#7 Have you ever experienced a heartbreak or a loss that you were convinced simply could never be fixed? And you said to yourself: “This is it. I’m just going to have to endure, to live with this hurt forever”? When the war with Iraq was in its early stages, and the first reports of American deaths began to hit us in our national soul, a man looked into CNN’s TV cameras, and his world was destroyed. His name was Michael Waters-Bey, and his 29-year-old son, Kendall, had just been killed in the conflict. Kendall was married; he had a 10-year-old boy himself. And now this grieving grandpa looked into the camera and said: “That chair he sat in at Thanksgiving will be empty forever.” And at a time like that, people who say they have a Christian faith have to really dig deep and ask ourselves this: “Does Christianity have an answer for this heartbroken grandfather? We say we serve a wonderful God, but is He also a mighty God? A mighty enough God – and a creative enough God – to fill that empty chair someday soon and make Thanksgiving Day a time of joy again?” I think about that grandpa, and that 10-year-old son, Kenneth, who doesn’t have a dad anymore. The very first verse in the Word of God is some incredibly good news for the Waters-Bey family. Say it with me, why don’t you: <Genesis
1:1> Well, you probably already knew that verse by heart, but Genesis 1:1 happened a long time ago; you’re wondering how it helps this little fourth-grader, Kenneth, right now, in 2003, who doesn’t have a dad anymore to assist him with his homework or help him learn to catch a football. We did a Voice of Prophecy radio series a few years back, and got such a blessing from a terrific Christian bestseller, How Now Shall We Live?, by former Watergate prisoner Chuck Colson, and his writing partner, Nancy Pearcey. He tells a simple story about a dad and a daughter going to Disney World. How many of you have been down the I-95 to see Mickey Mouse? Well, this dad, Dave Mulholland, was there with a purpose in mind, and it wasn’t to ride on Dumbo the flying elephant. He was concerned about his 15-year-old daughter, Katy. She was in high school, just starting to stretch her own wings, and it just seemed like she was starting to fly off in all the wrong directions. Dave and his wife had found pot in her purse one day. That was a crisis. She and her friends were getting into things they shouldn’t. But the most serious thing of all was that she was just drifting away from God. She didn’t think Christianity was relevant anymore; her friends shrugged off religion as kind of useless and stupid; her science classes in school made it plain that the Bible was just a potpourri of fables and “urban legends.” The way Colson puts it in his book: “These Christian parents felt they were losing her to a secular world smugly satisfied with itself and deeply hostile to their own.” So Dave was kind of hoping that in between all the exhibits and rides, they might have a chance to do some serious father-daughter talking about the big things. But then – disaster! They went into an incredible exhibit called “The Living Seas.” And there, with all the sights and digital Dolby surroundsound, the way only Disney geniuses can do them, the narrator came on with his resonant voice of authority: “Imagine a place somewhere in the endless reaches of the universe, on the other side of the galaxy of a hundred-thousand-million suns. In this tiny corner of the universe, deep within the cluster of slowly forming planets, is a small sphere of just the right size, a sphere just the right distance from its mother star.” And then Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy hit this dad and his daughter with the punch line: “A spot of light expanded into a thunderous crashing flood as stars exploded and galaxies formed.” In other words, a big bang. A universe just jumping into existence all by itself. No God, no creator, no divine heart of love making a world in six days. Just one-in-a-trillion evolutionary luck. And now Dave Mulholland was sure he was really sunk. But he took his daughter outside, and bought her an ice cream cone, sat down on a park bench, and tried to cut through what they’d just heard and try to figure out: Is there a God in heaven who can do all the things the Bible says He can do...or did we just slowly find our way here to Columbia, South Carolina all by ourselves after millions of years of upward evolutionary migration? And what this dad on that Disney World bench tried to gently explain to his girl was an immutable law of the universe: Everything that is designed has a designer. That’s it. If you’re driving along Interstate 90 with your family on vacation in South Dakota, and you suddenly look up and see the heads of four U.S. presidents carved out in the granite, no one with a brain says to their family: “Oh, look, kids, at what the wind and the rain and the snow and the eons of time and the erosion of drip-drip-drip caused to show up. There’s Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson and Roosevelt all by blind luck.” No way do you say that. You know that an architect named John G. Borglum came by with a pretty big rock hammer and a designer’s vision. A good 200 years ago, English theologian William Paley posed it this way: If you’re walking along a beach and suddenly you bend over and pick up a beautiful watch, ticking away and keeping good time, you don’t say to