WONDER – OUR CREATOR GOD

WONDER – OUR CREATOR GOD Daniel 4:1-3 Daniel 4:37 Daniel 6:27 November 26, 2006 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction I stepped outside the other day and ran smack into Fall. There was no mistaking it. The autumnal feel was all around me. Just the day before the temperature was warm, almost toasty. There were a few clouds in the sky and everyone was out walking, riding bikes, even mowing lawns. But within a week it all changed. Overnight lawns browned, leaves began their season-long metamorphosis into colorful landscape swatches and finally pale, brittle compost on the ground. Even the air had a new hue. It was somehow thicker, darker, harder to see through. All the life of summer had run its course. The annual hibernation of things green was beginning. Like an old bear, summer was lumbering its inexorable way to the cave of winter, ready for rest. I recall driving through the early morning while Autumn was still with us. Glorious, I said aloud to myself, taking in the fullness of God’s handiwork in the trees that lined the road. Things going away have their own beauty, and the season of closings not only portends winter’s coming, but brings out a newly emergent majesty—colors locked out of our retina’s discernment, until now. And every year it is the same cycle, always old, always new. Insinuating itself into my mind was the lyric of that great hymn of faith, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”: Summer and Winter and Springtime and Harvest; Sun, Moon and Stars, in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love. It’s a re-write of God’s promise in Genesis 8:22, “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Praise Him for the beauty He has fashioned all around you, and for the exceeding wonder of His faithfulness. Nebuchadnezzar’s Revelation If you had asked Nebuchadnezzar if he could imagine himself saying such things he would have called you crazy for asking. But then, that was before he met Daniel and his buddies. Now, after a few months of witnessing wise dream interpretations, mortals walking unscathed through white hot fire and a brief personal visit to the desert of insanity, he was not only willing to admit it, but anxious to tell the whole world. King Nebuchadnezzar, to the peoples, nations and men of every language who live in all the world: May you prosper greatly! It is my pleasure to tell you about the miraculous signs and wonders that the Most High God has performed for me. How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders! His kingdom is an eternal kingdom; his dominion endures from generation to generation. (Daniel 4:1-3) Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble. (Daniel 4:37) You’ve got to wonder at this powerful pagan king and his dramatic change of heart. God metamorphosed this proud and haughty man—and he did it by making him wonder—wonder at his mighty works. When He recognized the might and faithfulness of God, it brought him to a sense of wonder and expressions of praise. Months later, Darius the saboteur and usurper of the throne from Nebuchadnezzar’s son, Belshazzar, would be converted when God shut the mouths of hungry lions and delivered Daniel, and would likewise send a message to all the peoples throughout the land, honoring the God who …performs signs and wonders in the heavens and on the earth… (Daniel 6:27) We like these monarchs should praise Him for His wonders in heaven and on earth. In our hearts let us glorify the Lord our God and wonder at His majesty, power, wisdom and faithfulness. Special Slide Show (Click here to view) Slide 1 – We are viewing the Milky Way from a vantage point some 10 million light years from the earth, suspended out in God’s breathtaking creation, what He summarized simply as “the heavens”. We are looking at just a small window of what is seemingly limitless space. We are going to make a very fast journey through the regions of God’s creation. We’ll be coming home to earth—and beyond, as we move into the realm of microcosm and subatomic matter. Slide 2 – We are now ten times closer to our destination, a mere 1 million light years from the earth. From here we can clearly see the Milky Way. What appears to be a swirl of milk and marbles is actually incomprehensibly huge—100,000 light years in diameter. Our sun is in there somewhere, only one of about 300 billion stars in this spiral galaxy alone (let alone the countless other galaxies). The small red square gives you an approximate sense of our home in this massive galaxy. Slide 3 – We are drawing closer to the Milky Way now, our home galaxy. Only 100,000 light years away from our world. Slide 4 – At the rim, now, of our galaxy, and a mere 10,000 light years from earth, we are in full view of the stars at the extreme edge of the Milky Way. Our galaxy is growing, you know, currently gobbling up the Megellanic clouds, a process that should be completed in about 100 million years. Of course, all the talk is that we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. This catastrophic banging together of millions of stars should take place in about 1 billion years. Slide 5 – Ten times closer now and only a thousand light years from home we can get a much better close up of the stars. Get your cameras ready, because we’ll be passing by thousands of stars that are thousands of times bigger and hotter than our sun. Slide 6 – We’ve slipped another ten times closer—just 100 light years from earth! If you can see the red square in the middle, well a very small part of that area contains our entire solar system. Slide 7 – Well, we’re really making time now—just ten light years from earth, and look at all the stars. Too bad we can’t get close enough to see the multiple trillions of planets that must be circling them. Slide 8 – Only 1 light year away, and look! There’s our sun! We’re right on target. Just think, only 9 trillion kilometers and we’ll be there! Slide 9 – Ten times closer again, and just 1 trillion kilometers from home! Slide 10 – Just a blink of the eye and we’re only 100 billion kilometers from the solar system. Look, you can see the color enhanced familiar oval orbits of our planets. Slide 11 – Ten billion kilometers and we’re really in the neighborhood now. Slide 12 – The orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury are colored in for us to view from 1 billion kilometers. Slide 13 – The blue line is earth’s orbit—we’re