The Lord Was an Embryo

Here is the last word on the humanity of the unborn, and it is not an argument but a Person.

God came to save us by way of conception. He did not begin as a cluster of cells that would later become Christ. At conception He was already a living human embryo, and Scripture calls that embryo the Lord.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

He was not a potential Son of God awaiting a later threshold. He was the Son of God from the moment of His conception.

Days old, and addressed as Lord

Watch the timeline Luke gives us. Mary went “with haste” to Elizabeth after Gabriel’s word: within days of the conception, while the Lord was at the earliest embryonic stage. And when her greeting reached Elizabeth, the unborn John leaped, and Elizabeth cried out, “why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43–44).

Days old. Smaller than can be seen. And already addressed as “my Lord.”

Luke was a physician, and his vocabulary is worth a physician’s attention. The word he uses for the child in Elizabeth’s womb, brephos, is the very word he uses for the newborn Jesus lying in the manger (Luke 2:12) and for the little children brought to Jesus to be blessed (Luke 18:15). His word for “baby” reaches back across the birth canal and forward past it without a change of term. The physician among the evangelists draws no line at birth. His own vocabulary refuses one.

An inconvenient and dangerous pregnancy

Notice, too, what kind of pregnancy God chose. Mary was unmarried, in a small town, betrothed to a man who resolved to divorce her quietly when he learned of it (Matthew 1:19). By every measure the modern argument uses, this was the pregnancy to end: unplanned, socially ruinous, a threat to her whole future. God did not merely permit His Son to be carried in such a pregnancy. He appointed it. The circumstances that are today offered as reasons a child may be ended are the circumstances into which God sent His own.

Why doctrine cannot survive a pre-human window

Now follow the logic to its end. Scripture says the Son “had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17). He was one of us from His conception; therefore we are one of us from ours.

Suppose instead that there were a stage at which the embryo is not yet a human being. Then there was a stage at which the eternal Son, having taken our nature, was present in Mary’s womb as something less than one of us. The whole logic of the Incarnation forbids the thought. Christ passed through every stage we pass through, and was Himself at every one of them. To deny the humanity of the unborn is not first an error concerning man. It is an error concerning Christ.

The gospel turned backward

At the cross the strong One laid down His life for the weak, who could give Him nothing (Philippians 2:6–8). Abortion, and any act that knowingly ends the life of the conceived, is the strong taking the life of the weak for the sake of their own comfort. The one is the shape of Christ’s love. The other is its undoing.

And the same gospel that exposes the sin is the only sufficient answer to its guilt. There is cleansing in the blood of Christ for all who come, and no condemnation for those who are in Him (Romans 8:1; 1 John 1:7). The Lord who was Himself an embryo receives all who turn to Him, whatever they have done, in ignorance or in knowledge. That is not the footnote to this argument. It is where the argument was always going.

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version. The full case, with every text weighed and the poetry objection answered, is in the treatise The Biblical Case in Full.