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Psalm 139:1 O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. 5 You hem me in--behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, behold, you! 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. 19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! 20 They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? 22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Craftsman
The last two weeks in our study of this psalm we have examined five attributes of God. Today in verse 13 we come to a sixth wonderful life-sustaining, joy-giving truth about God. We could title this one Creator, since it is all about God’s work of creation, but I think it is more specific than that. It is not just God as Creator, but it is about God’s work of creating me in particular, and the amazing craftsmanship involved.
Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
Known through Creation
This is still part of the discussion of God’s amazing knowledge of each of us. You are deeply and thoroughly known by God - and not just through observation. He knows you by His penetrating, omniscient gaze that can search and discern all your thoughts and motives and feelings and desires. But even beyond that, He knows you at an even deeper level. He pieced you together in the womb. If you got a new smart phone, it is one thing to learn everything about what that phone does by examining it and using it. But it is another level altogether if you were the one who wrote every line of the code in the software programs, and you designed and personally built every component in that phone and then put it all together. Every component of your being was designed and built by God.
Glorious Craftsmanship
You do not have to travel to Niagara Falls or look up at the stars to be awed by God's mighty power. All you have to do is look in the mirror.
Your Body
One of my commentaries on this verse said it would have been natural for the pre-scientific mind like David's to wonder about the development of an embryo. I just had to shake my head when I read that. It was written in the 1800's - right after the Enlightenment when they thought they knew everything. A couple hundred more years of scientific advancement has gotten us to the point where we are more baffled than ever at the development of an embryo. How do you start with a single cell, and it starts dividing, and in a matter of weeks it has a brain? And a skeleton? Most cells, when they divide, they just duplicate themselves. How does this one cell divide into 300 different kinds of cells (brain cells, skin cells, fat cells, bone cells...)? And how come those cells all just divide and create only new forms of their own cell? Skin cells only create more skin cells, never brain cells or anything else.
Let's just talk about the brain cells for a minute. If you are pregnant, then in the past 60 seconds, your baby added a quarter of a million new neurons. And every one of those quarter million new neurons that are formed every minute behaves as if it knew where it belonged and which other cells it has to make connections with. Each cell joins only to the cells it needs to be connected with, and no others. And it is not just that each cell has to connect to one or two other cells. Each one has to make thousands of connections across gaps known as synapses. Signals are sent across those synapses through a very complex chemical and electrical process. Think of each synapse like a little on/off switch. If you take just one portion of the brain - the cerebral cortex, which is just a layer of tissue on the surface of the brain - there are about 20 billion neurons just in that portion of your brain. Every one of those neurons has to make thousands of connections. Just in the cerebral cortex alone there are between 100 and 500 trillion synapses (switches). That is more than all the connections in all electrical appliances and computers and routers and Internet connections in the whole world - in your brain. That is like the number of stars in 1000 Milky Way galaxies. For your baby's brain to work, it is going to need to be properly wired with that many connections. Those cells connect to the wrong places and the brain doesn't work. When you were in your mother's womb, who made sure none of those hundreds of trillion connections got their wires crossed?
All that was completed by the time you were born. You have never had more brain cells than when you were born. By age three, you had already lost half your brain cells, and it has been declining ever since.
But here is the amazing thing. A few years ago some scientists developed a new method of mapping out the connections in the brain, and they found the figures I just gave you are not quite right. It is true that there are hundreds of trillions synapses - they had that part right. Where they were wrong was in thinking that each synapse was like an on/off switch. It turns out, each synapse contains more like 1000 different switches, which means the overall complexity of the function of the brain is orders of magnitude beyond what they thought. The complexity of the brain is staggering beyond comprehension.
And all these hundreds of trillions of electrical connections operate continuously day and night for 70+ years on 20 watts of power - fueled largely by cheeseburgers and French fries.
And that is just one organ in your body. How about your heart? Your heart is about the size of your fist and weighs less than eight ounces And since yesterday it has already pumped 1800 gallons of blood. Every single day that little eight ounce blob in your chest does enough work to lift 36 tons one foot off the ground.
