God's Pearl

O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens! Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, Because of Your enemies, That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen—Even the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, And the fish of the sea That pass through the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8:1-9

In these verses we find the psalmist marveling at God’s creation, and how we as one of God’s creations are honored by God. These verses also tell us of what place we hold in God’s heart.

The pesky housefly is the most talented aerodynamicist on the planet — superior to any bird, bat, or bee. According to a British scientist, “a housefly can make six turns a second, hover, fly straight up, fly straight down, fly backwards, do somersaults, land on the ceiling, and perform various other show-off maneuvers. And it has a brain smaller than a sesame seed.”

Flies are also loaded with sensors. In addition to their compound eyes, which permit panoramic imagery and are excellent at detecting motion, flies have wind-sensitive hairs and antennae. They also have three light sensors, called ocelli, on the tops of their heads, which tell them which way is up. Roughly two-thirds of a fly’s entire nervous system is devoted to processing visual images.

If God put so much wisdom into ordinary houseflies, imagine what it means to know that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

The psalmist looks at God’s creation of the heavens and the other works of his hand and wonders why God even cares about man. Compared to all creation man is so small, so seemingly insignificant. But God thinks different.

The psalmist is pondering the imponderables, and I have a few that I want to present to you.

• You tell a man there are 400 billion stars, and he will believe you. But tell him a bench has wet paint, and he feels the need to touch it. Why?

• Why do you put suits in garment bags and put garments in suitcases?

• If a cow suddenly laughed, would milk come out of its nose?

• How come glue does not stick to the inside of the bottle?

• Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?

• Why is a boxing ring square?

• If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes?

• Why are there five syllables in the word monosyllabic?

• Why do banks charge you a nonsufficient funds fee on money they know you don’t have?

• Why are they called apartments when they are stuck together?

God has entrusted all his earthly creation to man, to be stewards of it. Is that love or what? But humanity has a low opinion of itself, and this is evident by the fact that we rob and steal from each other, that we abuse each other mentally, emotionally, and physically. God created us to love and care for one another.

Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love God with your mind, body, and soul. The second greatest is like the first, to love your neighbor as yourself. God is asking us to just get along, and He knows that we can do it, but alas, we just don’t want to.

I believe that we feel that we are not capable of the task of the stewardship that God his placed upon us, and so we turn to our own selfish ways. But by the grace of God, the love of Christ Jesus, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit we can be better, we can be God’s pearl.

Many Germans who had immigrated to the United States were sitting in a theater when the movie Psyche was shown. The propaganda movie, produced by Hitler’s Third Reich in 1940, followed the invasion and Blitzkrieg through Poland. Whenever a Polish person appeared on the screen, people in the audience would scream, “Kill him! Kill him!” in a frenzied commitment to the destruction of Germany’s enemies.

W. H. Auden, the Pulitzer Prize – winning poet, playwright, and literary critic, was so shocked that he walked out of the theater. He later said one question ran through his mind: “What response can my enlightened, humanistic tradition give to this evil, to those who cry out for the blood of innocent victims?” He began to sense that the only answer to evil was not in humanism, but in God and the revelation of God in the Bible.