chapter in the Bible. I was then, and remain now, quite perplexed about its meaning.

“We read that suspicion of infidelity in the Old Testament triggered a potentially dangerous ritual in which a woman was put on trial, made to drink a potion of sorts, and, if she was found guilty, the verdict was rendered in physical consequences. The verses are Numbers 5:22 and 27, texts that say the adulterous woman’s ‘thigh shall fall away’ (the ESV translation), which doesn’t make any sense to me. Other translations say the consequence is ‘miscarriage and untimely birth’ (according to the NEB and REB translations). Basically, a guilty verdict was rendered by an induced abortion.

“In fact, that’s the interpretation I found in Old Testament scholar Norman Henry Snaith’s commentary, Leviticus and Numbers. On linguistic grounds, he said, ‘cause an abortion’ is a possible interpretation here. I was surprised. How would you respond?”

My response is first to ask, Was this abortion advocate seriously willing to follow where the Scriptures lead? Or was this simply a superficial cheap shot because a text might picture God as aborting a child? Now, I don’t know the answer to that question, but it would make a difference personally in how I spoke to that person directly.

My second response is to say that I don’t think we can have any confidence that this text describes an abortion or a God-caused miscarriage. In fact, I think a good case can be made that this is not what’s happening. And I’ll come back to that.

And my third response is that even if God were pictured here as bringing about the miscarriage as part of the punishment for adultery, that would not give us any right at all to take the life of the unborn. All of life is in God’s hands. He owns it. He gives it and he takes it according to his own infinite wisdom. It’s his. And therefore, he gives it where we can’t, and he takes it where we shouldn’t, because we are not God. So, let me say a word about each of those three responses.

Discerning Sincerity

If a person comes to us with a biblical objection to our pro-life position, it may be that the most helpful and hopeful thing we could do is sincerely offer them to sit down and do a serious study together with them of what the whole Bible has to say about the unborn and the rights we have or don’t have to intrude upon God’s person-forming work in the womb (as it says in Psalm 139).

That might be the test of the sincerity of their objection.

Does God Cause Miscarriage?

Second, let’s look at what the text actually says in Numbers 5. The situation is that a husband has accused his wife of committing adultery against him, but he has no proof. He brings her to the priest, who sets up a test to determine her guilt or innocence. He mixes holy water with dust from the tabernacle floor and has her drink it.

Significantly, the test is designed so that her innocence is assumed and what has to be proved is her guilt, not her innocence. The ordeal is favorable for the defendant — namely, the woman. In other words, it’s not as though, if nothing happens, she’s guilty. No. Something extraordinary has to happen to prove her guilt — indeed, something supernatural. The assumption is that God will decide this case.

If she’s guilty, Numbers 5:22 describes what will happen. Here’s the wording: “May this water that brings the curse pass into your bowels and make your womb swell and your thigh fall away.” If that does not happen, she’s innocent. Now, Jessica points out that some interpreters take this “falling away of the thigh” as a miscarriage or an induced abortion from God.

This is a pure guess. Nobody knows for sure what those words “falling away of the thigh” mean. That wording is not a common idiom. It’s not as though the writer used an idiom here that we all know from elsewhere means “miscarriage.” We don’t. We only have this context to go on.

More Likely Meaning

I think the text, the context here, points in a different direction. First of all, the Hebrew word for thigh can mean hip, as it does when Jacob’s hip is put out of joint (Genesis 32:25); or it can mean loins, including the sexual organs, as when Abraham’s servants swears by putting his hand in that sacred place of reproduction (Genesis 24:2–3).

“The focus of the punishment is not on miscarriage, but on the fact that the innocent will go on to have children.”

The falling of the woman’s loins would be a very odd way to describe a miscarriage, but it would not be an odd way to describe a vaginal prolapse. A prolapse, which my grandmother had to have surgery for while she was living with Noël and me — that’s why I know about this — is what happens when the pelvis muscles and tissues can no longer support the female sexual organs because the muscles and tissues are weak or damaged, which causes one or more of the pelvic organs to drop or press into or out of the vagina. Now, that’s an easily treatable situation today with surgery. In those days, that must have been horrible.

And then notice that Numbers 5:28 shows us what this punishment involves by contrasting it with the woman who proves innocent. Here’s what it says in verse 28: “But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive children.” In other words, the focus of the punishment is not on miscarriage, but on the fact that the innocent will go on to have children, and the guilty woman won’t, because that’s the effect of the falling of the loins, I’m suggesting.

All Souls Are God’s

Now, suppose my interpretation is wrong, which it could be because none of us knows for sure what the “falling away of the thigh [or the loins]” means. And suppose this text really does say that God, the just judge, decreed that the child in the woman, supposing there was one (it doesn’t say), was aborted. Suppose that. What does that tell us about the life of the unborn and our right to take it or not? And the answer is nothing, because we are not God.