yourself: “Amazing what the waves and the pounding surf will fling together if you just let enough centuries go by! A really nice watch that says Rolex on it. Thank you very much, currents and tides. I think I’ll keep this.” No, if you’re smart you’ll take out your Bible, right there on the beach, and read from Isaiah 40:26: “Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, by the greatness of His might and the strength of His power; not one is missing.” And what an increasing number of scientists are now conceding is a valid field of study, “ID,” or “Intelligent Design,” is even more true as this dad at Disney World talks to Katy about the fact that he is her dad. I mean, having a child – you talk about design! Starting off with just two tiny cells. And then for nine months, those cells multiply and divide, turning into all the right clusters of more cells, organs, blood, lungs, heart, brain, skin, entire systems. And then Dave Mulholland is right there in the delivery room, he and his wife are Lamaze-breathing like crazy, hyperventilating, pushing, counting down to the big moment, and then all at once, you see this new little life emerge. And it has a face! Little scrunched-up face, with two eyes, and a nose, two ear, and a very noisy little mouth and vocal cords. And Daddy says to himself: “This is a designed miracle. This child is fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are the works of God!” Psalm 139:14. In fact, Dave said to his daughter as they sat there eating their Disney World ice cream bars: “Everything I know about the universe, including my incredibly beautiful daughter, indicates to me that somebody designed it. Created it.” This “ID” concept, “Intelligent Design,” by the way, is something many branches of science are conceding now and even using. How about in forensic science? When police find a body, like Laci Peterson, their first question is, Was this death the result of natural causes or foul play (an intentional act by an intelligent being)? Pathologists perform a battery of fairly straightforward tests to get an answer. Those of you who watch Law & Order: CI – which I guess is for “criminal intent” – see this Detective Goren, who looks in the carpeting for clues, and who sees a little thread of this, a bit of fluff over there...and he’s looking for exactly what the title says: intent. Some person behind the evidence. So friend, do we buy this pillar of the faith: that God is our Creator? Christian researcher George Barna reminds us of this truth: “Without a biblical worldview, all the great teaching goes in one ear and out the other. There are no intellectual pegs...in the mind of the individual to hang these truths on. So they just pass through. They don’t stick. They don’t make a difference.” And then Colson goes on to suggest that any worldview is only as good as its answer to these three questions: Question One: Where did we come from, and who are we? The Bible answers that question with the word Creation. Genesis 1:1. And who are we? The sons and daughters of God. Question Two: What has gone wrong with the world? The Bible’s answer to that: the fall. A serpent in the garden of Eden. Satan. Sin. Death. Question Three: What can we do to fix it? And there our answer is nothing. We can’t do anything. But Christianity’s answer is Calvary. Jesus loving us and dying for us and coming soon to rescue us. And friend, we either take the Bible’s worldview, or we have to settle for existentialism, which basically says “Life is absurd, meaningless, and that the individual self must create his own meaning by his own choices.” Or postmodernism, which thinks that there are no eternal truths, no overarching realities except what you and your friends decide is right for you on May 3, 2003 in the year of our...nobody. Recently the NABT – the National Association of Biology Teachers – announced that “all life is the outcome of ‘an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.’” Does that give you confidence? Well, friend, I find it interesting that even the world’s best scientists are conceding something called the Anthropic Principle. We get a few stats from Pastor Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in Illinois. He and Mark Mittelberg wrote this book entitled Becoming a Contagious Christian and he gets some help from the men and women in the lab coats, who tell us these fascinating things: For instance, if you were to raise or lower the universe’s rate of expansion by just one part per million, there would be no life. In fact, I’ve read that the force of gravity has to not only be right, but right to within one part in ten to the sixtieth power. If the average distance between stars were any greater, there’d be no planets. Any smaller, and there could be no planetary orbits necessary for life. If you were to jigger just slightly – and please don’t go home and do this – the carbon-to-oxygen ratios on planet earth, there’d be no one here to breathe...and we couldn’t meet here tomorrow evening. If you were to tilt earth’s axis just slightly one direction, we’d freeze to death. Go the other way even one degree, and we’d instantly burn up. A few years ago when I was on a mission trip to the Philippines, I honestly thought someone had tipped the earth toward the sun a few degrees, or at least our hotel room, the same day the air conditioning in our van broke down. But friend, listen, this