Majesty

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.

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

Democritus suggested that all matter in the universe was made up of tiny, indivisible, solid objects. He called these particles "atomos” which is Greek for “uncuttable” or “indivisible.” Later scientists discovered that these atoms could be divided into smaller particles known as the electron, proton, and neutron. Now, more than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand it.

High school physics teachers describe protons as featureless balls each with one unit of positive electric charge. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images. Most recently, a monumental analysis found that the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself.

Mike Williams, a physicist at MIT, said, “This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine. In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is. (The proton) has been humbling to humans. Every time you think you kind of have a handle on it, it throws you some curveballs.”

Our understanding of the atom has come a long way. While it has taken several thousand years, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of all matter has advanced considerably. And yet, there remain many mysteries that are yet to be resolved. With time and continued efforts, we may finally unlock the last remaining secrets of the atom. Then again, it could very well be that any new discoveries we make will only give rise to more questions and they could be even more confounding than the ones that came before!

Possible Preaching Angle:

Scientists continue to expand our knowledge of the universe and how it operates. Just as the universe is massively complex with uncounted galaxies, so the subatomic world is massively complex. Together they are silent witnesses of the mind of our omniscient and omnipotent Creator who designed it and “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

In his recent book, Paul Tripp describes a trip to the see world’s tallest skyscraper:

Wherever you go in Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet (just over half a mile) it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave you in mouth-gaping awe. As you move around Dubai, you see all of these buildings and you say to yourself again and again, "How in the world did they build that?" But the Burj Khalifa is on an entirely other scale.

Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing this structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of the other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those build­ings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one.

When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic looking elevator and, in what seemed like seconds, was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building, because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. Those "small" buildings were skyscrapers that, in any other city, would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit. They looked small, unimpressive, and not worthy of attention, let alone awe. I had experienced the greatest, which put what had impressed me before into proper perspective.

By means of God's revelation of himself in Scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God's perfection. There is no holiness as holy as God's holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon his holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory.

Scientists studying two different parts of God’s awesome creation—the oceans below and the sky above—have made two startling discoveries.

First, (in January 2022), an underwater mapping project off the coast of Tahiti took an unexpected twist. Deep sea explorers discovered a sprawling, two-mile long coral reef resembling a bed of roses. The remarkably well-preserved and pristine reef is the largest ever found at its depth. One scientist called it a “dream.”

Then, two months later (March 2022), astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a record-setting image showing the most distant individual star ever seen. The star lies 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. It is believed to be about 50 times as massive as the sun and millions of times brighter. The scientists expressed awe and surprise at their own discovery. Individual stars far from Earth are often too dim to be seen even with powerful telescopes. But Hubble was able to spot the massive star with help from “gravitational lensing,” in which light-bending gravity from massive celestial objects functions as a magnifying lens. The star was dubbed Earendel, which NASA said means “morning star” in Old English.

God looked with delight upon his handiwork at the end of each day of creation having found it good. Part of what it means for us to be created in God's image is to possess a natural appreciation for beauty and the urge to celebrate it and its source.

Anyone who doubts this need only visit the pier at Mallory Square in Key West, Florida around sunset. Tourists from the world over line the railing there each day and watch reverently as the sun sinks silently into the western horizon. In its fading rays a spontaneous response ensues--clapping!

Beholding once this ritual with my own eyes, I couldn't help but wonder. For whom do they think they're clapping?

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) As a Thanksgiving illustration this reveals mankind's universal inclination to give thanks; 2) The incongruity of recognizing the beauty in God's handiwork but denying his existence (Rom. 1).

Science has come very far in understanding how the human body works. But scientists admit understanding the human brain is still in its pioneering stage. God’s marvelous creation is still a mystery. The ultimate question in neuroscience is: How does the brain work?

Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. ... But we don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory.

Stanford neurologist Charisse Lichtman, offers a picture to clarify the problem:

But if I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”

On September 5, 1977, the Voyager I space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. It has been speeding through space at an average speed of thirty-eight thousand miles per hour ever since, almost a million miles per day. Voyager I is the first spacecraft to travel beyond the he­liopause into interstellar space, and NASA continuously calculates its distance from Earth. As of this writing, Voyager I is 13,490,006,617 miles from Earth and counting.

That is pretty amazing, isn't it? But not as amazing as you. The Voyager 1 will run out of gas, so to speak, around the year 2025. At that point, it will have traveled more than fifteen billion miles! But guess what? That is less than half the length of the DNA strand(s) in your body if (they) were stretched end to end. The cumulative length of DNA in all the cells in your body is about twice the diameter of the solar system (over 32 billion miles)! In the words of the psalmist, you are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Editor’s Note: You can verify that amazing fact here.

