Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Earth Day - Part 3

Wednesday, June 8, 2016
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Genesis 1:1(NLT)

This week we are looking at the trace evidence of our God in creation.  So far we see that He is unique, all-powerful, and has all knowledge.  Now:

HE IS AN ORDERLY CREATOR

That God brought order out of the chaos is another statement of our text. 
The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.  Genesis 1:2(NLT)
St. Augustine            wrote:  Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.
Our text says that God brought all creation into being after his kind; this means our “kind” was created with beauty, symmetry, and function, just as God exists in these.  We are, as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made.[2] 
Dr. Lewis Thomas was president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.  In the 1970's he wrote of what he called The Great Astonishment:
A short while ago the newest astonishment in medicine, covering all the front pages, was the birth of an English baby whose conception had taken place in a dish.  The older surprise, which should still be fazing us all, is that a solitary sperm and a single egg can fuse under any circumstance, and grow into eight pounds of human baby; this procedure has gone on for so long that we're used to it; hence the outcries of amazement at a minor technical modification – nothing much, really, beyond relocating the beginning of the process from the Fallopian tube to a plastic container. 
The real amazement is this:  you start out as a single cell; this divides into two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage, as the cells differentiate, there emerges one cluster of cells which will have as its progeny the human brain.  The mere existence of those special cells should be one of the great astonishments of the earth.  One group of cells is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining.  All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, or the marvelous act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in that first cell.  All of grammar, all arithmetic, all music.
It is not known how the switching-on occurs.  At the very beginning of an embryo, when it is nothing more than a cluster of cells, all of this information and much more is latent inside every cell in the cluster.  No one has the ghost of an idea how some of them suddenly assume the special quality of brainness.  If anyone succeeds in explaining it within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out."[3]       
The orderliness of the creation suggests an orderly, infinitely knowledgeable and volitional Creator.  Belief at the point of God’s creation settles the entirety of our culture’s religious debate.  According to Dr. Henry Morris, Genesis 1:1 refutes:
Atheism – because the universe was created by God.
Pantheism – for God is transcendent to that which He created.
Polytheism – for one God created all things.
Materialism – for matter had a beginning.
Dualism – because God was alone when He created.
Humanism – because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.
Evolutionism – because God created all things.[4]         

For You Today

A great hymn of the church is Have Faith in God; that includes His creation!
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today…have a blessed day!
Go to VIDEO

[1] Title Image: By NASA/ GSFC/ NOAA/ USGS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
[2] Psalm 139:14
[3]Thomas, Lewis, The Medussa and the Snail, (New York, Viking Press, 1978 - quoted in The Reader's Digest, October 1979
[4][4]Morris, Henry M., The Genesis Record, (Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1976), 38

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