planet was designed by a loving God who wanted you and me to be here tonight. Did you know that we are the absolutely perfect distance from the sun? 93 million miles? Any closer – that wouldn’t be good. Any farther away, and it wouldn’t just be a cold winter, it’d be all winter. As in deep freeze for the human race. And DNA? You talk about design...and all the scientists and genome researchers know it. Let me make it even more personal: Someone must have gone to a lot of effort to make things just right so that you and I could be here to enjoy life. Folks, listen…modern science points to the fact that we must really matter to God! By the way, did you know the origin of the word anthropic? I haven’t been to the seminary for a good many years, so most of these linguistic tidbits, I have to get out of my big fat Greek dictionary, but the word anthropos actually means “human being.” That’s it! This Anthropic Principle reiterates that God cares about human beings and has built this world just for our survival. Here’s an important P.S. for us to prayerfully consider: the Bible earnestly invites us to worship God precisely because He is our Creator! Did you know that? Right in the heart of Revelation, which is God’s last-day message for this generation, that mighty first angel of chapter 14 has this invitation: “Fear [or respect] God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come. Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.” Back in chapter four, we find a mind-boggling scene in heaven where all the holy beings who have never sinned worship constantly, and they say this: <Revelation
4:11> You know, I’ll let you in on a tiny secret. In this same book I just mentioned, Colson quotes from a physicist named Heinz Pagels, who authored a report entitled A Cozy Cosmology, which appeared in “The Sciences” magazine. And he suggests that if our universe “appears to be tailor-made for life, the most straightforward conclusion is that it was tailor-made, created by a transcendent God.” And then this physicist quietly confesses that, in their hearts, many scientists know it. But they find that conclusion “unattractive,” and twist their own logic into pretzels, coming up with things like their “theory of multiple universes” to get around the problem. In Pagels’ own words: “It is the closest that some atheists can get to God. In other words, atheists are squirming every which way to avoid the obvious.” The well-known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once calculated that the odds of life just showing up, just sparking itself into existence, would be the same as lining up many, many blind people – in fact, here we go again: 10 to the 50th power this time; that’s a lot of people in a row, all blind – and giving them each a scrambled-up Rubik’s Cube...and having all gazillion of them solve it at the exact same moment. So tell me: would you like to put your faith in those visually challenged people with the Rubik’s Cubes, or with a billion monkeys on a billion word processors trying to randomly pound out a Webster’s Dictionary? Or would you like to trust in what it says in Hymn #88 in my church’s official hymnal, where it says: “I sing the mighty power of God, That made the mountains rise, That spread the flowing seas abroad, and build the lofty skies”? You tell me. In his book, Believe in Miracles, But Trust in Jesus, Pastor Adrian Rogers tells about a student who came up to him. “Pastor Rogers, I’ve got a question. Do you believe there’s life on other worlds?” Now, I don’t know what you think about that...although the Bible doesn’t say. But Pastor Rogers gave him an answer. “No, I don’t think there is.” “What?” the kid said. “You think all the life there is in the universe is right here on earth?” “Uh huh.” And the kid shook his head. “No way,” he said. “How can that be?” And he launched into how there are just so many trillions of planets and stars and galaxies and Milky Ways, all spanning light years with 20 zeroes after them. You talk about “ID,” intelligent design, and this kid gave Pastor Rogers quite a little Genesis 1 sermon. Then he said: “You mean to tell me you think God went to all that trouble, and then just put life on one tiny little world?” And Pastor Rogers said to him: “What trouble?” Don’t you just love that answer? “What trouble?” Listen, the Bible tells us that when it comes to creation, God does great things...but they’re not hard things. Not for Him. Jeremiah 32:17 tells us that God isn’t over-extending Himself when He creates: “Ah, Sovereign Lord, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for You.” And let’s put up on the note board that the First Law of Thermodynamics – the conservation of matter – actually works in favor of the power of God. Colson again: “Matter cannot just pop into existence or create itself.” But friend, matter can pop into existence when God clears His throat and says “Let there be...a world.” The Reader’s Digest had a little story where the great scientists with their gene-splicing lasers looked up at the sky and said, “You know what, God? We don’t need You anymore. You say You’re the creator of life; now we’ve caught up. You make people; we can do it too.” And they went ahead and challenged God to a man-making competition, to be televised on ESPN. And you know – God didn’t get angry. When we have questions or even when we challenge Him, He patiently demonstrates His power