The Wonder of You

This was the conclusion of David, the psalmist, who said on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works I will meditate, I will tell of your greatness. What was the end result of that meditation, studying, observing, watching, examining, learning?

Wow, God, you did that. That's where it leads us. I've got to tell people of your greatness, I belong to a great God. The Bible tells us that we should study and meditate upon God's creation.

Why would that be the case? Well, when we do, it teaches us about God's character. We learn about God as we study the things he's made. Here on Wisdom for the Heart, we've been working our way through a series on God's creation called In Living Color. Today, we're going to examine God's creation of us.

God created humans. Every intricate detail of our body declares the glory of God, and we'll learn how today. Your Bible teacher is Stephen Davey, and he called this message The Wonder of You.

Thus far in our study, we have taken our binoculars and added them to our Bibles. We've made some observations revealed in creation some of the wonders of the natural world around us, and you know as well as I do, we've just really only begun to take a closer look at the creative genius of our creator, God. And it isn't just about looking at these elements, it's about glorifying him, the author, the creator. The more we learn about creation, the more lovely and brilliant and purposeful and creative he is. This was the conclusion of David, the psalmist, who said, On the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works, I will meditate, I will tell of your greatness. What was the end result of that meditation, studying, observing, watching, examining, learning?

Wow, God, you did that. I've got to tell people of your greatness, I belong to a great God. That's where it leads us, as we observe his creation. John Piper put it this way, If created things are seen as gifts from God and as mirrors of his glory, to delight in them is really to delight in their maker. So far we've taken a closer look at some of God's handiwork, we've taken a quick look at the honeybee, birds, metamorphic rock, gemstones, dinosaurs, hurricanes, the average ordinary oxygen pumping tree in your backyard, just for starters, and we've really just scratched the surface.

What I want to do today is follow the advice of Augustine, the theologian from the first century and church leader, a brave man who wrote, and I quote him, Mankind goes abroad to wander at the height of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the long course of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, and the circular motion or orbits of the stars, but they pass by themselves and do not notice. So let's not pass by ourselves and the marvel of creation that is reflected in our own bodies. Now I have to say at the outset it was difficult to know what to focus on when you think of how we're put together and created by God. I thought we'd spend a session on the human eye, which we're not, but I do want to drop in and talk a little bit about this amazing, complex, moving, self-cleaning, self-adjusting, fiber optic marvel. In fact the eye is so complex and so marvelous that even Darwin wrote to a friend that his theory had at its weakest point the concept of the human eye evolving.

In other words, as he observed what little he could tell and know with what rudimentary instruments he had at his disposal, it was still amazing to him to think that it could somehow become randomly evolving to the point it was. He wrote to a friend late in life and I quote him, the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but my reason tells me I ought to conquer this cold shudder. Beloved, you don't want to conquer that which is written on your heart that points to a Creator God.

It shouldn't be a cold shudder. It should be a warm embrace as you observe what God has created. There's an interesting expression that appears three or four times in the Hebrew Bible where the believer is told that we are the apple of God's eye. To the Hebrew poet, the Hebrew author, the pupil, the little black spot in the middle, the pupil of your eye was considered the apple.

It's round so it became tantamount to the round fruit called the apple as it became to be known metaphorically of the eye. We now know, of course, they could observe this as well in their own lifetime because we know that the strongest protective reflex you happen to have in your body is the reflex to blink in order to protect your eye. Nothing moves, by the way, in your body faster than that reflexive protective act. In fact, if somebody or something gets too close to your eye, you blink and you haven't even thought about it. It doesn't take conscious thought.

It just happens so fast that you blink. This is what David is talking about as he comes to talk about that as an analogy of God's movement to protect the believer. Psalm 17 verse 8, David asks the Lord, keep me as the apple of your eye.

Hide me in the shadow of your wings. Those are two poetic expressions asking for the Lord's fastest and strongest protection possible. The prophet Zechariah speaking for God promised Israel, for he who touches you touches the apple of his eye. So you might as well try to poke God in the eye as you would to touch Israel.

