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.
That signals the ostheoclasts that it is time for them to go to work.
Ostheoclasts are the demolition cells that attack the excess bulge of bone and dynamite it away and sweep it away into the blood stream where it is washed away.
Soon the bone is as good as new… actually better.
As long as you live, the ostheoblasts and ostheoclasts are racing around demolishing old bone and laying down new bone. Bone is continually renewed with fresh new bone.
By the time you are three years old, you have not one single bone cell you had when you were two.
Not only do the blasts replace bones but they do so according to usage. If you go the bone when you had a long gate, but now you are taking short strides... the blasts design the stress points to accommodate a short stride. If you start lifting weights, your bones adjust with design and mass.
You want to tell me that it was not a higher intelligence that knew and designed these things?
Can man design a material that can do that?
Can we believe it just happened?
One more example...white blood cells. They are the armed forces cells in the body. They are just lazy, amorphous white blobs in the blood stream.... most of the time. But just let some invader damage the vein. An alarm sounds chemically. Muscles cells contract around the damaged place, damming up the loss of precious blood. Clotting agents streak to the sight and halt the flow of the blood at the skin’s surface. Before long, scavenger cells appear to clean up the debris, and fibroblasts, the body’s weaving cells gather around the injury sight. Like beagles on a scent the white blood cells home in from all directions to the point of attack. They can even flow right through tissue to take the most direct route. They cover the sight, and surround the intruder bacteria. Once the bacteria are completely surrounded, the white blood cell uses its tiny granules of chemical explosives to detonate and destroy the invader.... and often itself too. We have 50 billion of these white blood cells and 100 times that much in reserve in the bone tissue. Each time a bacteria invades the body the cells categorize it and imprints certain cells with a death wish to destroy that bacteria. Those cells then spend their lives, coursing through the bloodstream searching, waiting for the enemy.
Can you tell me that it is not a great and all-knowing power that understood and designed those things?
0 lord my God, when I in AWESOME WONDER consider all the worlds thy hands hath made.... then sings my soul.... HOW GREAT THOU ART!
HIS SALVATION
“And when I think that God His Son not sparing, sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in.”
Think of it.... GOD’S SON WAS GIVEN IN MY PLACE.
I am not worthy, I should have to die for my own sin, and I should die for him.
Hundreds of men gave their life for me on D-Day... I am not worthy, but it is not the same as that this one should die because this one WAS GOD. GOD climbed up on that cross, was cursed and murdered... in my place.
John 3:16 says that God so loved ME... that he was willing to trade his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON.
Who do I love enough to give my only son for?
How could I do that yet He did.
If Ethan was dying of a heart defect, whom could I ask to give me the heart out of their twelve-year-old son’s chest?
If it were your son, would I give you Ethan’s?????
Our world places values on persons...
The general is more important than the private.
The president is more important than the homeless
If Leah were dying in need of blood and the president’s daughter was too, would they let my daughter have it... or His?
Now think about it… THIS IS GOD’S SON.... His perfect, sinless son... and I am the imperfect, sinful, lowly son of a service station owner… and God, His Father allows him to die so I can go free.
What manner of love is this?????
"He bled and died to take away my sin" I don’t deserve it.
How great a love that takes,
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee... HOW GREAT THOU ART, HOW GREAT THOU ART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HIS RAPTURE
"When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation, and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart..."
It is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13f READ
What kind of God can ride on the clouds and bring the angels with him?
What kind of God can have the power to keep the souls of the departed saints in heaven... Secure?
What kind of God can give the orders and all of the graves will give up their dead bodies that have been held prisoner?
What kind of God has the power to call up bodies from the depths of the sea or call back together the cells of a body blown to bits or rotted in the grave?
What kind of God can change those bodies into spiritual bodies ready to inhabit heaven for eternity...never dying, never being sick and never hurting?
What kind of God can reunite the soul with those changed bodies and have a heavenly being to spend eternity praising him?
What kind of God can rise up the living and change them in the twinkling of an eye into the same kind of heavenly body?
A GREAT GOD!
And HOW SHALL WE RELATE TO SUCH A GOD?
"Then I shall bow in humble adoration, and there proclaim, MY GOD, HOW GREAT THOU ART."
That is how we will spend eternity in heaven... praising God the Father.
That is how we are to live here...praising God the Father, the Savior, the one who gave His Son that we might live... the one who made it all.
Let us pray
Invitation: We have a great God... a God whose POWER is so great that He created, from nothing, all that now exists or ever existed.... a God whose KNOWLEDGE is so great that He knew your sins long before you were ever born… a God whose GRACE is so great that He is willing to forgive and forget every sin you ever committed, every sin you ever will... a God whose LOVE is so great that He gave his only begotten son to die in your place... a God whose POWER is so great that he will be God at the end of time and will remember those who have believed on him and trusted in him to save them and he will deliver them from the flames of Hell to spend eternity in Heaven... a God whose WEALTH is so great that he has storehouses of blessings in heaven that he wants to and does give to those who are faithful.
If you have that kind of GREAT God making that kind of Great offer... wouldn’t it be a Great shame to leave here today and miss out on it?
Come today and accept His GREAT love and blessings... as we sing...."How Great Thou Art."
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Medical information came from the book, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made"