And when you get up to the level of your body's systems (circulatory system or respiratory system, nervous system - I think there are 11 different systems) - you could spend your whole life studying just one of those. It is complexity beyond what words can describe.
What orchestrates all this complexity? If you ask a scientist he will say, "Oh that’s easy - acid." It is all mapped out in an acid - deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Coiled up inside every one of your cells is a strand of DNA that is encoded information - all the information that dictates how every one of your trillions of cells in your body will develop and operate throughout your whole life - including features that are unique to you (hair color, eye color, height, aspects of your personality, etc.). If you stretched out one strand of DNA in one cell it would be nine feet long (all of the DNA in your body would reach from here to the moon), but it is all coiled up so that it fits inside a microscopic cell (and unlike your extension cord at home, it never gets tangled). In fact, the exact way it is coiled up is crucial for its function. Coil it any other way and it wouldn't work.
Every cell in your body contains enough information to fill 5000 books with 200 pages each. It is amazing that that much information can be stored in a space much smaller than a human cell. But what really struck me when I was reading about it this week is the relatively small amount of information that is. The amount of information stored in your DNA is actually less than a half of a gig. The excel file where we record our church attendance is three times that size. One-third of the space it takes to keep track of who showed up at our little church is all it takes for God to encode all the directions for all of your characteristics and how every one of your trillions of cells will function throughout your entire life. From the time you were one single cell until now the only thing that has been added to you has been nourishment.
The complexity of the human body is staggering beyond human comprehension. Darwin knew that, but he figured evolution was still possible, because if you take the basic building block, the cell, which is like a little blob of jelly, if it kept dividing, and if enough of them fall into place you get a living organism, and the organism can develop greater complexity over time. One of the modern discoveries that has totally debunked Darwin's theory is the fact that cells are not what Darwin thought. They are not simplistic little blobs of jelly that could just come together by chance. Cells are incredibly complex machines. In fact, it is a little misleading to compare it to a machine or even a computer. A human cell is more like a city. If you think of the city of Denver, with all the communications, and the infrastructure, highways and transit systems, waste management, the electrical grid, plumbing - all the complexity of an entire city – that is what each cell in your body is like. And all of it has to be functioning in order for the cell to be operational. A friend of mine was working on a Master’s degree in biology and one of his classes was Introduction to the Cell - a whole semester just to introduce the basics of the cell.
Exploring the human body is like exploring the universe - it is not long before you short out every one of those billions of neurons. And all this information that orchestrated and organized all this complexity - where did that information come from? There are a lot of problems with naturalism and the theory of evolution, but none is greater than this one. The more they study the field of information theory the more they realize that information cannot come through the evolutionary process. It always requires intelligence. If you took a walk on the beach and came across three sticks forming a triangle, you might think that just happened by chance with the waves. That is possible, because no information is being communicated. But if you saw some sticks that spelled out the words, "New 1:25 group starting on Friday nights at the Montoya home," no one in his right mind would see that and think, "Oh, look what the waves did." You would instantly assume that some person put those sticks like that, because you understand that if information is being communicated, that information had to come out of someone's mind. There are no examples anywhere in the creation of information appearing where it did not exist before apart from the intervention of an intelligent source.
So the presence of information in our cells points to a Creator. And the nature of that information points to a Creator with an intelligence far, far beyond what the human mind can even conceive of.
Your Inner Man
So the piecing together of your body in the womb is a marvel beyond comprehension. But that is not the most amazing thing that happened in the womb. David says you created my inmost being. That is a reference to his inner man - his heart and soul and spirit. God also created the immaterial part of you while you were in the womb. What is that? With all our vast, scientific discovery, we have no idea of what the soul even is. We can say with absolute certainty that it exists. If you try to doubt that it exists, you need your inner man to do the doubting! It is not your body that is doubting it. So it is obvious that we have both a physical, material part and an immaterial, non-physical part. And yet we cannot imagine what it even is. What is your soul made out of? What is the meaning of something that exists without physicality? What tethers your soul to your body? Wherever your body is, that is where your heart and soul are. It is always present only where your body is present and nowhere else. It is tethered to your body.
