Messages I'd like to be speaking to you
of the wonders of God in creation, providence,
and redemption.
We're not going to finish the subject throughout
all eternity.
We touched on it briefly three weeks ago
here at the missionary conference, but we hope
to go into it in more detail this
week.
And I'd like to read some verses.
I don't think it's necessary for you to
turn to them.
They're just isolated verses, mostly from the Psalms
and Isaiah.
The wonders of God in creation.
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all.
That's Psalm 104, verse 24.
Isaiah 6-3, I like this.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
Every created thing is marvelous beyond human description.
Psalm 9, verse 1.
I will praise you, O Lord, with my
whole heart.
I will tell of all your marvelous works.
Psalm 111-2.
The works of the Lord are great studied
by all who have pleasure in them.
And then again, Psalm 145-10.
And all your works shall praise you, O
Lord, and all your saints shall bless you.
We have a wonderful God.
And the works of God are marvelous beyond
description.
Everything that God has created is a marvel.
And a lifetime could be devoted to any
single thing.
A single cell in the human body is
just as wonderful in its order and complexity
as the starry heavens.
That's marvelous, isn't it?
It's true.
A single cell in the human body is
just as wonderful in its order and complexity
as the starry heavens.
Spurgeon had a nice way of saying it.
He said, In design, in size, in number,
in excellence, all the works of the Lord
are great.
In some point of view or other, each
one of the productions of his power or
the deeds of his wisdom will appear to
be great to the wise in heart.
Those who love their master delight in his
handiwork.
They perceive that there's more in them than
appears on the surface, and therefore they bend
their minds to study and understand them.
The devout naturalist ransacks nature and hoards up
each grain of its golden truth.
Say, why are you talking on this subject
at Greenwood Hills?
I'll tell you why.
I'm angry.
I'm angry that evolutionists have been allowed to
take the field.
You get evolution every time you turn around.
You get it in National Geographic.
You get it in Time magazine.
You get it in Reader's Digest.
You get it on TV, I guess.
You get it on the radio.
Everywhere you get evolution.
Where do you get the Lord extolled for
all his great wonders?
I have a book here.
Just think of this.
Nature thought of it first.
Not God.
Nature thought of it first.
How man has copied nature's tools, traps, defenses,
weapons, and inventions, and applied them to his
own use.
Nature gets the credit.
God doesn't get the credit for it.
You know, that's not right.
I think we Christians have been asleep at
the switch.
Maybe it'll be a challenge to some of
these young people down here to take up
this subject and produce works in which the
Lord is extolled as the one who is
great in all of these things.
I tell you, if we would just pause,
stop from our busy lives, and look about
us and see the marvels of God in
creation, it would sweep us off our feet.
We would be breathless.
And we would look with contempt on any
suggestion that these things happened by chance.
Let's think first of all tonight of the
human body.
We live in it.
We utilize it.
We take it for granted.
But you know, it has been called the
masterpiece of God's creation, the human body.
And I really think that's true.
Exodus 4.11. Who has made man's mouth,
or who makes the mute, the deaf, the
seeing, or the blind?
And then going back to the psalm again,
Psalm 139.14. I will praise you, O
Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvelous are your works, and that my soul
knows very well.
You know, it's marvelous to me how to
go back in the psalms, and those men
had great thoughts of God, didn't they?
And we don't.
We don't.
Our God is too small to borrow a
title from Phillips.
We're so busy in making a living that
we're not making a life.
And we don't look around us, and we
don't think about the wonders of God, for
instance, in the human body.
The blueprint of the human body is contained
in the DNA molecule.
It's really incredible that anything so small could
contain so much.
If somehow you could take the DNA molecule
and separate it from its constituent part and
splice those parts together, the resultant line would
go to the sun and back 400 times.
Now, I get sensory overload when I think
of that.
You want to tell me that everybody says,
come on, you can do better than that,
evolutionists.
Let me say that again.
If you could take that and separate the
strands of the—and you've never seen a DNA
molecule.
Probably never will.
But if you could splice those things together,
it would go to the sun and back
400 times.
Yet all the genes in your body could
be fit into a cube the size of
an ice cube.
I tell you, I think that's wonderful.
