Why God created pregnancy?

In looking for an analogy as to how we “live in God and God lives in us” (1 John 4:16), John tells us that “now we are children of God,” but “what we will be has not yet been made known,” 1 John 3:2. 

That’s a typical description of pregnancy, that on conception a child is now being formed, but what that child will be won’t be made known until he or she is born. And John seems happy with that analogy too, because he speaks of us being “born of God” and having “God’s seed” in us (3:9). He’s saying that God conceived us with his seed as a child of his, but also that we’d be born of him too. It’s both conception and birth, with that essential time in between in which we grow into what we’ll be like “when Jesus appears” (2). 

Does this help explain, then, why God created pregnancy in a human mother? It not only illustrates the process of conception to birth we go through as children of God, but also why it’s so important during that process that we “live in God and God lives in us.”

It was only because we were living in our mother’s body, for instance, that we grew into a baby ready to be born. It was also our mother living in us that we became a baby at all, because everything we needed came from her body, the nutrition, protection, the flow of blood, the growth of our cells, and the mixture of DNA from both our parents that would decide the kind of person we would become. Her blood was our blood, her flesh formed our flesh, her life was our life. Or put the other way round, our blood was her blood, our flesh was formed by her flesh, our life came from her life. Either way, it was her living in us and us living in her that grew us from conception to birth. 

Likewise, it’s God living in us and us living in him that grows us from conception to birth as his children. Which Jesus handily illustrated for us when he said in John 6:53, that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” 

Human pregnancy pictures that perfectly, because if it wasn’t for us feeding on our mother’s flesh and drinking her blood, we’d have had no life in us either. So, just as God provided everything we needed in our mother to grow us into a child with physical life, he’s provided everything we need in Jesus to grow us into his children with eternal life. But “How does Jesus feed his life into us?”….(next blog)