And yet that tether is breakable. We know that soul and body are separated at death. Obviously there is a huge difference in a person one minute before he dies and one minute after he dies. All the same chemicals are present in his body. All the same cells are there. Physically he is the same, but it is crystal clear that the person is not there anymore.
And while you are alive, how do the connections between soul and body work? Someone hands you a written message, letting you know that a loved one died. That piece of information is not physical. And it is understood and interpreted by the part of you that is not physical. And the sadness and sorrow you feel – that is in your inner man. But it affects your body. Physical tears form and run down your face.
And it works the other way too - physical things can have an effect on your inner man. I told you last week how just the physical action of Tracy putting her hand on me can impart non-physical things like encouragement and happiness and inner strength and motivation.
When your inner man causes your body to move, where does that power come from? Suppose you decide to read your Bible. It starts in your inner man - motives, attitudes, desires, etc. They come together to make the decision, "I'm going to read my Bible." So your mind activates your brain, and chemicals start moving in your brain. Where does the soul get the power to activate that physical movement in the brain?
When David says that God created his inmost being and then knit him together in the womb, it is more than just the formation of his body. That is mind-blowing enough. But it is also the knitting together of that body with the soul and mind and heart and will.
A Person in the Womb
When you look in the mirror, do not become preoccupied with how you compare, good or bad, with other people or what people think of you. Become preoccupied with God and His handiwork. Think about what happened while you were in the womb.
15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
Here David describes the womb as being like the depths of the earth - a secret place where no one can see. The whole time your mom was looking at books that describe the development of the baby at various states of the pregnancy, God was actually watching it firsthand. In fact, He was the one doing it. He was proactively piecing you together in the womb.
Do you see that phrase in verse 16 - my unformed body? That word refers to a formless, unfinished mass. In the late states of a pregnancy the unborn baby looks like a baby. But the earlier you get, the less it seems to have a human form. I read an article this week that argued that it is ok to kill what is in your womb because if you look at it in the early stages it does not look human, therefore it is not human. But David was David even when he was an unformed little blob.
When did he get his soul? When he was born? No - we saw in verse 13 that it was inside the womb where God knit together not only your body but also your inner man. When does a person first become a person? What does science tell us?
Science
From science we learn that an embryo is not just a part of the mother's body. The development and behavior of every body part in a woman’s body is determined by that woman's DNA. But the development of the child, from the moment of conception, is not determined by the mother's DNA. It is determined by the DNA of that new child - who is a different person with different DNA.
Scripture
That is what we know from science. And Scripture verifies that.
Psalm 51:5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
David traces his bent toward evil all the way back to conception. For him to have been sinful he had to have been a person. Tissue blobs are not sinful or righteous. When Mary first got pregnant and went to see Elizabeth:
Luke 1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb
Elizabeth is in her sixth month, and what is inside her is called the baby. And the fact that John responded to the presence of Jesus points not only to John's being a person, but to Jesus existing as a person.
And look at how Mary is described:
43 But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
Even when you are just a few days pregnant, you are a mother. Sometimes when a first child is born the dad will say, "I became a father today!" No you didn't. You have been a father for nine months. When Carolyn-Nicole was born the hospital gave me a T-shirt that said, "I became a father at Hinsdale Hospital." I never wanted to wear that shirt because I don't know for sure where I was when I became a father, but I am quite certain it was not in a hospital.
When in Doubt...
And if none of that convinces you, and you are still not quite sure when a baby becomes a human being - what should a person do if they don’t know for sure? Imagine yourself working on something in your garage, and your 7-year-old walks up behind you and says, "Dad, can I kill this?" What would you say? If you would say yes without even turning around, I think you are a little overboard on permissive parenting. Any responsible parent, before answering him one way or the other, you want to know what he has. If it is a mosquito or a roach or a weed, you will probably say yes. If it is the neighbor’s dog, you will probably say no (although some of you would be tempted). If it is your neighbor, you would for sure say no.