When man fell in the Garden of Eden, he took nature down with him. In spite of this some of nature has retained its former glory, and many have seen God’s hand: “How many poets have claimed to observe him in a vermillion sunset or a blooming rose, in a bird’s song or a ripple on the surface of a stream?”

The famous American naturalist John Muir wrote in 1839 hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains: “Another inspiring morning, nothing better in any world can be conceived. No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine.”

In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt visiting Yosemite wrote: “The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages.”

On the other hand, the fall and savagery of nature is all too apparent, as some observers have written, nature is also “full of danger and malice, chaos and murder, uncertainty and terror … We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. ... Masked beneath the beauty of nature’s world is one simple and ugly truth: life must take life in the interest of life itself …”

In his book Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura tells a story of valuing art and beauty:

As a newlywed couple, my wife and I began our journey with very little. After Judy and I got married in the summer of 1983 we moved to Connecticut for Judy to pursue her master’s degree in marriage counseling. I taught at a special education school and painted at home. We had a tight budget and often had to ration our food (lots of tuna cans!) just to get through the week.

One evening I was sitting alone, waiting for Judy to come home to our small apartment, worried about how we were going to afford the rent and pay for necessities over the weekend. Our refrigerator was empty and I had no cash left.

Then Judy walked in, and she had brought home a bouquet of flowers. I got really upset. “How could you think of buying flowers if we can’t even eat!” I remember saying, frustrated. Judy’s reply has been etched in my heart for over thirty years now. “We need to feed our souls, too.”

God’s creative ability truly is more wondrous than anything man can conceive. For example, the spider and its web elicit considerably more astonishment than the man-made intricate world wide web. The 48,000 known species of the spider were given an awe-filled treatment by the magazine New Scientist.

Weighing between 50 and 80 milligrams most spiders know how to plan ahead. They alter the size and structure of their webs according to the remaining silk reserves in their glands, ensuring that they don’t run out midway. They are also sensitive to the weather. In low temperatures, they make simpler structures with bigger gaps between the spirals to avoid spending too much time exposed to the cold.

Spiders are so adept in the manufacture of their webs, that in most cases the prey has no chance. They tweak the tension of silk strands to boost the transmission of vibrations from a struggling insect, allowing the spider to respond more quickly. They can even learn from near misses. If their prey hits the web but then escapes, spiders will lay down more sticky silk to ensure this doesn’t happen in future.

Like humans, spiders have a fondness for travel. Spider silk--the envy of human engineers--is put to a huge range of uses. This includes using it for a sort of flight known as “ballooning,” in which a few threads, lifted by electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, carry them far and wide on nothing more than a light breeze. Spiderlings are known to survive without food while travelling in air currents of jet streams for 25 days or longer.

Brett Baddorf, a missionary to the South Pole (yes, he lives and works at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station), has surprisingly discovered God’s incredible beauty in this remote place. Baddorf writes:

My best moments during the winter here … are spent walking outside where isolation and darkness meet. I pause to reflect on God’s vast infiniteness, gazing at a crystal-clear view of the Milky Way and at constellations invisible back home. Stepping outside into 90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit with an average 30-degree wind chill is daunting, but every moment in the wild I feel God’s overwhelming presence as I’m made aware of his transcendence.

I enjoy learning about the sciences that explore the vastness of space. But the more I learn, the more I see the intricate hand of God weaving the tapestry of the sky. One person on the station told me it was absurd amid all of this infinite wonder to believe in a God who would be bothered with such an inconsequential planet, let alone the people on it. Gazing into the unbridled magnificence of our galaxy, however, I felt anything but irrelevant to God. Quite the opposite. I felt God’s tender grasp.

The most unique of my outdoor experiences at the South Pole has been standing beneath the Aurora Australis. Even with a scientific understanding of what causes this phenomenon, it is easy to stand in awe of a Creator who moves beyond simple function and into indescribable beauty—it is entirely possible God is doing both at the same time. Watching as wild green curtains dance above a barren and inhospitable landscape, one cannot help but wonder if God reserves some of the more marvelous masterpieces for the few who strive to the furthest corners of this world.

Sarah Salviander is research scientist in the field of astrophysics. A lifelong atheist, Sarah became a theist as an undergraduate physics student, when she came to believe that the universe was too elegantly organized to be an accident. She is currently a researcher at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a part-time assistant professor in the Physics Department at Southwestern University.

Her parents were socialists and political activists who were also atheists, though they preferred to be called agnostics. In her testimony Sarah wrote:

It's amazing that for the first 25 years of my life, I met only three people who identified as Christian. My view of Christianity was negative from an early age. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe.