That's the point. Alright, enough of the eye. I spent some time researching, a lot of time researching the brain, that three and a half pound cauliflower you have inside your head. But inside that command center are 100 billion neurons and every one of those 100 billion neurons is making tens of thousands of communicative connections.

It's staggering to consider. In fact, one recent research project revealed that it would take the world's fastest computer, the great computer at least in our generation, the fastest computer 100 years to process the data of what the eye sends to the brain and the data that's processed in one second. It would take the fastest computer 100 years to analyze the same kind of data processing that happens in you right now.

One second. So you can imagine how easy it would be to focus on the eye and or the brain. But as I studied further, I was drawn deeper still into the molecular cellular aspects of our body's creation. And I have to admit to you now I'm in deep water here. I flunked science class repeatedly and math, which goes right along with it, I flunked that. In fact, I was allowed into college on probation because I had to pass pre-algebra and I was given one semester to do it. I had to get above a 70 and I got a 70, a D minus so that I could become your pastor. I finally graduated.

So I'm in deep water here. I'll try not to give you anything I can't pronounce. But it is really amazing, this body of yours and mine. It's an amazing cell producing factory. In fact, in the time it takes me to finish this sentence, your body will have produced several million cells. It just produced several million more. It just produced several million more. Two million cells per second, which is a good thing because two million cells a second are dying in your body.

And that's the exchange rate. That's the way God designed it. What's aging? Aging is when more die than are formed.

And everything kind of starts slowing down and the skin loses its plasticity and the eye cornea hardens and those joints don't work. What's happening? It's slowing down.

That replacement rate slows down. But just imagine, inside your body, just today, 60 billion cells will be manufactured. No wonder you're tired. Look at what's been happening.

All you've been doing is sitting there and you're just flat worn out. Now evolution says that life supposedly developed over a few million years in a warm little pond of goop. And you have to use the word goop.

You can't use water because amino acids won't form in water. So this goop, which was some kind of rather interesting, miraculous concoction, and nobody knows where it came from, nobody knows what's in it, but we evidently know for certain that you came from it. At any rate, if you start with a big bang and that produces this planet, and somehow on this planet you get this strange little pond of goop, over millions of years, molecules are formed, over a few more million years, amino acids form, and during the next few million years, some of those amino acids notice each other and say, hey, I'd kind of like to connect with you and maybe we can do that and try a little error. Over millions of years we finally come together in just the right pattern and a single cell springs to life. Now based on the light microscope which Darwin had available and would have used to study the cell, he was able to amplify the cell several hundred times, but the living cell that he looked at would have looked to him like an apparently disordered blob of particles which seemed to be tossing around rather haphazardly, something's going on, looks like inside, but he can't tell for sure, but it's moving rather haphazardly in all kinds of directions.

That's all he knew. Now thanks to the electron microscope and amazing progress in molecular biology, along with mitochondrial DNA research, and I know in our congregation we have at least one doctor who specializes in research and lecturing on mitochondrial DNA, which terrifies me that he's in the audience. But at any rate, we can now study the cell magnified a billion times over. And what we discover is going to matter to you and to me.

And let me jump ahead at a point of application. The evolutionist Bertrand Russell, as an example, says that man, quote, is a curious accident in a backwater. In other words, we're just an accident that happened in this backwater puddle of goop. It was nothing more than random, purposeless accidents. Oxford professor Peter Atkins said with even a little more biting pessimism, this evolutionist, as he surveyed the universe and even the human being, he said this, mankind is nothing more than, quote, a bit of slime on the planet.

That's it. You're an accident. You're a slimy coagulation of amino acids and proteins that accidentally sprang to life for no apparent reason, which by the way then means you have no meaning. You have no purpose. You have no hope. You have really no future. And in the meantime, along the way, you have no help.