It is not enough for the abortionists to say, "We don't know for sure if an embryo is a human being." The burden of proof is on them to prove conclusively that it is not human before being allowed to kill it. If I am out hunting and I hear a noise behind a bush and I shoot at that noise, and it turns out it is another hunter and my shot kills him, I am going to jail. Why? Because it is against the law to kill something if you don't know what it is. And the reality is, when it comes to an unborn baby, we do know what it is. It is a human being, and so to kill it is to commit murder.
"What if I've already had an abortion?"
If you have had an abortion, confess it to God as sin, ask Him to forgive you, and if your faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ He will forgive you and separate the guilt of that sin and every other sin as far from you as the east is from the west and He will never again remember it against you, which means you never have to remember it against yourself.
Architect
Foreknowledge...of Me!
So the fact that God created you means He knows everything there is to know about what you are like. And the fact that God created you for a purpose means He not only knows what you are like, but He had it all planned out ahead of time.
16 ...All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
What does that mean - ordained? In what sense were each of the days of my life ordained by God (your Bible might say formed or planned)? That word literally means to shape something.
Isaiah 29:16 Shall the potter be regarded as the clay ... or the thing formed say of him who formed it, "He has no understanding"?
That word formed is this same term. Before you were born, God sat down at His potter's wheel and formed your whole life. He planned out every single day, and wrote it all down in His book. Your Daytimer is second edition. The first edition was written before you existed. Every day, written out, everything that would take place. This is not talking only about generalities - where you would go to school or who you would marry. It includes every detail of every day - every step you take.
Proverbs 20:24 A man's steps are directed by the Lord. How then can anyone understand his own way?
God does not just decide how long your life will be; He directs every step. And so we worship God and stand in awe not just because of His exquisite craftsmanship of our bodies and soul, but also because He is the brilliant, Master Architect of our lives.
Jeremiah 10:23 I know, O Lord, that a man's life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps.
Proverbs 16:1 To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue.
Proverbs 16:9 In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.
Proverbs 16:33 The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
Evil, Sovereignty, and Free Will
Now, I know when some of you hear that it gives you no joy at all. In fact, it fills you with anxiety. It bothers you because it brings up two difficult questions:
1) What about free will?
2) What about evil?
If God pre-plans everything that makes it seem like I am just a puppet, and my decisions don't really determine what happens. And what about sin? If God preplanned every day, then what about my sinful days? Is God guilty of causing moral evil?
The answer is no, God is not guilty of causing evil, and yes, your free will is still intact. God is never guilty of generating evil (Jas.1:13). He never forces anyone to sin, He never nudges anyone in the direction of sin, He never entices or tempts toward sin. All of the force God exerts on the human soul is in the direction of righteousness, never sin. So no, God is not guilty of making anyone sin.
And is our free will still intact? Yes. That is why Scripture gives us commands and then gives us reasons to obey those commands. And countless times in the Bible things are said to have happened a certain way because of what human beings decided. In fact, in some cases it even says things would have been different if the human beings involved would have decided differently (e.g. 2 Sam.12:8).
"But I don't understand how all three of those things can be true - that God pre-planned everything, and yet we still have free will and our decisions really do determine outcomes, and God is not guilty of causing sin. How can all three of those things be true?"
My answer to that is very simple: Don't worry about it. You don't understand it? Fine. There are all kinds of things I don't understand that I don't worry about. Scientists cannot explain how light can behave like a wave in some contexts and like a particle in other contexts. It seems like a contradiction, because it cannot be both. So what is the explanation? I don't know, but I can tell you I lose zero sleep over it.
And if there are things in the creation that are over my head, should I be so shocked to discover that some things about God are beyond what my little brain can compute? I cannot even understand everything about Tracy - or myself - and would I expect to fully understand everything about God? It is not that hard to just believe the things the Bible says.
1) God pre-planned and formed every one of my days before I was born.
2) Nevertheless, I am still responsible for my decisions.
3) God is not guilty of evil.
None of those three things are complicated or hard to understand. If you cannot see how they go together, don't worry about it. Just sit back and enjoy everything God says in His Word.