That gives me great thoughts of God when
I ponder something like that.
The body itself is just a marvel of
diversity and unity.
It has billions of parts.
And yet, think of how they work together
so that we can walk, run, jump, see,
hear, feel, smell, touch, taste, think, and remember.
Marvelous when you stop to think of it.
And the brain, the brain, the headquarters for
this marvelous masterpiece, this complete masterpiece.
Orders go out from the brain, and when
obeyed, they generally have a healthy, functioning body.
Millions of people have lived and are still
living, many.
And yet, no two exactly alike.
And criminals run up against this fact, don't
they?
When they leave their fingerprints, and no two
fingerprints exactly alike.
And now they have genetic fingerprinting where chemical
sequences of DNA are found in a person's
blood, sweat, saliva.
And they can analyze these and identify the
person.
Just think of that.
Not just a fingerprint, but blood, sweat, saliva,
the DNA in it.
And you can identify the person.
The innumerable possible combinations of DNA renders the
likelihood of two being exactly alike to be,
the odds are 70 trillion to one.
Which is another way of saying infinitesimal.
Think of the extraordinary coordination of mind, bone,
and muscle that enables a person to run
for 26 miles in a marathon.
This is wonderful, isn't it?
Or to climb Mount Everest, 29,000 feet.
Or to lift 6,270 pounds of dead
weight.
The body has been known to do that.
Guinness' Book of Records.
Running over 27 miles per hour.
Marvelous, isn't it?
It's a wonderful mechanism, the human body.
My father made it all.
Of course, the body needs food to provide
energy for all of this.
And that's wonderful in itself.
Because the food is chewed, it's mixed with
saliva.
Lubricates it and often begins the breakdown of
starches.
Then it goes down into the esophagus.
And by a marvelous mechanism, it's propelled into
the stomach.
Where it's mixed with just the right amount
of acid to break it down.
If it weren't just the right amount, you'd
be rushing off the hospital with an ulcer,
wouldn't you?
And you couldn't do that if you worry
too much.
The next stop is the small intestine, which
deathly transfers vitamins, minerals and nutrients to the
bloodstream.
And the large intestine absorbs the liquids.
And all that's going on right now, friends,
and you're not even conscious of it.
It's all unconscious activity.
And the human body, I think it's marvelous.
When we enjoy a meal of filet mignon
steak, baked potatoes loaded with butter, mixed vegetables
and salad, we're quite unaware of the marvelous
processes that are going on in the body.
The food is assimilated in such a way
that some of it's going to flesh.
Some of it's going to bone, to teeth,
to muscle, to nerves, to fat.
I wish I hadn't said that.
It's marvelous, isn't it?
The food is assimilated.
Some goes to the eyes.
How does it know where to go?
It does.
It's going on all the time.
And then, it not only provides for the
bodily needs, but it provides energy so that
you can push yourself away from the table
after you've had that last piece of apple
pie and ice cream.
I'm sorry to make your saliva flow like
that.
How does the food know what part it's
supposed to play in the body?
I would say it all happens by contention,
really.
Don't insult my intelligence by telling me that
it all happens by chance.
Do you know why men believe in evolution?
Because they don't want to believe God.
It says that in Romans chapter 1.
Because they did not want to retain God
in their knowledge.
Why don't they want to retain God in
their knowledge?
Because they know if there's a God, they're
responsible to Him.
And that's completely unacceptable.
Completely unacceptable to acknowledge a God to whom
they are responsible.
I believe some hold evolution because of peer
pressure, because reputation for scholarship more or less
depends upon it, because there's no university in
the United States in which you can get
a PhD degree in the sciences that doesn't
hold evolution.
That's why I say it's a shame that
voices aren't raised, prophetic voices aren't raised and
cry out against it.
Think of the wonderful mechanism of human sight.
It's the extraordinary faculty by which light is
transformed into information.
And that reveals the colors and shape of
our environment.
I think it's marvelous, really.
I don't know what you think about it.
In the simple act of looking, you're unaware
of the billions of calculations that are going
on all the time.
Billions of calculations.
The brain teams up with the eyes to
show you the words that you read in
your Bible.
Marvelous, isn't it?
