How Great Thou Art Series

How Great Thou Art

(Deuteronomy 10:17 NIV)

“For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome...”

This is one of the greatest and most popular hymns in Christendom.

It is not one of the oldest, however, having been translated and put to music in 1949.... many of you are older than that.

It was written in Sweden as a poem entitled "O Mighty God" by Carl Boberg in 1886. In 1925 it was set to music by Prof. E. Gustov Johnson and still called, "O Mighty God." In 1948 a London missionary to the Russian Ukraine heard the song and translated it into English as "How Great Thou Art." Since that time it has become one of the great hymns of the faith.

God is indeed great... all-powerful, all knowing, all loving and all present.

This song uses three main arguments to prove that greatness. His creation His salvation His rapture

HIS CREATION

Who in their right mind can stand on a mountain, top and view the majestic greatness of creation and not cry out... There is a higher intelligence.

Who can stand by Old Faithful, or Niagara Falls, or the Grand Tetons, or Grand Canyon and not know that there is a higher power?

You don’t need a bible or a preacher to tell you the truth... your eyes, ears, tongue, nose can all prove that God to you.

And there is no doubt that this higher power must be of the highest intelligence.

Let’s look at the body and see the hand of God. Start with first things first...what you see skin.

How great a God it took to invent skin...an organ like no other... weighing a mere nine pounds in the adult it flexes, folds, and crinkles around bends, and bumps and always stays supple. It knows where to be thick… like on your heel… and where to be thin… like an eyelid. It keeps out water and infection but allows in air. It knows where to be rough as sandpaper and where to be soft as a baby’s bottom. It can give without tearing and if it does...it can knit itself back together. Do you believe this happened by random chance?

And under the skin are the arteries...the rivers of blood…rivers of life…they are lined with small muscles that contract in rhythm to push the blood throughout your body. They can open and shut themselves off as needed... like when you are hot they open little arteries near the surface of the skin to allow the blood to be cooled by the air. Or if you are cold, they shut off the ones near the surface and keep the blood warm. (Your fingers get cold) Or if you are bleeding these rivers know how to dam themselves to prevent blood lose. They carry food and oxygen to your organs. They allow certain things to pass through the walls while keeping others in or out.

And how about the bones? No Exxon or NASA researcher has yet (nor ever will) discover a material as well-suited for the body as bone, which comprises 1/5 of the body weight…the arrangement of bone cells forms the lightest structure, made of the least material...but possessing incredible strength, enough to protect and support every other cell. In comparison, wood can withstand (only a fraction) of the pulling tension, and cannot possibly bear the compression forces of bone. Steel, which can absorb both forces, is 3 times the weight of bone and would burden us down.

Then, miraculously, the body takes this stress bearing bone and hollows it out, using a weight saving architectural principle that it took man centuries to discover; it then fills the vacant space in the center with an efficient red blood cell factory that turns out a trillion new cells per day. Then these new blood cells travel right through the bones and into the blood vessels. Bone is elastic enough to give but hard enough not to give. It knows which to do when. When a baby is born it has 350 bones that in time will harden into 206. The baby’s bones are soft and pliable so that passing through the birth canal is possible.

Maybe scientists will one day invent a material as strong and as light as bone, as supple yet as rigid as bone. But can they invent a substance that can grow continuously, lubricate itself, require no shut down time, and repair itself?

That is right... repairs itself. When a bone breaks, an elaborate process begins. Excited repair cells invade in a swarm; within two weeks a cartilage-like sheath called callus surrounds the break. Then come the OSTHEOBLASTS… the cement laying cells. Gradually they break down the callus and replace it with fresh bone. In two or three months the fracture sight is marked by a mass of new bone that bulges over both sides of the broken ends like a spliced garden hose.