Life

During a gathering of entrepreneurs in Las Vegas one of the speakers was a brand architect at Lego. During his presentation, he handed each attendee six Lego bricks. Then he asked them to estimate the number of unique combina¬tions that could be created with those six bricks. This sounded like a trick question, so one attendee aimed high and guessed several hundred combina¬tions. That left him several hundred million short of the actual answer!

Are you ready for this? The total number of possible permutations—six bricks with eight studs each—is 915,403,765. Nearly a billion possible permutations with six Lego bricks!

While the number of possible Lego combinations is mind-boggling, it pales in comparison to the sheer complexity and potential combinations found within DNA. Here's why:

Legos have a limited number of ways they can connect. DNA, on the other hand, uses four different "bases" (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) that can pair in specific ways. However, the sequence of these base pairs is what carries the genetic information, and this sequence can vary enormously.

A single strand of DNA can contain millions or even billions of these base pairs. A gene, which is a specific segment of DNA, might be hundreds or thousands of base pairs long. The number of possible sequences for a gene, let alone an entire DNA molecule, is astronomically huge.

To give you a sense of the scale, the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs.
Even a relatively short gene of 1,000 base pairs has 4^1000 possible sequences (4 because there are 4 bases). That's a 4 followed by 1,000 zeros, a number far exceeding the number of atoms in the known universe!

Possible Preaching Angle:
The information encoded in DNA is incredibly vast and precisely organized, making the Lego analogy seem in comparison. It serves as a powerful reminder of the awe-inspiring power and intelligence behind creation and is a testimony to the purposeful Creator behind life.

Societies that do not value human life, especially at its most vulnerable moments in the mother’s womb or in the last days, are dying (often quite literally) political entities that have lost their purpose. Destroy the family, and you don’t have much of a society.

That’s why the following stats are so concerning: The E.U.’s fertility rate in 2022 was 1.49, well below replacement. And when compared to close to five in Africa and 3.14 in the Arab world, Europe is dying. Many European allies eliminate around three hundred human lives for every one thousand live births. The U.K. has about 330 abortions per one thousand live births; France just above three hundred, which incidentally is the same as Russia. (The U.S. is not far behind, with about two hundred abortions per one thousand live births.)

No wonder an article in First Things concludes, “The West is killing itself.”

“Life will not be contained, life breaks free, it expands to new territories, it crashes into barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously,” said Jeff Goldblum, playing the role of chaos theory mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm in the iconic 1993 film Jurassic Park. “I’m simply saying that, well, life finds a way.”

That line was part of a fictional exchange, but it might have just as easily been uttered by real life scientists, baffled by a recent discovery at a storefront aquarium in North Carolina.

Charlotte the stingray lives at the Aquarium and Shark Lab in Henderson, North Carolina. She’s more than two thousand miles away from her natural habitat, off the coast of southern California. And it’s been more than eight years since she shared a tank with a male of her species, instead sharing a tank with five small sharks. But somehow, Charlotte has become pregnant.

Marine biologists call the process parthenogenesis, where a mammal can reproduce offspring from unfertilized eggs. It’s a rare phenomenon, but similar behaviors have been observed in other animals like California condors, Komodo dragons, and yellow-bellied water snakes. According to Katy Lyons, a research scientist at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Charlotte’s pregnancy is the first occurrence of her species, the round stingray.

“I’m not surprised,” said Lyons. “Because nature finds a way of having this happen.”

Editor’s Note: Unsurprisingly, the casual temptation for a skeptic may be to suggest that, even if there were a Jesus of Nazareth born of a virgin, it could have been through a parthenogenetic process. But given that parthenogenesis results in a near clone of the parent—and hence, all offspring are female—no one can suggest that a virgin conception of Christ could have been anything but miraculous. For further information, follow this link to Answers in Genesis.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is sovereign and will not be constrained by any earthly obstacles, whether from biology or technology. Miracles do happen and they testify to God’s power. If we continue to submit our lives to God’s will, we might very well witness an unexpected blessing.

Every person starts as one fertilized egg, which by adulthood has turned into roughly 37 trillion cells. But those cells have a formidable challenge. These cells must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA perfectly, about once every 24 hours. To speed up the process, cells start replication in multiple spots with people having tens of thousands of them throughout their genomes.

However, this poses its own challenge: How to know where to start and how to time everything. Without precision control, some DNA might get copied twice, causing cellular pandemonium. Bad things can happen if replication doesn’t start correctly. For DNA to be copied, the DNA double helix must open up, and the resulting single strands are vulnerable to breakage or the process can get stuck.

It takes a tightly coordinated dance involving dozens of proteins for the DNA-copying machinery to start replication at the right point in the cell’s life cycle. Keeping tight reins on the kickoff of DNA replication is particularly important to avoid that pandemonium.

Today, researchers are making steps toward a full understanding of the molecular checks and balances that have evolved in order to ensure that each origin initiates DNA copying once and only once, to produce precisely one complete new genome.

Possible Preaching Angle:

3,000 years ago, King David exclaimed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Ps. 139:14). Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially since that time and we should be even more in awe of God’s creative genius on display.

The dramatic increase in life expectancy confuses people. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the average life span was about 45 years. Now people are expected to live up to 78.5 years. That has spurred an unwarranted optimism, when in truth, the overwhelming majority of the increase is the result of a decrease in infant mortality.

At the turn of the twentieth century, about 10 to 15 percent of all children died before their first birthdays, mostly from infectious diseases. But because of medical advances, today less than one percent of children die before their first birthdays. Thus, Olshansky and Carnes point out in their book The Quest for Immortality, “The rise in the life expectancy has slowed to a crawl.”