The human eye is a combination of a
still camera, a video, a movie camera.
It has a light meter.
It has automatic focusing, wide-angle lens, zoom
lens, and full-color instantaneous reproduction.
It beats Polaroid.
Doesn't it?
And that's marvelous.
You ever thank God for your eyesight?
Because I do, because I should be blind.
And I really thank God from the bottom
of my heart.
I went to the optometrist the other day,
and he talked to me about my eyes.
He said, look, if I went blind tomorrow,
I wouldn't say a word of complaint.
All these years of eyesight.
I tell you, what a blessing, huh?
Thank God for your eyesight.
Thank God for the miracle.
Now, the brain has been called an enchanted
loom that takes all of those electrical signals
from rods and cones in the eyes and
weaves those bits of information into a tapestry
portrait of what is before you.
Marvelous, isn't it?
What happens?
Is there a screen back there somewhere where
it's projected?
Our eyes enable us to estimate distances, which
is kind of helpful when you're driving a
car, isn't it?
It enables that pilot of the plane.
It's quite important for that pilot to be
able to estimate distances, depth perception, because he
has to bring that plane down, hopefully without
too bad a bump on the landing strip.
The eyes, they seem to be such simple
members of the body, and you take them
for granted every day, and yet they contain
six million cones that serve as receptors and
millions of things called rods.
Just think, in you.
These rods contain millions of molecules of rhodopsin,
a photosensitive pigment which is especially important for
vision in dim light.
God thought of everything, didn't he?
God thought of everything.
Actually, when you look, you see things, you
would ordinarily see things upside down, the way
sight is planned by God.
But the brain comes to your help, and
by a neat trick, it turns things right
-side up, and you see them the way
you should see them.
Marvelous, isn't it?
And you didn't even know it, and you've
been enjoying eyesight all these years.
And scientists can't explain a lot of this.
You know, I look at an object, and
then I look away, and I can reach
out and touch the object.
And scientists don't understand how you can do
that.
How the brain and memory team up together
so that you can do that.
The puzzle of human sight is what some
scientists have called the holy grail of vision
research.
Isn't it wonderful to know the Lord and
be able to thank Him for all of
this, for all the wonders of our human
body?
Think of the wonder of hearing.
I think it's nothing short of astounding how
the inner ear gets sound waves.
It gets those words in the form of
sound waves, and it converts them to nerve
impulses and transfers these impulses to the brain.
That's really great.
And it does it, and it does it
very effectively.
The hearing cortex processes the information, sends it
to the brain's left hemisphere, which is the
language department.
Yet, people seldom appreciate their hearing until they
lose it.
And then they appreciate it very, very much.
Think of the marvelous...
I think we talked about this at the
lunch table.
Think of the marvelous filtering system that the
hearing has that a dear sister can sleep
through the raucous snoring of her husband, and
yet if the baby whimpers in an adjoining
room, she's awake like that.
That's wonderful, isn't it?
Or here's a mother sitting in the meeting,
and there's a nursery there with ten kids
in the chapel.
Twenty kids.
And all of a sudden, one of the
babies cries.
She knows whose baby it is.
She knows it's her baby.
How does she do that?
That's the way God has arranged it.
The wonders of God in creation.
I tell you, the Lord is the most
unthanked person in the universe, isn't he?
When you think of it all, when you
think of all he's done for us, and
how little thanks he gets.
Of course, that's one of the condemnations of
the pagan world, going back to Romans 1.
It says, Neither were thankful.
He's done all of these things for mankind,
and they could care less.
Of course, ears are also pretty important for
maintaining equilibrium.
When the inner ear is out of sorts,
the world about us spins dizzily.
It's called vertigo.
Think about the miracle of speech.
How do you speak?
How do you talk?
What happens?
You say, I just do it.
I know.
But there has to be some process by
which you do it.
I just do it.
I know.
You said that before.
But what happens?
It comes almost as naturally to us as
breathing.
And actually, most of us live quite normal
lives without knowing the mechanics of speech.
But here they are.
When we want to say something, our brain
sends a signal to the lungs to expel
air.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
Your brain sends a signal to your lungs
to expel air.
