Works of God

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.

In his book, The Art of Prayer, Timothy Jones tells the story of his friend, Jeanie Hunter:

In … 1983, surgery to have a tumor removed from my ear, left a facial nerve severely damaged, causing paralysis and weakness on the left side of my face. My hearing was so affected that I had to wear a hearing aid. The nerve controlling taste was cut so that food tasted like wet cardboard. And my middle ear was injured, leaving a constant ringing. On top of all this, I was so dizzy I had to spend most of the day in bed or lying on the couch.

(In) 1987, someone from my church called and asked if I was going to attend the Wednesday morning service. ... I finally agreed. As I drove to the church, I could sense a voice saying, “This could be the last time you drive to the church sick.” I knew the medical community had done all it could. Could it be possible that Jesus would heal me?

[At the close of the service Jeanie went forward for prayer.] My prayer was “Lord, please either heal me or let me die. I just cannot live with this illness any longer.” When I opened my eyes, I saw I was bathed in light. Then from the middle of the light, God sent a washing of love that penetrated every part of my being. As I stood in the light, it was as though I could see 4-inch-tall letters that read, “YOU ARE HEALED.”

Suddenly I found my hearing aid on my lap. For the first time I was able to hear without it. The noise in my head and the dizziness vanished. Feeling in my extremities had returned. I could actually walk through a door without hitting the door frame. And taste! It came back in a little over a month, while I was licking envelopes in the office. That evening, as my daughter and I went up and down the aisles of the supermarket, I kept opening the packages as I threw them into the cart. I hadn't tasted food for four years, and I couldn't wait!

In Star Struck, David Bradstreet shares the following examples of the wonder of God's creation:

When the summer sun is beating down, do you ever wish you could store some of that heat in a jar until wintertime? Perhaps that's one of the reasons God created the oceans, which cover three-fourths of the surface of our planet at an average depth of more than two miles. The oceans help regulate our planet's temperatures, turning dramatic highs and lows into averages that are just right for us.

Like oxygen, liquid water is essential to life. And while almost every other planet we've studied lacks flowing liquid water, our world is awash in the stuff, some 352, 670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, according to the National Ocean Service.

And like convection—the process God uses to circulate our air and keep it fresh—our planet's water cycle constantly circulates our water, which evaporates from the ocean, rains down on the land, and then flows back to the ocean to do it all over again.

Think for a moment about the mysteries of just one of God's creatures—a whale. These big, beautiful creatures spend 95 percent of their lives in the ocean, one of the deepest and darkest places we know about. And without warning, they pull 30,000 pounds of blubber against gravity and leap out of the water for unexplainable reasons. Some baby whales gain 100 pounds an hour while nursing. The song of a humpback whale, lasting for 10-20 minutes and being repeated for hours at a time, is produced for no apparent reason. Biologists speculate it may be related to mating, but truthfully no is quite sure. The reason they breach is also a mystery. For show? For mating? For fun? There are speculations, but no one really knows why.

Behold them for a second and you feel helpless, out of control; not the terrible kind of helplessness, but the beautiful kind where we feel small and God feels big, and the mysteries of the world are acceptable to be unexplained.

Writer Philip Hoare tried to describe his sense of awe as a huge finback whale swam underneath his ocean vessel:

In that one motion, my entire presence is undermined. I feel, rather than see, this eighty-foot animal swimming below. Knowing it is there tugs at my gut, and something inside makes me want to plunge in and dive with it to some unfathomable depth where no one would ever find us.

Your brain is about the size of a head of cauliflower. It looks and feels like a three and a half pound lump of firm tofu. It comprises about two percent of your body's mass, but it uses twenty-five per percent of the body's energy.

Scientists estimate that the brain receives 100 million bits of information per second and contains 100 billion cells, many of which are neurons. These cells have a thin, complicated shape like the branch of a tree. They can be as short as a millimeter or as long as a meter. At one end is the axon and at the other end are dendrites, the twigs on the branch. Neurons communicate with each other by sending chemical and electrical signals racing down the branch at 200 miles an hour. When the charge reaches the end of the cell it leaps the synapse—the space between the dendrite and the next twiggy branch. Each cell is surrounded by ten to 100,000 dendrites creating the possibility of one million billion synaptic connections—that's 10 followed by a million zeros! Compare that to the number of particles in the known universe—10 followed by 80 zeros.

You can see that the brain is complex if not unfathomable. Truly, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." Just ask your brain.

The human brain weighs three pounds. It is the size of a softball, and yet with it we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years. God has created us with an unlimited capacity to learn. What that tells me is that we ought to keep learning until the day we die.