You're on your own. Beloved, you're a creator. God says something vastly different in the word of God. Isaiah the prophet writes, this is what the Lord, the one who made you, says, the one who formed you in the womb and get this and helps you. Don't be afraid. What is the message of the creator who crafted you and who assists you? He says to you, don't be afraid. You were deliberately, knowingly crafted and created, embroidered as we've learned by the master designer, and one point of many of application is don't be afraid. Everything about your life has sovereign purpose and design behind it and in front of it, even though we may not be able to explain it and we may not know this side of heaven. And frankly, when we get to heaven, I don't think we're going to ask God for an explanation because I really don't think it's going to matter. In the meantime, don't be afraid. Let me put it this way.

If God is your creator, wise enough and powerful enough to create you, he is wise enough and powerful enough to watch over you. Now let's go back to that amazing microscope that would reveal what Darwin could never have even imagined. You happen to be an amazing factory of working cells.

And I got to tell you, this is where it gets crazy. You don't just have one cell in your body. You happen to have 37 trillion cells in your body. And that's not all. Inside each of those 37 trillion cells, in each individual cell, you happen to contain 100 trillion atoms.

How long would that take to put together, I wonder? Well, let me try to illustrate it with a tennis ball. Let's bring it down to my level, okay? Here we go. If you could magnify one living cell in your body large enough so that each of those 100 trillion atoms became the size of a tennis ball.

Are you with me? We've expanded that cell so it is large enough so that each one of those atoms is the size of a tennis ball. That cell would cover the space of New York City, okay? But we're going to put this model together so that each of those atoms is connected to the other atom. All the other atoms are connected, you know, like Tinker Toys, you have those sticks. But at any rate, imagine these are all connected together and you have 100 trillion of them. Well, if you could, by the way, connect each of these atoms together if I had a, you know, a stack of sticks up here and I could do that and I could connect this one to this one in 60 seconds. In order to create the model of one living cell, it would take me 56 million years. One cell. But let's suppose I could do it and we hung around.

You stayed long, forgot lunch. And we created that model and it's covering New York City because it's that large. We can get in our car and we can drive around and we can look at it.

Oh, and by the way, if I had the ability, which, you know, I don't, to somehow animate this so that these are now all working, spinning, turning, doing these amazing functions. Now we hop in our car and we take a little tour and we're going to watch what happens. Now what I want to do is I want to put up a quote. It's a long quote because of that I want to put it on the screen in a minute so that you can read it along with me. This quote comes from a book written by Stephen Bartholomew that I read this past summer in preparation for this particular message. It's an amazing book of about 300 pages. Let me pull one quote out of this and have you follow along on the screens.

Here it goes. If the cell could be magnified to allow you to travel within it, at the outer edges, the surface of the cell, you would see millions of openings like the portholes of a huge spaceship opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we drove through one of those openings, we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless corridors and conduits branching off in every direction, some leading to a central memory bank in the nucleus and others leading to assembly plants and processing units. We would see proofreading devices and quality control machines checking to make sure everything is in order. We would watch a variety of assembly processes, decoding systems, memory banks where information was being stored and then retrieved at just the right time and for the right purpose. Eventually we would arrive at the nucleus of the cell, a vast spherical chamber resembling a large dome, and inside that dome we would see neatly stacked together in ordered array miles of coiled chains of DNA molecules which form the genetic code, all the information drawn from which determines all the processes of all that activity inside one single cell, information that is uniquely designed to make you, you.

And there's only one of you. All that complexity and beauty and design happens to be what makes you, you. Now the evolutionists has argued that much of the DNA, because DNA poses quite a problem because of all the genetic coding, so they've argued that much of the DNA is junk. You've heard the term junk DNA. It's malleable.

It's changeable. It's adaptive so that you could become something else or somewhere along the line over millions of years you could have been something else. And they will be quick to point out that we share common genetic code, little bits and pieces, with creatures like mice and monkeys and bananas. One study of DNA, however, published just a few months ago, not by creationists, but a study that is literally shattering the house of cards of evolution, is proving that as much as 95% of your DNA is not junk after all.