And the air rushes up the throat to
the larynx, and in the process, vibrates the
vocal cord.
Of course, your lips help.
Your jaw helps.
The rest of your mouth helps.
You want the words to be high-pitched,
your brain tells certain muscles to tighten the
cords.
They tighten, and the pitch of your voice
goes up.
You say, that all happened by adaptation?
How foolish.
Adaptation.
When the pressure on the tension on those
vocal cords is released, your voice goes lower,
like this.
Do you ever think how amazing your skin
is?
That's annoying.
It doesn't allow water to go through.
I'm glad it doesn't.
It'd be brown.
But it allows moisture to come out.
I'm glad it does.
Glad I didn't have to wear a coat
up here tonight.
I think it's marvelous.
It enables you to tell whether you're holding
one dollar bill in your hand or two.
You're working with paper, you hold it and
say, huh, more than one sheet.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
Think of the calculations that went on in
your mind.
Your brain, from your fingers to your brain
in order to do that.
Bruce gave out some lovely hymns tonight and
they really encapsulated the things we're saying.
How great thou art, huh?
How great thou art.
It can never be told throughout all eternity.
And really, I'm sorry that I've lived this
long and haven't spent more time just looking
about me and rejoicing in the greatness of
my God.
The skin.
It measures pressure and heat and cold.
Things like shaking hands and even kissing.
They're really part of the essentials of a
normal life.
The stimulation of the sense.
Actually, the skin is the largest organ of
the human body.
It's a birthday suit that goes with you
all through life and it weighs, on the
average, about six pounds.
Depending on the size of your belt.
It covers two square yards, give or take.
And we can be thankful that it has
tremendous elasticity.
It has millions and more nerve endings that
enable us to distinguish different sensations.
How many different odors can you recognize?
Well, if you're an average person, you can
recognize 4,000 different odors.
Not bad, is it?
But don't be too proud.
Some people can recognize 10,000.
And, of course, a dog can surpass human
skill in this area, as you know.
A third of the brain is devoted to
scent.
Distinguishing odors.
That's a third of the dog's brain.
And that's why certain dogs are used to
locate lost persons and track down criminals.
The nose knows.
The nose knows fragrances that are indistinguishable in
laboratory experiments.
Man can't duplicate that in a laboratory experiment.
It's funny, when you get to this age
in life, how the nose has stored up
odors from way back in childhood.
Some years ago, I was with a team
in Italy, and we were invited to one
of the girls' homes for supper.
And we sat there in the living room
of this home in Italy waiting for supper.
And I could smell something.
It was something I hadn't had since I
was a child in New England.
And most of you have never eaten it.
We called them periwinkles.
We used to go and pick them off
the rocks and take them home and boil
them and use a little common pin, a
straight pin, and eat them.
And I hadn't smelt that for, well, I'm
not going to go into that.
But it's all recorded there in the memory.
How can you do that?
How can the mind do that?
How can the mind record the odor of
a rose?
Oh, that's a rose.
Oh, that's a carnation.
Marvelous, isn't it?
Absolutely marvelous.
What a wonderful God we have.
Just think of that.
How he designed this body of ours.
Nothing short of amazing.
It's funny how some odors start the saliva
flowing.
Other odors, you immediately say, yuck.
Tremendous influence on us.
Think of the hand.
There's nothing as handy as the hand.
Poor pun.
It's a tool and it's a machine.
Think of all the operations the hand has
to do in life.
All the necessary operations.
If you could feed all of that information
to the computer, and if you had the
right software, and if you said to the
computer, now design something that would do all
of these things and do them best, what
do you think would come out?
Like that.
The human hand.
Nature didn't think of it first.
God thought of it first.
And he designed it for that very purpose.
The hand is so important that there's a
special area of the brain devoted to it,
and quite distinct from the area that's devoted
to the fingers.
Do you know the most wonderful part of
the human body to me is the brain.
I love it when I read in Job,
and God asks Job, who has given wisdom
in the mind or given understanding to the
heart?
Think about that.
Who has done that?
Because we know the answer.
How did he do it?
The average adult brain weighs about three pounds.
It enables it to learn.
Animals can do that.
To think or reason, animals can't do that.