“God’s decision to take the life of an unborn child does not give us any permission to do the same.”

God says in Deuteronomy 32:39, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.” In other words, to be God is to have rights over life and death that others don’t have. Hannah speaks for God in the same way in 1 Samuel 2:6, when she says, “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.” And Job, when he lost all ten of his children, said — and the verse following says he didn’t sin when he said this — “The Lord gave, and Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

In other words, one of the things it means to be God is to have absolute rights over human life. God made all life. All life belongs to him. Only God can say Ezekiel 18:4 in truth: “Behold, all souls are mine.” Therefore, God’s decision to take the life of an unborn child does not give us any permission to do the same, any more than God’s giving us his own Son in crucifixion gives us the right to kill Jesus. God ordains the death of his own Son, not to legitimate murder, but to make it possible for murderers to be saved, including those who take the life of the unborn.

Do you ever feel that you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? That the responsibilities, duties, and burdens of life press upon you with their almost intolerable reality?

“The weight of the world” might refer to your vocation, to the calling that you have in life. The pressure of a calling can feel crushing. There aren’t enough hours in the day. There aren’t enough resources available. The possibility of failure is real; it looms on the horizon. You feel pulled in too many directions, and at some point you’re going to break.

“The weight of the world” might refer to the burdens in your family. Parents feel the enormous gravity of raising children, of having the responsibility to shape and mold the souls of our kids. We want so much good for them. We long to give them everything they need. And again, we feel our limits. We can’t change hearts. We can’t protect them from everything. We are neither omniscient nor infallible.

Sometimes “the weight of the world” is simply the sheer gravity of existence, of reality. We are mortal. We live in a world where death is certain until Jesus returns. More than that, we live in a world where eternity hangs in the balance. Heaven and hell are real, and everyone we know is journeying toward one or the other, toward eternal joy or eternal misery. In his inimitable way, C.S. Lewis expressed this kind of existential burden in his sermon “The Weight of Glory”:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. (45)

A load so heavy that only humility can carry it — what does this mean? And how can we grow in the humility necessary to carry the vocational, familial, and existential burdens that we face?

Heavy and Growing Burden

In my own life, especially in those moments where the burden feels greatest, I find myself returning to a few sentences in Lewis’s novel Perelandra. It may be odd to find solace in a science-fiction novel, but Lewis is a master of embedding truth and comfort in stories.

The novel is the second in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, in which the hero, Elwin Ransom, journeys to the planet Perelandra in order to stave off disaster. The novel is Lewis’s variation on the temptation narrative of Genesis 3. The Queen of Perelandra is tempted by the Unman, a human from earth who has been possessed by a demonic power. The Unman attempts to draw the Queen into disobedience to Christ (called Maleldil in the novels), appealing to her imagination to elicit a tragic act of rebellion to Maleldil’s law.

The variation on the temptation narrative is the presence of Ransom. He is on Perelandra not merely as a witness, but as a participant. He is an intrusive third party, and he feels the burden of preserving the innocence and righteousness of the Queen in the face of the Unman’s lies and deception. For days he attempts to argue with the Unman, countering his lies with truth, only to see the truth twisted to serve the Lie again. His burden grows as he sees the Queen’s imagination clouded by the lies and her resolve weakening.

Then, one night, Ransom encounters Maleldil himself and comes to realize that he is not there to argue the Unman into submission, but to engage him in physical combat — to fight him and kill the body that the devil has possessed and is his only anchor to Perelandra.

‘Be Comforted, Small One’

With the burden of Perelandra’s future resting on his middle-aged shoulders, Ransom submits. He attacks the Unman, wounding him, and then pursuing him across the oceans, until the two are pulled beneath the waves and cast ashore in a cavern beneath a mountain. In the end, Ransom kills the Unman, but only after enduring a tremendous crucible — the combat itself (in which his heel is wounded), the descent beneath the mountain, and then the long, arduous ascent out into the light.

After his journey, Ransom finds himself in a great mountain hall, speaking with two eldila, angelic powers who serve Maleldil. In the course of their conversation, Malacandra, the eldil who rules Mars, informs Ransom that “the world is born to-day.” The Queen has passed the test, and the King of Perelandra has passed his own as well. As a result, “To-day for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be” (169).

Hearing this, Ransom falls to the ground. The weight that he has borne is too much, and he is overwhelmed by the burden. And the burden not just of the responsibility but, apparently, of his own success. It is at this point that the angelic power speaks the words that have been such an encouragement to me when I feel the weight of the world.