Another thing that confuses people is thinking that if we could cure cancer, most of us would live many more years. Not true. In fact, Harvard demographer Nathan Keyfitz calculated that if researchers cured all forms of cancer, people would live only a measly 2.2 years longer before they died of something else! Unless science cures the majority of all diseases, as author Stephen Cave writes, “Then the result is not a utopia of strong-bodied demigods but a plethora of care homes and hospitals filled with the depressed, the diseased and the incontinent old.” In that case “it is not about living longer but dying slower.”

A recent Aperture video gives a concise overview of absurdism: the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd. It begins with the Greek mythological story of Sisyphus. The gods were displeased with his arrogance and punished him with the futile task of pushing a rock up a hill, then having the rock roll back down every time he reached the top.

Classical interpretations of the myth view it as an allegory for the futility of trying to escape death. No matter how powerful or clever a person is, we're all doomed to meet the same fate. More modern audiences have found something more relatable about Sisyphus' struggle: seeing it not as a simple parable about the inevitability of death but more like a metaphor for the drudgery and monotony of their own lives.

Every day we wake up, make coffee, take commute to work, stare at a computer for hours, get yelled at by our boss, stare at the computer some more, then travel back home, binge Netflix or YouTube while eating dinner, go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again. Just like Sisyphus we seem condemned to repeat the same meaningless tasks over and over and over.

Most of us do this every day for the rest of our lives as though we're sleepwalking, never waking up or stopping to ask why. For some of us, one day we're standing on a street corner preparing to go to work, when in an instant we're struck by the strangeness of it all. Suddenly nothing appears to have purpose. Life is haphazard and meaningless. You look around and you whisper to yourself: Why are all of these people even in such a hurry? For that matter, why am I? What's the point of all this? Why am I even alive?

You can watch the video here (0-1 min. 57 sec.).

Two Christian university professors had an unusual assignment for students over a long break. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon told their students while they were on school break to take a long, good look at their belly button. Why? They explain:

Nothing is quite as revealing as our belly button ... by noting that we are creatures, creations of mothers and fathers, the Bible tells us that we have life as a gift. We are begotten, not manufactured. Someone even changed our diapers; our first hint of what grace must be like. No wonder some of us resent our parents, for they are a visible, ever-present reminder that we were created, that the significance of our lives is not exclusively self-derived.

In contrast, it is all too easy in today's Western culture for us to imagine that we are self-made people. But your belly button does not merely remind you of Mom and Dad, but of your Creator and Redeemer, from whom you have life, meaning, and purpose.

The Starbucks at the CIA headquarters is not allowed to take names for orders. It’s not “business as usual” for the Starbucks franchise housed inside the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. This particular store, code-named “Store Number 1,” operates much differently than their other 12,000+ stores in the U.S.—not surprising when it must accommodate clandestine spymasters working for the most powerful spy organization in the world.

This seller of skinny lattes and double cappuccinos is deep inside the agency’s forested Langley, Va., compound. Because the campus is a highly secured island, few people leave for coffee, and the lines can stretch down the hallway. Welcome to the “Stealthy Starbucks,” as a few officers affectionately call it.

Servers do not ask for the customer’s name (which they normally write on the coffee cup to expedite things), for undercover agents grow uncomfortable when someone asks for it. Even the receipts the baristas hand back have “Store Number 1” cryptically printed on them.

Each barista goes through a robust interview and background check before they are even told that they will be working at the CIA Starbucks. There are nine baristas working there and whenever they leave their work area, a CIA “minder” escorts them. All are regularly briefed about security risks and must report if someone seems overly interested in where they work or asks too many questions about their employment. They can’t even blow their own horns about working inside the CIA at nightclubs or parties and, if asked, can only tell friends, family members and acquaintances that they “work in a federal building.”

One barista said she has come to recognize people’s faces and their drinks. “There’s caramel-macchiato guy” and “the iced white mocha woman,” she said. “But I have no idea what they do. I just know they need coffee, a lot of it.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Compromise; Hiddenness; Light of the World - Agents and even baristas must remain secretive and anonymous at CIA headquarters. But there should be no “undercover Christians” who follow this pattern in their daily lives. Christ wants no hidden Christians; he wants us to shine as lights and be bold and open in our testimony as his followers. 2) Accountability; Secrets; Secrecy – Christians must be open and accountable with one another; there should be no hidden areas of our lives that we conceal while pretending to be godly. 3) Persecution – Some are covert Christians who practice Christianity in secret, often because they fear persecution or discrimination because they live in countries where Christianity is illegal or heavily restricted.

It is impossible to do justice to the wonder of the creation of the world and everything in it. You and I have to work hard to make anything. Even when you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, with all the pieces properly designed and a booklet of instructions, you are driven to the edge of your sanity trying to follow the instructions and assemble what you bought.

All of our DIY projects require mental focus, physical dexterity, and perseverance. We struggle to make things, even though we always start with raw materials, are following instructions, and have collected the appropriate tools. But you and I have never created anything; we do not make something out of nothing. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "Creation, as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. We only build. We always have materials to build from.”

The truth of creation should fill us with awe, humble us, and drop us to our knees. God, with nothing more than his will and his word literally spoke the universe into existence. Think of huge galaxies and little ants. Think of the body of an elephant and the translucent creatures that swim in the deep­est trenches of the sea. Think of huge towering trees and microscopic organisms. Think of the technology of the human eye and the intricate design of your hand. Genesis 1 and 2 are meant to put you in your place and insert God in his proper place in your heart and life.