We'll just wait. They'll eventually get to 100%. But they've already reached 95% is not malleable. It is not changeable. It is fixed, fixed, so that somewhere down the line, you know, people that come from you are not going to look like a banana or a mouse or a monkey.

It's fixed. In fact, one theoretical evolutionist admitted two weeks ago that if this research can be validated, it's this project called ENCODE, he says, if ENCODE is right, evolution is finished. You are the work of a master creator, a master composer who condensed and communicated the information of who he wanted you to be, so that every atom would be crafted and created and every cell of your body functioned together because you are not an afterthought. You are the result of eternal thought. Beloved, from eternity past, God was thinking about you.

It's a staggering thought. In fact, the apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians and said it this way, For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. You are the workmanship of God.

The word for workmanship is POEMA in the Greek language, which gives us our English transliterated word POEM. Paul is choosing a word under inspiration to emphasize God's creative skill, his lyrical, creative, designing ability to write out a poem that will become you. Nobody else's lyrics matches perfectly yours. Even your thumbprint is an original.

Nobody else has it on the planet. Your unique, one-of-a-kind, creative poem written by God. And Paul kind of pictures God for us as if he were sitting down in eternity past and writing out an original poem with original lyrics that would become you. And he planned when you would be born and the works that you would do. This is the created marvel of you. Since he put you together, since he's thought of you from eternity past, designed every cell, every atom, every ability, every inability, every disability, everything you can do, everything you can't do, the color of your eyes, the height of your stature, the created designs and interests, everything about you created and encoded by God so that you would become the marvel of who you happen to be. I was reminded of an event that I shared with you a few years ago.

I believe in a Sunday evening service. I want to repeat it here, but it occurred in the early 1930s. A man was on the side of a dirt road standing next to his broken-down Model A. He had exhausted himself under the hood of his Model A, nothing he tried to get that engine to crank back up, and he'd given up. About that time, a beautiful chauffeur-driven limousine pulled off the road near him and out stepped a well-dressed, slightly built older man. And he walked over and he asked this gentleman if he could take a look under the hood. The guy was a little surprised and said, Well, sure, go ahead and take a look, and he tinkered around under the hood a little bit. Then he pulled his head back out, he dropped the hood down, and he told the man, You can crank your car now.

It will crank back up. The man really didn't believe him, but he went over and he cranked it, and sure enough, that engine fired up. That slightly built man was headed back to his limousine.

The man caught up to him and he said, You know, I'm just so curious. You don't look like a mechanic. You're certainly not dressed like a mechanic.

Your hands don't look like they've spent a whole lot of time recently on the engine of a car. How did you know what to do so that my car would be fixed? And the man quietly responded back to him, Well, my name is Henry Ford, and I invented your car.

And because I invented your car, I know how it's supposed to work. God designed you. He put you together. He wrote out the lyrics of your life.

He coded those lyrics into DNA coils so that all those cells and all those atoms would operate as they're supposed to. By the way, don't talk yourself down. Don't run yourself down. You're a marvelous creation, a masterpiece that is original and unique. You're the only you there will ever be, uniquely you.

The enemy wants to run down God's creation. The enemy will tell you, You're nobody. Who do you think you are? Oh, I am one of God's marvels.

That's who I am. That's who you are, uniquely designed as one of God's original masterpieces. He invented you. He invented you. He then knows how you're supposed to work, how you work best, and that for which he designed you so that no matter how mundane or repetitive, small or great, do it well as you glorify this one where you say with David, just after a brief moment or two of meditation on his marvelous deeds, we will talk about what we share with others, the greatness of our God.

I'm glad you joined us today. This is Wisdom for the Heart, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Stephen is the president of Wisdom International. One of the resources we've developed is a book based on this series. If you're enjoying this look at God's creation, you'll enjoy the book called In Living Color. This is a hardback book that makes a great gift. It's available during this series at a special rate. Visit wisdomonline.org for information. Join us next time for more Wisdom for the Heart. You