“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.” (169)

Great Comfort of Smallness

Here is the paradox of comfort that Lewis offers. On the one hand, Ransom really did have a responsibility. The burden of fighting the Unman rested squarely upon him. It lay within his power to embrace his calling, or to shrink back. And yet, after completing his task, at the moment of triumph, the words are clear: “It is no doing of yours. . . . He lays no merit on you.”

“Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world.”

The comfort offered here is the comfort of smallness. And Lewis offers it not only to Ransom, but to the reader. Ransom is not great. Neither are we. Everything we have is gift, and therefore we ought to receive and be glad. Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world. This is the humility that keeps our backs from being broken by the weight of glory.

Bear Your Load with Hope

Lewis is not the only one to comfort us in our smallness. King David too offers this comfort in Psalm 131. David’s heart is not lifted up, he says; his eyes are not raised too high. His mind is not occupied by realities above his station (Psalm 131:1). In humility, David refuses to carry the weight of the world. Instead, he comforts himself in his smallness.

I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 131:2)

“Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.”

A weaned child does not attempt to bear the weight of the world. A weaned child is content in the arms of his mother. He seeks no merit; he labors under no delusions of grandeur. He simply embraces his smallness with gladness.

And so, when I feel the weight of leadership, or teaching, or pastoring, or parenting, or the sheer weight of existence pressing upon me, like David, I seek to calm and quiet my soul. In the face of lofty thoughts that are too high for me, in the teeth of turbulent passions and emotions, under the weight of reality, I say to myself,

Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit upon you. The weight of the world is not yours. It was borne by another, by one whose bloody shoulders were able to bear it — up to Golgotha, into the tomb, down to Sheol, and then out, out again into the light of resurrection. Have no fear, small one. Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.

Some truths about God we receive into our minds as we might receive a houseguest, expecting them to behave nicely and generally keep the furniture in place. But then, sooner or later, we hear the sounds of drills and saws. We feel the rumble of a sofa being dragged across the floor. And we discover that we have welcomed not a houseguest but a construction worker.

One such truth, for many of us, is the sovereignty of God. That God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11) struck me, at first, as both biblically plain and experientially sweet. I became a Calvinist almost without realizing it. But then, in time, no truth caused me more mental angst, and even anguish, than this doctrine of God’s total, unstoppable sovereignty. I had imagined myself the calm host of this truth, until my mind became a construction zone.

“Over creation, over history, and over hearts, God reigns.”

Many could testify to a similar experience of mental renovation. Open the door to God’s sovereignty, and walls of supposed rationality may collapse. Stairways of instinct may be turned right around. A whole new floor of possibility may be added. You will emerge “renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:23), but the process may sometimes feel like a hammer blow.

How Sovereign Is He?

Whatever place God’s sovereignty has in our present mental framework, we may find help from Acts 4:23–31, a passage that has renovated many minds. Perhaps nowhere else in Scripture do we get such a sweeping sense of God’s sovereignty in so small a space.

The early church prays, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them . . .” (Acts 4:24). Their “sovereign Lord” is none other than the sovereign Creator of Genesis 1: star-speaker, mountain-maker, ocean-carver, creature-crafter. And as the rest of Scripture celebrates, the same God who spoke the world into being goes on speaking, upholding “the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). His sovereignty over creation continues every second. Not a blade of grass grows without him saying so.

But his sovereignty doesn’t end with creation. “Sovereign Lord . . . who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, ‘Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain?’” (Acts 4:24–25). The events of Good Friday may have seemed to some like a chaotic tragedy, like innocence caught in the death gears of political corruption, but the believers say, “No, the death of Christ fulfilled the story of David’s ancient psalm. For a thousand years, the threads of history have been running toward the cross.” History, to them, was prophesied, predestined, planned (Acts 2:23; 4:28).

And not just the events of history, but even the desires and impulses of human hearts. “Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27–28). Why did Judas betray his Lord? Why did Herod mock the King of kings? Why did Pilate, knowing his duty, let justice be trampled by the raging mob? On one level, because Judas wanted money, because Herod “was hoping to see some sign” (Luke 23:8), because Pilate feared man. These were “lawless men” (Acts 2:23), fully responsible for their sins. But on another level, on the ultimate level, they acted as they did because this is what God had predestined to take place.

Here, then, is the sweep of God’s sovereignty in the space of a few verses. Over creation, over history, and over hearts, God reigns. And such a reign cannot help but renovate our minds.

Renovation of the Mind

One of the marvelous features of Acts 4:23–31 is that these believers not only affirm God’s exhaustive sovereignty, but they also teach us how to apply it. And oh, how we need such teaching. Countless errors creep into minds and churches when we take true doctrine from Scripture without also allowing Scripture to guide our applications. And few doctrines are more prone to misapplication than the sovereignty of God.

