Bible Fact · Psalm 139:14 — 'I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.'
DNA: The Code Behind Life
The Fact
Psalm 139:13–16 reads: 'For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.' The imagery of being 'knitted together' (Hebrew: sakak — to weave, to intertwine) and 'intricately woven' resonates with what we now know about DNA. The human genome contains approximately 3.2 billion base pairs encoding about 20,000 genes in every single cell. If the DNA from one human cell were uncoiled, it would stretch about 6 feet (2 meters). The information stored in the human genome, if converted to text, would fill approximately 200,000-word books. The phrase 'in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me' is a metaphor — but one whose imagery anticipates the discovery that developmental biology is itself an encoded program.
Context
Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and is a committed Christian, wrote: 'The human genome consists of all the DNA of our species, the hereditary code of life. This newly revealed text was written in a language that all life can read... I felt an overwhelming sense of awe in surveying this most remarkable of all texts.'
Significance
The discovery that every human being is built from an encoded biological program — written in the 'language' of base pairs — makes Psalm 139's imagery of God 'writing' the person far less metaphorical than it first appears.
Reflection
Psalm 139 says you were 'fearfully and wonderfully made' — not by chance, not by accident, but by the intentional creative work of a God who saw you before you existed. How does that change how you see yourself today?