Who Am I? Series

There is a question that is being hotly debated right now that’s pretty much dominating the news and threatening to perhaps tear our country apart and the debate is scary and uncomfortable but maybe it’s a good thing because we’re wrestling with an important question … perhaps the most important question of all: What is life? An appropriate topic for Mother’s Day, amen?

When I was about 10 years old, I took my father’s BB gun and was playing with it … which I wasn’t supposed to be doing. It wasn’t very powerful or very accurate. My brothers and I used to chase each other around and shoot each other with it. It stung a little bit and left a red mark … that was about it. One day, I took aim at a squirrel that was climbing down the big cherry tree that we had in the backyard and, much to my surprise, I hit it in the eye. It took a long time to die … or at least it seemed like a long time to me … probably a half hour … and I probably should have put it out of its misery but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it … so, I cried and waited until it finally died and then I buried it.

During that time, as I watched it die, I was deeply disturbed by what I had done. I had taken a life. That squirrel was just going about its day when I ended its life … and there was nothing that I could do to fix it. God gave it life. I took it away. And I didn’t have the power to give it its life back and it broke my heart to think that I had taken away the most precious thing that that squirrel had … life.

Psalm 8 is a celebration of the Creator and Giver of Life. “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1). It describes the works of God’s fingers … the moon and stars. It praises God for His creation … the sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish and all the creatures that live in the sea (Psalm 8:3, 7-8). And then it praises God for making us … who crowned us with glory and honor and gave us dominion over His creation and the responsibility to take care of it. And yet, David raises the question: “what are human beings that You are mindful of them, mortals that You care for them?” (Psalm 8:4).

Last week I said it was important for you to paint a picture of God because that picture determines how we relate to God. As we are going to see, what we believe about what God sees when He looks at us can also deeply affect how we see ourselves and the world and those around us with whom we share dominion over God’s creation. Are we just some accident? Some random lump of cells? Or are we fearfully and wonderfully made by a Divine, Loving Creator?

Let’s start with the premise that we are just random accidents. There is the theory that all life rose out of some primordial ooze made up of a slurry of chemicals. A lucky combination of the right chemicals. It would have to be random and an accident because chemicals are just substances. They don’t have thoughts or feelings. It’s not like some carbon and nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen were just swimming around in this primordial soup and decided to hook up and form something as sophisticated and complex as a human being. While these chemicals could possibly exist in large amounts, the odds of them getting together in just the right combination to form simple sugars and proteins … though not impossible … would be mathematically astronomical. But let’s give these theorists the benefit of the doubt. Chemical chains form. They combine with other chains and become more involved, more and more complex but at what point do these chains form thought? At what point did they acquire the desire and the drive to re-create themselves and survive? At what point did these chemicals cross the line from being inert to “living” entities? And again, it raises the question of what does it mean to be “alive”?

If we are the result of random combinations of chemicals that somehow evolved into more and more complex combinations that eventually became sheep and oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the air, and all the creatures that live in the seas … what would be the point or purpose of life? Seriously. What is the point of life? To struggle and survive, to grab as much pleasure as possible for as long as possible only to succumb to the inevitable? Why this drive to re-create ourselves over and over again? So that our off-spring can struggle to survive, to grab as much pleasure as possible for as long a possible … producing off-spring who will struggle to survive and produce more off-spring who will have to struggle to survive … but to what end? For what purpose?