The prayer of Acts 4, repeated, internalized, embraced, would guard us from a dozen dangers and keep us on God’s level path, even if the process brings pain. For truth can indeed seem “painful rather than pleasant” for a time. But like God’s fatherly discipline, “later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

Here, then, are three new rooms (among others) God’s sovereignty builds into the minds of those who welcome it.

1. God is sovereign — so pray boldly.

Remarkably, the high sovereignty we encounter in Acts 4 comes to us not in a treatise, a confession, a debate, or even a sermon, but a prayer. While some hear of sovereignty and wonder what difference their prayers could make, the early church received sovereignty as a reason to pray. Here, they kneel before a “sovereign Lord” (Acts 4:24); they plead beneath his providence.

God’s sovereignty rightly communicates something of his transcendence, his highness and holiness. But the believers in Acts 4 know something else about God: in his transcendence, he remains deeply personal with his people. He speaks and listens, invites us to pray and responds to our prayers — all while somehow weaving everything into his “definite plan” (Acts 2:23).

Rightly understood, faithful prayer depends on both God’s transcendence and his nearness. If God were only transcendent, he wouldn’t bend to hear our prayers; if he were only personal and near, he wouldn’t be able to answer our prayers. But if God is both transcendent and personal, mighty and near, then he can both hear our petitions and act. We don’t need to know exactly how he sovereignly folds our prayers into his plans. It’s enough for us to know that he does.

2. God is sovereign — so take action.

The early believers were heirs, as we are, to Jesus’s promise to build his church (Matthew 16:18). As the kingdom spreads throughout the book of Acts, they know they are not the ones spreading it, not ultimately. Such expansion was the work of the risen Jesus, who had poured his Spirit upon his people (Acts 1:1, 8). Seated upon his throne, he was sovereignly fulfilling his promise to build the church against the gates of hell.

But the church did not for that reason grow passive or complacent. They did not merely wait and watch the Holy Spirit act. At Pentecost, Peter gets up and actually preaches (Acts 2:14). Before the council, Peter and John take a breath and actually obey God rather than man (Acts 4:19–20). And when persecuted, the church prays for boldness and actually continues “to speak the word of God” (Acts 4:31). They trusted God would sovereignly fulfill his promises — and then they acted as if he just might do so through their efforts.

For these believers, a seemingly closed door (“Speak no more to anyone in this name,” Acts 4:17) was no reason to stand back and watch; it was reason to pray for boldness, stand up, and turn a handle. They trusted that the same “hand” that governed history was with them still, ready to “stretch out” not before, but precisely “while” they went forth and spoke (Acts 4:28, 30). So, as you stand before some opportunity for the gospel, even if many obstacles stand in the way, take courage from God’s sovereignty and act.

3. God is sovereign — so draw near.

Amid their affliction, we might have expected the believers to address God as something other than “sovereign Lord” — perhaps “sympathetic Lord” or “merciful Lord” or “loving Lord.” These titles are certainly appropriate, and Scripture proposes them to the suffering elsewhere (Hebrews 4:15; 2 Corinthians 1:3). But this time, in their pain, these Christians drew near to the sovereign Lord. They did so for at least two reasons.

First, they knew that only a sovereign God could take the wrongs done against us and turn them for our good. Sympathy, mercy, and love are precious qualities in our God, but their preciousness runs thin if he cannot actually do something about our pain. But oh, how he can.

“In his sovereignty, he became a Lord with scars.”

The God we serve was able to take the worst moment in the history of the world and turn it into a moment of eternal remembrance (Acts 4:27–28). And the early church knew that if God could do that at the cross, then he could do it anywhere and everywhere for anyone, no matter how black the sorrow or deep the loss. As on the world’s worst Friday, he can take our most shattered days, rearrange the pieces, and make them spell good.

Then, second, who is this “sovereign Lord”? He is not only the God who turned such a Friday good; he is the God who felt this Friday’s sharpest grief. In his sovereignty, God could have stayed aloof from us, working out his plan from his high throne. But he didn’t. Instead, in his sovereignty, he put on flesh and bone. He took the dark prophecies of the Messiah’s sufferings and laid them on his own human shoulders. He received the whips and the nails and the thorns. In his sovereignty, he became a Lord with scars. And therefore he is, and ever remains, the strongest refuge for suffering saints.

Receive, then, this renovating doctrine of God’s unstoppable sovereignty. Watch how it inspires your prayers, emboldens your witness, and then, in the pit of your deepest pain, leads you to the one who once died under sorrow, and now lives forever as Lord over it all.