It is so sad if someone misses the wonder of this truth because they don't want to deal with a paradox. They think they have to deny this doctrine in order to protect other doctrines. And so they miss out on the joy of knowing that God pre-planned every day of their life before they were ever conceived.
Go back to a year or two before you were born. Go up to heaven, open God's book, and before your parents even starting thinking about names for their baby, there is your name in His book. And under your name - if you go down far enough, there is an entry for the date Sept.22, 2013. You might have to blow a little dust off of it, because it has been there since the creation of the world. But if you look at that entry, there it all is - the clothes you put on this morning, what you had for breakfast, how you felt during the day today, what thoughts will go through your mind later today, how it would strike you when we sang Fairest Lord Jesus, and whether or not you would be distracted when we got to verse 3. There is an entry just as detailed for tomorrow's date. And it is not just God looking into a crystal ball and observing what will happen - He is the Architect of it. Before your parents even knew each other - before Adam knew Eve, it was all written right there in God's marvelous novel of the ages.
Is this novel based on a true story? No, the true story is based on God's novel. God did not write what He wrote because it was going to happen; it happens because God wrote it. Some want to say God just looked into the future, observed what sovereign man would do, and dutifully wrote it down - so that we are the prime, ultimate determiners of reality and God only comes along behind us and responds to our decrees. What a terrifying world that would be! The reality is, God is the first Cause, He is primary, His determination is first, and things happen because He ordained them to happen. What grace, that we might be characters in His marvelous novel of the ages! God not only created us, but He is the Author and Architect of our lives.
We were comforted in the first 12 verses of this psalm where God observes everything we do or say or think. But here - He knows us not only from observing what we do, but also by foreknowledge of it all. He knows everything that will happen to you, and He planned it all out taking into consideration how it would all play out from your point of view. God did not just plan that everything would take place in a certain way. He planned it so that everything would take place in a certain way from your perspective! He did not just plan a sunny day today. He took into consideration what impact a sunny day would have on your mood and the clothes you would put on. And He took into consideration what impact your mood and dress would have on others around you and their moods and thoughts and decisions, ad infinitum! What vastness of wisdom! And what wonderful, condescending mercy and grace, that He would care at all about how something would affect me.
Application
So, God is the exquisite Craftsman who made me and the omnipotent Architect of my life. Great information, but what does that mean for how I should live? How do we put this sermon into practice? The answer is in verse 14. All we have to do is take our cues from David.
Praise
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made
The way to respond to this truth is with praise. Great theology always results in great doxology. (Doxology is worship - glorifying God.) If you ever study theology and it does not result in worship, your theology is bad. No matter how much information you know about various doctrines, if it does not draw exuberant praise out of your heart, you are a poor theologian. You see people who have read every book on the end times, or they have the doctrines of grace all figured out, but their pride is through the roof and they have more anger than joy. Those people are ignorant about end times and the doctrines of grace. They have missed the point and they need to go back to the drawing board.
Apart from Christ Himself, I believe David may have been the greatest theologian of all time. No one teaches us more about God than David. He was a consummate theologian, and he is also probably one of the greatest worshippers of all time. True theology always leads to joyful doxology.
Gratitude
And a key part of doxology and praise is thanksgiving. One of the chief ways we praise God is by expressing our gratitude to Him. In verse 14, some of your Bibles say, I praise you... and other translations say I thank you... That same word can mean thank or praise. I have studied that word a lot and I have never been able to figure out when it should be translated one way or the other. The two meanings seem to be so close that I think the word probably carries both ideas every time it is used. You cannot separate thanksgiving from praise.
And so one of the chief ways we praise God for the way He created us is through gratitude. Every time you look in the mirror you should thank God. Now, of course there are wrong ways to do that. You don't want to do that in a prideful way that centers on yourself. (You look in the mirror and say, "Oh wow! That is absolutely fabulous. Thank You, God, for making me so much better than everyone else.") You don’t want to do it like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 when he says, “I thank you that I am not like other men...” That was an attitude of such pride and arrogance that proved that man wasn’t even saved. The point of all this is not to boost your self-esteem. That is the last thing I want to do. The purpose is not to increase how much esteem you have for yourself; the purpose is to increase the esteem you have for God. That is true gratitude. It has nothing to do with how you compare with other people.