The human brain can understand, memorize, retrieve information.
All the experiences we've ever had in life
and all that we've ever learned, they're all
up here.
All up here.
You say, I've forgotten them.
It doesn't make any difference if you've forgotten
them, they're up there.
I don't say it's boasting, I just say
it to illustrate my point.
When I was a boy of five, my
parents took us to Scotland.
We spent a year there.
My grandparents couldn't speak English.
They spoke a language called Gaelic.
And it's bad when your grandparents speak another
language because they can keep secrets from you.
And so in self-defense, we learned to
speak Gaelic.
I went 45 years without talking Gaelic.
And I went back there for a visit
and it started coming back to me.
They rolled in the aisles to hear me
talking with a Yankee accent.
That's just marvelous, isn't it?
I'm not doing that to exalt myself.
It's the same with you.
Every experience you had in life is up
there.
Recorded in the human brain and can be
retrieved.
I remember reading about a brain surgeon in
Montreal and he developed that technique of operating
in the brain and the patient was under
local anesthetic and he had a little electrode
and he was charting the brain and he
would touch the brain of this lady and
she said, what is it now?
And she would say, I'm in the hospital
giving birth to my first baby.
I can smell the ether.
It could be retrieved by electrodes.
And he touched another part and he said,
what is it now?
And she'd say, we're in the living room.
We're listening to Aida on the record player.
It's all there in the brain.
All the experiences of life.
Think about how it can be all retrieved
at the judgment seat of Christ.
More seriously, at the judgment of the great
white stones of the unsay.
Isn't that awful?
Because it won't be brought up against us
at the judgment seat of Christ.
Nothing will be brought up against us at
that time.
I think that's marvelous, really, just to stop
and think about those.
Of all the parts of the human body,
nothing is more mind-boggling than the brain.
For instance, I start to think about a
chocolate sundae.
How did I do that?
I mean, how did that get into motion?
You say, no trouble at all.
No, it wasn't a trouble at all.
But how did it happen?
In my thirst, I reach over and lift
up this glass of water.
But my nerve, my brain sounds alarm.
It says, hey, McDonald, that's not a glass.
You know?
All those things going on automatically with the
brain.
Really, too much.
The fact of the matter is we know
very little about the functioning of the human
brain and there's little likelihood that we will
ever be able to understand it.
The way that the brain and the body
interact presents biology with its ultimate challenge.
And they admit it.
They admit it.
Just let me read you a couple of
quotes from secular scientists.
And then I'm through tonight.
Edmund Bowles, B-O-L-L-E-S,
called it the most complicated structure in the
known universe, the human brain.
The most complicated structure in the known universe.
Dr. Michael Denton, he wrote the book Evolution,
A Theory in Crisis.
He's not giving up evolution, but he says,
look, there are some serious problems we've got
to face.
He says it would take an eternity for
engineers to assemble an object even remotely resembling
the human brain using the most sophisticated engineering
techniques.
And Oxford professor Roger Penrose, he's an evolutionist,
the author of the book The Emperor's New
Mind, and he says, look, don't compare the
human brain to a computer.
He says that's not a good, not a
good illustration at all.
The computer will never be able to think.
He says the very fact that the mind
leads us to truths that are not computable
convinces me that a computer can never duplicate
the mind.
And Isaac Asimov, who died recently, an evolutionist,
he said, in man is a three-pound
brain, which, as far as we know, is
the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter
in the universe.
What a great God we have, huh?
It seems too bad to go through life
occupied with trivia, but all about us are
these marvels of God in creation.
We don't stop to look at that buttercup.
We don't stop to think of this body
that he's given to us.
And we don't look up into the starry
heavens, an ocean without shores.
Shall we pray?
Blessed God, forgive us for living busy, hectic
lives and failing to see your wonders in
all about us.
We pray that we might have greater thoughts
of you.
Forgive us for thinking of you so little,
relatively speaking, and in such a small way.
Give us a vision, oh Lord, of your
greatness, your majesty, your sovereignty.
And even here in the conference, may we
be sharing with one another some of the
wonders which we have seen in this universe
of yours.
We ask it giving thanks in the savior's
name.
Amen.