closing in—just a 100 million kilometers now. Slide 14 – Ten times closer, at only 10 million kilometers distance and we can see our home planet! Slide 15 – Look at that familiar sphere – just 1 million kilometers away! The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Slide 16 – One thousand kilometers! We’ve just passed the Moon and are closing in like astronauts. Slide 17 – Ten thousand kilometers – that’s just like from here to France! What a magnificent planet God created for us, and He called it by name in His Book creating the heavens and the earth! Slide 18 – A thousand kilometers away and we’re closing fast toward the southeastern United States. Slide 19 – Only 100 kilometers to go—why, that’s Tallahassee, isn’t it? We’re aimed right at Franklin County, the home of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Slide 20 – We’re targeted on the southwest sector of Tallahassee and only 6 miles high! Slide 21 – Strap in—it’s almost time for a landing, just 3,000 feet. Slide 22 – 300 feet and we’re going to hit the trees! Slide 23 – 35 feet! Look out below! Slide 24 – Hey, it’s going to be a soft landing in that oak tree. Slide 25 – What do you know? Face to face with an oak leaf. Slide 26 – Ten times closer to it we can see the marvelous design of the leaf. Slide 27 – Just a millimeter away from the surface of the leaf. Slide 28 – Hey, look! At 100 micrometers you can actually see the cell structure. Slide 29 – The individual leaf cells. Slide 30 – At one micrometer we can see the incredible structure of the cell itself. Only 170 years ago we were still just theorizing about cells. But God knew it all from the beginning. Slide 31 – We’re getting really small now as we close in to 100 nanometers, and we’re actually inside the cell structure now, face to face with the layers of stringy chromatin. Slide 32 - This is amazing! Look at the design even at this level. These are actually individual strands of DNA—the instruction manual for all of life, written by God himself and planted in all life forms. Slide 33 – Ten times closer again. Here are the nucleotide building blocks of DNA. Look at the intricate structure—small and tight, but somehow reminiscent of the vast stretches of the universe. Could it be the same Designer? Slide 34 – The cloud of a carbon atom! Looks just like a planet! Wonder at the Creator’s consistency! Praise Him for design! Slide 35 – Ten times closer, at ten picometers, and what do we find? Is that the universe with countless stars again? No, it’s an electron inside an electron shell of the carbon. Slide 36 – Ten times closer – only picometer away – there it is, looking oddly like the earth suspended in space, it is really just the sphere of space between the electron shell and its nucleus. Slide 37 – Speaking of the nucleus – here it is at a distance of 100 fentometers. Slide 38 – Ten fentometers and there is the nucleus of a carbon atom. The basic bonding ingredient of carbon and diamonds! Slide 39 – At one fentometer we are face to face with a single proton. Up until a couple years ago we thought this was the smallest, most basic unit in nature. But… Slide 40 - we have now discovered quarks – components so basic to God’s creation, and so small that we can only guess at what they look like, as we’ve never seen these confined elements It is the glory of God to conceal [things] a matter, to search out a matter is the glory of kings. [webmasters note: Proverbs 25:2] Wonders on the earth Consider with me also His creative wonders in us. We should learn to see God and wonder at Him in all that He has made. Consider your heart. The average human heart pumps over 1,000 gallons a day, over 55 million gallons in a lifetime. This is enough to fill 13 super tankers. It never sleeps, beating 2.5 billion times in a lifetime. Of course, the heart receives blood from the lungs then sends this freshly oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. The lungs contain 1,000 miles of capillaries. Through these delicate membranes and their precisely created alveoli, the oxygen wee breathe replaces the carbon dioxide, the “exhaust” of the blood system. The process of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide is so complicated that one scientist wrote, "it is more difficult to exchange O2 for CO2 than for a man shot out of a cannon to carve the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as he passes by." DNA contains about 2,000 genes per chromosome—1.8 meters of DNA are folded into each cell nucleus. A nucleus is 6 microns long. This is like putting 30 miles of fishing line into a cherry pit. And it isn’t simply stuffed in. It is folded in. If folded one way, the cell becomes a skin cell. If another way, a liver cell, and so forth. To write out the information in one cell would take 300 volumes, each volume 500 pages thick. The human body contains enough DNA that if it were stretched out, it would circle the sun 260 times. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson marvels at what makes up human life: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids…in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. [For example, to make collagen,] you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence…. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn't going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about ninety feet, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively forever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to two hundred, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all two hundred coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10260 (that is 1 followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms in the universe…. Yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you. God has put all this together, and He keeps it running as well. The Scripture says that the entire universe is held together by the Word of His power. Colossians 1:17 says, He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Creator and Sustainer. The human body uses energy efficiently. If an average adult rides a bike for 1 hour at 10 mph, it uses the amount of energy contained in 3 ounces of carbohydrate. If a car were this efficient with gasoline, it would get 900 miles to the gallon. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful; I know that full well. (Ps 139:14) SONG: GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS [Back to Top]