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
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