If you give me a gift, and I am truly thankful for that gift, that gratitude is not focused on me or on anyone else. It is focused on you - the giver. If you give me a gift I don’t deserve, that does not increase my opinion of myself; it increases my love for you. And that is what happened in David’s heart when he looked in the mirror. He saw the good things God had given him and instead of it making him think about himself more, it made him think about God more. The problem with putting yourself down all the time is it is a failure of gratitude.
Thanks for the Future
We should constantly be thanking God for the genius and beauty of what He did in creating our bodies and souls and forming the days of our lives on His potter's wheel. And for us, that gratitude extends into the future. For most people, thanksgiving is something that always has to do with the past or present. But God is so good and so trustworthy and so powerful and sovereign that we can be grateful for what He is going to do tomorrow even though we don't know what it is! The cure for worry in Philippians 4 is - in everything, with thanksgiving, present our requests to God. We see a scary situation on the horizon, and so we thank God for however He is planning on handling it, because we know for sure it will be good.
People ask me all the time what my vision is for the future of this church. What do I see for the year 2020 in this church? My answer is I don't have a vision, because I can't see the future. But I can tell you this, I bless the name of the great Architect of our lives for whatever it is He has planned for us in that year! And the same goes for the year 2050, when I will likely either be already at home with Him or in the process of dying.
Any time you find yourself wondering about what the future holds, let that wondering remind you that it is something that God wrote in His book – something He wrote because He was pleased to write it – something He wrote even though He had the full freedom to have written anything else. Any time you are tempted to complain or grumble, remember that you are about to grumble over something that God intentionally wrote into His book, even though He could have written anything He wanted – that is what He chose to write.
Fear and Wonder
What is the application for our lives of this text? Praise, thanksgiving, and one more:
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
The word translated fearfully literally means, that which creates fear. That Hebrew word is usually translated awesome. Wonderfully means that which causes wonder. David says, "I was created in a way that creates fear and awe and wonder."
Again, you don't have to travel to the Swiss Alps to experience awe - all you have to do is look at your fingernail - and learn a little biology. Every cell in the human body, the more you learn about it, the more awesome God becomes in your sight.
That is why evolutionists are so militant about cramming their beliefs down everyone's throat. The unmistakable thumbprint of deity on the creation of the human body points so clearly to God that, if a person wants to deny God or ignore God, the only way he can do it is to adopt some kind of belief system that can explain the existence of the human body another way. That is the purpose of the belief system of evolution - to create a way where a person can ignore God and still pretend to have some degree of intelligence.
You say, "how can an intelligent adult believe that if you start with nothing but a cloud of hydrogen and helium, if you wait long enough eventually you'll have human beings?” Without any intelligent design or power, a series of random, purposeless, meaningless changes produced creatures who can contemplate their own existence and who have consciences and who can create something like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and phones that you can talk to and they will answer your questions and who penned the Bible?
The reason so many people are willing to believe that theory is because the alternative is to acknowledge a Creator. And not just any Creator, but an awesome Creator - a Creator whose power is so massive that He cannot be safely ignored. They do not want to face the fact that there is a God who made them and owns them, to whom they are someday going to have to give an account, and so they opt to believe in a theory that seems to explain God away.
If that is you, please, open your eyes to reality and bend your knee before your awesome Creator, and instead of denying Him or explaining Him away with theories, or ignoring Him, worship Him! And for those of us who already do worship Him, let's look deeper into the wonders of what He has done, and His thumbprint on your body, and His brushstrokes on your soul, and His infinite power and wisdom in forming all the days of your life.
Benediction: Romans 11:33-36 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34"Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?" 35 "Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?" 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
1:25 Questions
1) Which areas of theology tend to draw your heart into worship most easily? And in which areas of theology do you seem to be missing the point (they pull you into worship the least)?
2) What kinds of thoughts about God tend to generate the most gratitude in your heart regarding the future?
3) What are some things about the way God designed your inner man that you are especially thankful for?
