“Bel bows down; Nebo stoops; their idols are on beasts and livestock; these things you carry are born as burdens on weary beasts. They stoop; they bow down together; they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity. Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by Me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am He, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save. To whom will you liken Me and make Me equal, and compare Me, that we may be alike?”
Isaiah 46:1-5
Yahweh exposes the futility of the false gods Israel is worshipping. Just as Israel is going into exile, so are their gods. Just like Israel, their gods will sit on the backs of beasts as they go into captivity, utterly incapable of saving them from the burden of captivity. God is nothing like these idols. For whereas the false gods of Babylon are carried on beasts of burden, God carries His people. Luther writes encouraging words on these verses:
Here you see the comparison. How could He speak more sweetly than in transferring a mother’s experiences to Himself, and the most concerned experience is carrying a child in the womb. The highest honor should be given to her who is pregnant. Here consider God’s zeal and care for us. Is not the maternal instinct constantly concerned about the infant? So God cares for us with an everlasting maternal heart and feeling… The fetus knows no concern. All the concern is in the mother, who looks after her tender belly. So God is likewise concerned for us. Therefore He wants to say: “Leave your cares, which look for ways of escape and other places of refuge. Come to Me, I will carry you in My womb.” The uterus and womb of God is the divine Word, by which we are fashioned and borne, as Paul says to the Galatians (4:19), “My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!” and to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:15), “I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” It is an outstanding and very firm comfort for the godly that God cares for us. Therefore we must strive with a single heart that we abide in the Word. The Lord will reject no one, however weak, if only we cling to the Word, the womb of God. Thus, then, we must believe in our weakness that we are borne in the womb of God, who will care for us with supreme devotion and will never reject us.
LW 17:139
Not that God literally has a womb, but He cares for His people like a mother cares for her womb and the infant therein. I will go a step further than Luther and say Baptism is the womb of the Church. For just as we passed through the waters of our mother’s womb in our first birth, so we pass through the waters of the Church’s womb, Baptism, and we are born again through the efficacy of God’s Word (John 3:5), which Luther metaphorically calls God’s womb.
No god is like our God. All other gods must be handcrafted by men, shipped in boxes to come to us, and placed on our makeshift altars or bookshelves in our homes. God needs no fashioning, for He is spirit (John 4:24). He comes to you in His Word and Sacraments; He carries us in the womb of Baptism in His Church, going to great lengths to care for us and nourish us with His Word and Sacraments. All throughout this life, therefore, as baptised children of God, He cares for us in the womb of our Mother, the Church, wherein He nourishes us with His Word.
The Lutheran Column 