and His plan. So He said to the men in their lab coats: “All right. Let’s do it. I’ll make a man out of dirt – again – and you do the same.” So the DNA experts immediately rolled up their sleeves, and got down on their knees and began scooping up some soil for their test tubes and their Petri dishes. And God gently but firmly said to them: “Just a minute, boys. Not so fast. Rule #1: you get your own dirt.” Well, that’s a fun story, but maybe you say: “Wait a minute. What about mutation of species over great spans of time?” Isn’t that an argument for evolution? But most mutations are like typos in a report, or bugs in a computer program. They don’t make things slowly better; instead, you have a downward spiral into mistakes and nonsense. In fact, that’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that our universe is slowly wearing down, disintegrating, not spiraling upward into higher levels of complexity. Colson writes in his book: “The same is true of errors in the genetic code. Most mutations are harmful, often lethal, to the organism, so that if mutations were to accumulate, the result would more likely be devolution than evolution.” Luther Burbank, the great genetic researcher, coined an expression or law called the Reversion to the Average. Most organisms, he reports, stay true to type. They don’t stray from the blueprint; variations tend to be very minor. In other words, most monkeys seem to stay monkeys. I remember last year when San Francisco Giants Barry Bonds started off the baseball season with two homers in the first game and two in the second game. Wow! Extrapolating off of that, in a 162-game season, you figure he could hit 324 “dingers” a year. But no...he came up with 46 – just about like always. Little pops of excitement happen here and there, but when all is said and done, the Reversion to the Average always happens; when you get to October, most Dodgers are batting about .223, and the team is in third place. Every year without fail. You fans at Wrigley Field and Fenway Park know all about it. And it’s the same in the scientific world around us. One scientific arena of real challenge comes with things like carbon dating and the half-life of radioactive material, or layers in the Grand Canyon, where a scientist will say: “According to this time line, if you extrapolate mathematically, the world is X number of millions of years old.” And listen, I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t have all the answers, and that it does take an expression of faith to trust in God’s Word over the theories in the geology labs. But the wonderful Christian writer C. S. Lewis once had a dialogue with a friend, and he said to him: “Okay, look. If you put sixpence into a drawer today, and then sixpence again tomorrow, and then the day after that you look inside...what are you going to find? One shilling, right?” And his friend picked up on the point. “Yes,” he said, “unless someone else has gotten in there and tampered with the drawer.” And – boom! – Lewis nailed the lesson home. “It’s the same in science,” he said. “The laws work a certain way unless there’s interference. Or upheaval.” Or...let’s say, for instance, a flood that devastates the planet and throws the numbers off. It’s just something to think about, isn’t it? I want to tell you tonight that I believe this Book. Did you know that even Darwin himself said: “You can either believe in my theories – in Darwinism – or you can believe this Book. But the two ideas are mutually exclusive. You can’t mix them up; you can’t blend them. They do not co-exist.” If you’re on a walk, and you see a turtle up on a fence post, you know one thing: somebody came along. Right? That turtle didn’t get up there by itself. And you know, I see the evidence in this sin-scarred but still beautiful world we live in, and I say: somebody came through here. A powerful God did all of this. Even the animals in our backyards and buzzing around our hummingbird feeders are a vibrant testimony to the creative power of somebody who came through here and made all these species: birds that can migrate and return to San Juan Capistrano the same day every year; whales and salmon that traverse the great depths, honeybees that build honeycombs that are a marvel of design. You know, the next time Eddie Murphy plays that Dr. Dolittle character who can talk to the animals, I wish he’d ask some of them how they do to do these amazing, God-inspired things. But we already know the answer, don’t we, Dr. Dolittle? Because the testimony’s right in front of us in the book of Job, Chapter 12: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the Lord has done this?” But now let’s take it a step further. If you concede the Bible version of events and say, “All right, God did make the universe,” then we still have to know: what does it mean to us? God made a world where our brave young men and women could get blown up and killed by other men and women. Does God care about that? I want you to remember that God creates because He does care. Clear back in the 26th verse of the Bible, God said: “...‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...’” God made us for fellowship; He made us because He loves us and is interested in us. Back in the tumult of the Old Testament, where there weren’t computer-guided JDAM smart bombs and Apache helicopters, but still a lot of warfare and bloodshed and empty seats at the Thanksgiving dinner table, King David wrote in Psalm 100:3: “Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.” Again, that’s why we actually owe Him our worship...whether we choose to be wise enough to do it or not. So if you do believe that God loves us, as it says in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world...” and again in I John 4:8, “...God is love.” and Jeremiah 31:3, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love...” then I think you need to accept that His love and His creative power and His creative interest in you are all absolutes. One thing I hope with all my being to put before you in this series is how eternal and real God’s love is for you at this very moment in time. And that if you enter into a relationship with Jesus – as your Creator and your Redeemer – then you can feel safe and secure and protected in that relationship. Friend, if you get saved tonight, if you accept Jesus as the Lord who made you and loves you, then you can know that you have it. You can know that salvation is yours. John 5:24, one of my favorite verses, has Jesus saying to His friends: “‘I tell you the truth, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not be condemned; He has crossed over from death to life.’” And the Bible doctrine of creation also makes it clear, doubly clear, that a God with that much love and power just will not let you go. You can know that you are His; you can know that your salvation is safe with Him. Notice this from Romans 8:38: “I am convinced [Paul writes] that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And what does this have to do with our grieving father whose son was lost there in the dust and the blood of Iraq? Simply this: the creative power of God is enough to bring young Kendall Waters-Bey back to life. That chair at the great banquet table doesn’t have to be empty for all eternity, because the same Creator who brought those cells together the first time can just as easily do it again. There was a wrenching story in the Los Angeles Times, written by Nora Zamichow, about how these young, young men and women had to make wills before they headed over to the war theater. And there’s something obscene, really, about a 19-year-old soldier making out a will, writing down who should get his boombox and his dirt bike and his Play Station. These are just kids; they weren’t giving away Wall Street portfolios and luxury yachts and Lenox china. Some of the soldiers joked that Uncle Sam paid them so little, there was hardly anything to give away...but those jokes were hiding the pounding pulses of those young Marines and the tears of their brides. And already, some of those wills are having to be put into effect now. But God promises to make it right one of these days, doesn’t He? Isaiah 26:19 says: “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy.” Anna Quindlen, who writes a wonderful column in Newsweek, describes a bad Monday she had with her daughter a while back. First of all, they went to a funeral. That was bad. But then a cell phone call had them rushing to the hospital where another friend was in the valley of the shadow of death. Right after that, it was a trifecta of tears, because their cat was poisoned and so they were speeding to the vet’s to deal with that. And finally it was bedtime. What a day! And Anna, good mom that she is, tucked her girl into bed and said quietly, “Well, honey, this was tough, but look at it this way: we’ll never go through a day like this one again.” That was September TEN, 2001. Monday, September 10. And this family lives in New York. The very next morning, we all know how death invaded our world like never before. In Ms. Quindlen’s words: “The day America’s mind reeled, its spine stiffened, and its heart broke.” Some of you here tonight, or watching at our downlink sites, might have had a loved one in those twin towers. Or in the Pentagon. Or on one of those four planes. And when the hijackers’ planes sliced into the World Trade Center, someone you loved was just suddenly...GONE. In one fiery moment...GONE. There wasn’t anything left: no traces, no DNA, no cells and no record. We all read how those firefighters – truly “New York’s finest” – wrote their names and Social Security numbers on their own forearms, just in case someone later had to hunt through rubble for their remains. But here your loved one is simply GONE. Nothing is left for God to work with. How can He clone or recreate them? Well, friend, “Let not your heart be troubled.” Does God need a lab? Does He need DNA? Did He make Adam out of DNA? Or can He just speak the word...and have the person you love and miss so much instantly come back to life? Maybe they were lost at sea; maybe they’ve been resting in a casket for many years now. That is not a problem for God. Because He is a Creator God who loves to create – and REcreate – life for those who love and worship Him. Say this great Isaiah promise of creative power with me as we close tonight: <Isaiah 65:17,
18> And for all of you who have a tombstone in your life right now, what beautiful words these are: <Isaiah 65:19> God has a plan. God’s in control. And in the end, we know who wins! Friend, did
you know the Creator knows you by name? Long before you were born,
He had a plan for your life – and your being here tonight
is a continuation of that Divine Plan!
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