Have your considered:
Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee.
If the Scripture said,
I knew thee when you were a little child, we would say that Jeremiah existed at that time. If it said,
I knew thee when you were in the womb, we would interpret it as saying that Jeremiah existed at that time. Why then, when the time moves back before the womb, does "I know thee" mean something else, to wit: “I knew about thee"? In the natural use of the word “knew", it is impossible to know someone before they exist, no matter how much you know about them.
We must be careful to not mixup
knowing and
knowing about as they are two different things. For example, Christians know Jesus, demons know about Jesus. This difference is also brought out in
Matthew 25:12 where Jesus said,
Verily I say unto you, I know you not... to the five foolish virgins. He obviously knew all about them, He just did not
know them. Mighty big difference! Well this also means that there is a mighty big difference between GOD knowing Jeremiah and GOD knowing about Jeremiah.
Since I believe that GOD knows about this difference then when GOD says to me that HE knew Jeremiah before his conception, I believe that GOD is sort of telling me that Jeremiah existed before his conception. If GOD was not bearing witness to Jeremiah's preconception existence in this verse, would you please tell me what HE was revealing? Was it HIS omniscience, that is, was HE telling Jeremiah that HE knew all about him before HE made him in the womb, that is, before he was created?
But Jeremiah needed no revelation of GOD's omniscience. Jeremiah was a priest. He was trained in the Scriptures and the Jews knew about GOD's omniscience long before his time.
Well, anything but his pre-conception existence eh!!!
Let me ask this. In your opinion, just what would GOD have to say to Jeremiah to reveal that he existed before he, ie his body, was made in the womb? What would HE have to say so that Jeremiah could put it in the Book?
So, the only question that happens then is when does God place a spirit into a physical body, during pregnancy?
Though the main point of
Matt 13:36 Then Jesus dismissed the crowds and went into the house. His disciples came to Him and said, “EXPLAIN to us the parable of the weeds in the field.
[Aside: the
explanation of a metaphor cannot contain a metaphor itself or it is just an extension of the metaphor not an explanation which should not have any literary devices within it.]
37 He replied, “The One who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. 38 The field is the world, and the good seed represents the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sows them is the devil.
...the import is that we are sown, not created, in this world since the devil sows the people of the evil one into the world (as GOD sees fit) also, to sow must have its plain meaning of
to remove from a place of storage to a place of growth, and cannot refer to a creation of a new spirit.
So, since these verses are about our pre-conception existence, most accept that we are sown into our bodies at conception but many believe we are sown into them at birth, shrug.
Ps 9:17 adds the info that the wicked at least come into the world from Sheol, the place of the waiting dead, since after death they RETURN to Sheol...
17 The wicked will RETURN to Sheol, all the nations who forget God. In their excitement to press their own view of our being created at conception, the KJV got beside themselves and translated
shuv - return, as its opposite, ie
to turn into (while going onward).