Leonardo da Vinci once observed that the average human "looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking." But not da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance man called the five senses the ministers of the soul. Perhaps no one in history stewarded them better than he did. Famous for his paintings The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, da Vinci trained himself in curiosity. He never went anywhere without his notebooks, in which he recorded ideas and observations in mirror-image cursive. His journals contain the genesis of some of his most ingenious ideas—a helicopter-like contraption he called an orinthopter, a diving suit, and a robotic knight. While on his own deathbed, he meticulously noted his own symptoms in his journal. That's devotion to learning. Seven thousand pages of da Vinci's journals have been preserved. Bill Gates purchased eighteen pages for $30.8 million a few decades ago.

Author Philip Yancey describes a moment of profound wonder and awe in Alaska's wilderness. He was driving down the road when he came upon a number of cars pulled off to the edge of the highway. Like any of us would have done, he stopped to see what everyone was looking at. Yancey describes the scene:

Against the slate-gray sky, the water of an ocean inlet had a slight greenish cast, interrupted by small whitecaps. Soon I saw these were not whitecaps at all, but whales—silvery white beluga whales in a pod feeding no more than fifty feet offshore. I stood with the other onlookers for forty minutes, listening to the rhythmic motion of the sea, following the graceful, ghostly crescents of surfacing whales. The crowd was hushed, even reverent. For just that moment, nothing else—dinner reservations, the trip schedule, life back home—mattered. We were confronted with a scene of quiet beauty and a majesty of scale. We felt small. We strangers stood together in silence until the whales moved farther out. Then we climbed the bank together and got in our cars to resume our busy, ordered lives that suddenly seemed less urgent.

In 1882 the artist and architect Antoni Gaudi started work on his masterpiece, The El Templo de la Sagrada Familia (or The Church of the Holy Family), in Barcelona, Spain. For Gaudi La Sagrada Familia was the unfinished summation of his life's work. For several years he actually lived on the building site, breathing the dust, and drawing his ultimate inspiration from the organic symmetry of creation as well as the teachings of the church. As the building rose skyward from its foundations, Gaudi's fame also soared. Kings and queens came to see the building site, imagining what it would one day become.

But then, in old age, Gaudi was run over by a tram. Because of his ragged attire and empty pockets, taxi drivers refused to pick him up, thinking he was a tramp, and he was eventually taken to a pauper's hospital. Nobody recognized the great man until his friends eventually tracked him down the next day. They tried to move him into a nicer hospital, but Gaudi refused, reportedly saying, "I belong here among the poor." He died of his injuries two days later and was buried in the midst of his unfinished masterpiece.

Gaudi had begun planning La Sagrada Familia in the 1880s and was still working on it the day he died, some 40 years later. When Gaudí died in 1926, the basilica was between 15 and 25 percent complete. Other architects have since continued to apply and interpret his designs, but the towers and most of the church's structure are to be completed in 2026, the centennial of Gaudí's death; decorative elements should be complete by 2030 or 2032. Gaudi's vast project reminds us that we are all called to pour our lives into something bigger than ourselves. "My client," joked Gaudi on one occasion, "is not in a hurry."

Possible Preaching Angles: Life is not a short story and I am not the star. And so, like Gaudi the apparent tramp giving his life to the construction of an edifice that outshone and outlasted him, we too contribute what we can to the epic story of God, a tale with many characters, vast battle scenes, a million interweaving sub-plots and many perplexing twists and turns.

Paul David Tripp writes in his book “Awe: Why it Matters for Everything we Think, Say, and Do”:

I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, D.C. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were going to see. He was decidedly unexcited. But I just knew that, once inside, he would have his mind blown and would thank me for what I had done for him that day. As it turned out, his mind wasn't blown; it wasn't even activated. I saw things of such stunning beauty that brought me to the edge of tears. He yawned, moaned, and complained his way through gallery after gallery. With every new gallery, I was enthralled, but each time we walked into a new art space, he begged me to leave. He was surrounded by glory but saw none of it. He stood in the middle of wonders but was bored out of his mind. His eyes worked well, but his heart was stone blind. He saw everything, but he saw nothing.

BBC Earth worked with a British environmental specialist to commission a never-before-seen survey they call the "Earth Index." It seeks to measure "the financial value of nature." For example, here are the estimated monetary value for aspects of God's creation:

• Freshwater valued at $73.48 trillion
• Trees valued at $16.2 trillion
• Coral valued at $9.9 trillion
• Wild sea fish valued at $224 billion
• Plankton valued at $222 billion
• Bees and other pollinators valued at $170 billion
• Vultures valued at $2.6 billion
• One beaver valued at $120,000

A spokesman for BBC Earth commented: "When you see the figures in black and white it's illuminating to see that the annual revenues of the world's most successful companies, Apple; General Motors; Nestlé; Bank of China all pale in comparison to the financial return from natural assets to our economy." Another specialist concluded, "What this unequivocally shows is the major contribution that nature makes to our health, wealth, and security."