So she began to focus on her physics and math studies. She joined campus clubs, started to make friends, and, for the first time in her life, met Christians.

They weren't like [atheists and agnostics I knew]—they were joyous and content. And, they were smart, too. I was astonished to find that my physics professors, whom I admired, were Christian. Their personal example began to have an influence on me, and I found myself growing less hostile to Christianity.

Sarah then joined a group in the Centre for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS) that was researching evidence for the big bang, and that was a turning point in her conversion. She continued: "I started to sense an underlying order to the universe. Without knowing it, I was awakening to what Psalm 19 tells us so clearly: the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

One of the most astonishing discoveries astrophysicists have made in recent decades is that if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent stronger, our universe would have reversed course long ago. It would have collapsed catastrophically, ending in a big crunch, the opposite of the big bang. Likewise, if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent weaker, our universe would have flown apart so rapidly that planets, stars, galaxies—all the basic constituents of the universe—would never have had a chance to coalesce. We'd all be dust in the wind.

Is it an accident that everything turned out so well? That gravity is not too strong, not too weak, but just right?

Sir Fred Hoyle, the late University of Cambridge astronomer and avowed atheist, didn't think so, not for a second. After doing innumerable computations, Hoyle discovered that the odds of our being accidents of nature are comparable to the likelihood of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling scrap metal into a fully functioning Boeing 747. "'So small as to be negligible," he said, following his calculations, "even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole universe." Hoyle said, "One arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design."

Today astronomers have come down on the side of believing that galaxies and galaxy clusters are pregnant with some sort of exotic material that is invisible to us—they are calling it dark matter. They haven't yet identified what it is exactly—or even established that it truly exists—but it is not for lack of trying. Despite decades of using every imaginable means of detection—from gamma-ray telescopes in outer space to cryogenic subatomic particle monitors buried deep inside a northern Minnesota mine—their occasional, tantalizing reports of success remain as unreliable as Elvis sightings.

And dark matter isn't even the most astonishing thing modem astrophysicists have discovered about gravity. Astrophysicists have discovered another mystifying reality—they call it dark energy. All told, astronomers have concluded that dark energy comprises some 68 percent of the total universe and dark matter, about 27 percent. That means only 5 percent of the entire universe is visible to us! In other words, everything we call scientific knowledge is based on but a pittance of what there is to know about our world. Ninety- five percent of it is hidden from us. Even with all of our advances our science is 95 percent in the dark about the universe it seeks and claims to understand; about what is real or not, what is possible or not—even about a prosaic force that exists literally right under our noses.

An issue of Outside magazine had a short article about Reid Stowe, a 58 year-old sailor who at the time was en route to setting the record for the longest sea voyage without resupply in history. Reid told the magazine: "I've learned a lot about myself … I've learned that we as humans must explore. We must see and discover new things or we degenerate. My hope is that this voyage will inspire people to overcome their fears and follow their dreams to explore."

Blogger and pastor Justin Buzzard comments on Reid's adventurous spirit:

What Stowe the sailor says is directly linked to being created in the image and likeness of God, who put us in a to-be-explored-and-cultivated-universe. God declared this vast and varied creation, "very good." He gave us a world with trails and truth, neighbors and noodles, Bibles and beauty, oceans and orchestras, spreadsheets and spears, art and animals, language and lumber, the gospel and grapes, Yosemite and Yelp, Mars and marriage, goose down and God's glory. And the Creator gave us eyeballs, fingertips, nostrils, holes in our ears, bumps on our tongues, synapses in our brain, and curiosity in our hearts as tools to explore with. We must "see and discover new things or we degenerate." The motto for the outdoor company The North Face ought to be the Christian's motto: "Never Stop Exploring."

An article in Discovery magazine noted a new study that suggests there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth. The article states:

It's a revelation that's both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden arrived at this staggering figure—a 7 followed by 20 zeros—with the aid of a computer model. Zackrisson found that Earth appears to have been dealt a fairly lucky hand. In a galaxy like the Milky Way, for example, most of the planets Zackrisson's model generated looked very different than Earth—they were larger, older and very unlikely to support life.

One of the most fundamental requirements for a planet to sustain life is to orbit in the "habitable zone" of a star—the "Goldilocks" region where the temperature is just right and liquid water can exist. [In conclusion], Earth is more than your garden-variety planet.

Of course the article begs a simple question: If we (earth dwellers that is) were "dealt a lucky hand," WHO dealt us the cards? The article doesn't mention God, but it can't avoid language that implies a master card dealer.

What are we to make of Jesus Christ? This is a question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us. The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it.