The architect Frank Gehry, well-known for designing the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, believes that constraints are the building blocks of great work. The strict standards for acoustics at Disney Hall led to a unique design of the interior space. And that, in turn, led to the soaring, graceful steel exterior that surrounds it. Gehry spoke of how lost he once felt when he was asked to design a house with zero constraints. "I had a horrible time with it," he said. "I had to look in the mirror a lot. Who am I? Why am I doing this? What is this all about?" It's better to have some problem to work on, Gehry explained. "I think we turn those constraints into action."

Gehry is saying, that constraints actually give us some building blocks to work with, a starting point. And without that, nothing happens. If you're ever tempted to feel limited by the constraints of your life, remember how few elements it takes to make something great. Every color in nature comes from just red, yellow, and blue together in millions of combinations. Every pop song, symphony, jingle, ditty, and aria in the Western World started with just twelve notes in the chromatic scale. Everything on the planet, including us, is made up of just 118 known chemical elements. And six regular eight-stud Lego bricks can be put together in more than 900,000,000 different ways. How's that for possibilities?

Possible Preaching Angles: God's Power; Help from God—This can also be used to illustrate the power of God. In other words, if human beings can find possibilities in limitations, how much more so is it true for the God of the Universe? How much more can God create possibilities out of our limitations?

Some people argue that miracles (like Christ's resurrection) are impossible because nature is a closed system and miracles would therefore violate the laws of nature. But John Lennox, mathematician and Professor at Oxford University, says that Christians don't claim that Jesus rose by some natural process that violated the laws of nature. Instead, Jesus rose because God injected enormous power and energy from outside the system.

Here's an illustration: Suppose I put $ 1,000 tonight in a drawer in my office. Then I put another $1,000 in tomorrow night. One plus one equals two. That's $ 2,000. On the third day, I open the drawer and I find $500. Obviously, when you only find $500 in the drawer, the laws of arithmetic have not been broken. $1,000 plus $1,000 still equals $2,000. What those laws tell you is that someone (in this case, probably a thief) has put his hand into the drawer and removed the money from the drawer. The laws of mathematics or the laws of nature or science can't stop him from doing that.

Lennox concludes: In the same way, the Resurrection of Christ (and every other miracle) doesn't negate the laws of nature. The Resurrection (or another miracle) shows that Someone has reached into the drawer of history and removed something—the sting of death. So unless you have evidence that the system is totally closed, you cannot argue against the possibility of miracles.

Your body, including your brain, is fearfully and wonderfully made. In the book Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? science writer Joshua Foer explains to a nine-year-old boy named Tom how the brain can store so much information despite being that small:

An adult's brain only weighs about [three pounds], but it's made up of about 100 billion microscopic neurons. Each of those neurons looks like a tiny branching tree, whose limbs reach out and touch other neurons. In fact, each neuron can make between 5,000 and 10,000 connections with other neurons—sometimes even more. That's more than 500 trillion connections! A memory is essentially a pattern of connections between neurons.

Every sensation that you remember, every thought that you think, transforms your brain by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, you will have created a new memory, which means your brain will have physically changed.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Creation; Self-image—Scripture is right: You are fearfully and wonderfully made. (2) Scripture Reading; Meditation; Renewal of the Mind—Our thoughts really do make a difference. The way we think and meditate creates a new "pattern of connections between neurons." (3) God, wisdom of—If our brains are this complex, imagine the depth and complexity of the "mind of God."

The Christian philosopher Dallas Willard wrote that God is "the most joyous being in the universe." Willard illustrated with the following story:

While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man … took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me ….

[I realized] that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being ….

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their [beauty] and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys …. We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right ….

Willard concludes, "All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness."

You and your friend are hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota. As you round a hill, you come upon a sight that stops you in your tracks. In front of you are four giant faces carved into stone. Each head is as tall as a six-story building. The faces are a perfect likeness of four American presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

After taking photos of this magnificent find, what conclusions would you come to concerning its origin? How did these faces appear on this mountainside? What reasonable options are there to explain it?

Perhaps they happened through chance. Over the years, wind and rock slides combined to produce these four faces. But that seems silly, doesn't it? We know that Mount Rushmore exhibits the three signs of design: forethought, planning, and intention.

Mount Rushmore is the brainchild of sculptor John Gutzon Borglum. Borglum wanted to create a memorial of America's most revered presidents (intention). Borglum and his four hundred workers devised an ingenious method of removing more than eight hundred million pounds of stone created by the blasting (planning). Before the blasting could begin, designers mapped out the size and shape of each president. The presidents' noses are twenty feet long and rest above mouths that are eighteen feet wide. Each of the presidents' eyes is eleven feet across. The carvings are scaled to individuals who would stand 465 feet tall (forethought). After fourteen years of work, the four busts were completed, and Mount Rushmore opened to the public in 1941.

Just as we attribute the design of Mount Rushmore to the work of John Gutzon Borglum, so we ought to attribute the design found in nature and in the human body to the handiwork of God.