If you would please turn your Bibles over
to the book of Genesis.
Specifically Genesis chapter one,
verse one. In the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth.
Before Scripture tells us anything about
man,
anything about his conscience,
anything about society, anything about the
universe and the creation itself,
it establishes God.
He is there before creation.
And anything that has ever existed exists
because of him.
Now there’s a popular observation in
Genesis chapter 1,
verse 1, that contains the beginnings of
what we’re going to describe this morning
as time, space, and matter. I’ve heard it
in many a sermon.
In the beginning, you have time.
God created the heaven, that being space,
and earth being matter.
I’m going to be careful tonight or this
evening to force to not force modern
physics
into terminology Moses was not trying to
use,
because the point is actually much greater
than time,
space, and matter. The heaven and the
earth encompass the created order
of things. Whatever exists in creation
ultimately owes its very creation to our
God.
And scripture does not picture God as a
creator who built the universe.
Started moving it, and simply stepped away
from it.
So let’s look over at Jeremiah chapter
twenty three,
verses twenty three through twenty four.
Jeremiah records God asking, Am I a God at
hand,
set the Lord, and not a God afar off?
Can any hide himself in a secret place
that I shall not see him,
set the Lord? Do not I fill the heaven and
the earth.
So this expression
Encapsulates the idea that we’re going to
title our sermon this evening,
which is God Permeates. Now, by permeate,
I do not mean that God is physically mixed
into matter or that everything
in creation is a God, such as we see in
different nations in the ideas
of Shintoism specifically. However,
the creator remains very distinct from his
creation.
And I mean that there’s no realm of our
existence in which we do not encounter the
Evidence of his power, his order,
his authority, and his influence.
Paul says this concerning Christ in
Colossians 1,
16 through 17. For by him were all things
created that are in heaven and that
are in earth, visible and invisible,
whether they be thrones or dominions or
principalities or powers,
all things were created by him and for
him.
And he is before all things, and by him
all things consists.
Now the Hebrew writer in Hebrews chapter
one and verse three actually takes
us to a much further point. So if we look
at Hebrews one and verse three,
he says, Who being the brightness of his
glory and the express image of his person,
and here’s the key phrase in this one,
upholding all things by the word of his
power,
when he had by himself
Purged our sins, that being Christ,
sat down on the right hand of the Majesty
on high.
So here we see God created it,
God sustains it, and his power is evident
all throughout it:
time, space, and matter. This morning
we’re going to look inward at the human
body.
We’re going to find it there. If we
examine the mind and the conscience,
we’re going to find it there.
If we look at human society and history
itself,
we are going to find the influence of God
there.
And finally, if we turn our eyes outward
into the expanse of the cosmos,
we find the existence of God portrayed
every step of the way,
from the smallest of particles all the way
up to the largest of gaps from planet
to planet. The question at the end of this
lesson for you this morning.
Will not simply be whether God permeates
the world around us,
but I want us to take a more personal
question this evening and ask:
does God permeate our lives?
And so we’re gonna move to our first
point,
which is God permeates the body.
David wrote, for those of you turning in
your Bibles,
it’ll be Psalm chapter 139 and verse 14.
For thou hast possessed my reins,
thou hast covered me in my mother’s wound.
I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made.
Marvelous are thy works, and that my soul
knoweth right well.
I think it goes without saying that David
did not possess a microscope.
At least not that I’m aware of.
They had technology, they had iron
workers,
but I do not believe I remember reading
anywhere in the Bible of a microscope.
He could not see the tiny parts of our
bodies that we can now pull out to today.
We were walking around the other day in a
Barnes and Noble,
and I’m sitting there as I typically do,
the child that I am, going down the toy
section.
And in the toy section, you can find.
An electron microscope. It’s like eighty
eighty dollars.
Now granted it was a nice one,
but it had a little L C D screen and
everything,
and you could pluck a hair from your head
on a children’s toy today and
put it under the microscope and see the
individual follicles and the cells
of the hair. Very, very cool.
David could not do that. David could not
look and see all that,
let alone understand all the work that
those tiny parts within our bodies
perform.
Yet what he could observe about the human
body was enough to make
him declare very boldly that he was
fearfully and wonderfully made.
Now we can look much further inward than
David ever could,
and the closer we look, the more
remarkable the body becomes.
One example I saw when researching the
different sciences and trying to figure
out
What would be a good hook for this?
I found a sermon actually, and the hook
for this one was a protein,
a polypeptide chain known as laminin.
Now, I’m going to try to stick to my notes
because I’ve got some science in here,
but I’m gonna get not too sciencey because
I don’t want to put everyone
to sleep like my old sixth grade science
teacher used to do to me.
It’s a protein that helps our cells attach
and support around them
and helps give structure to the tissue of
our bodies.
Think of it as one part of the framework
that keeps everything in its proper place.
These are something called basement
proteins.
Now, for those of you that know how houses
are built,
you have to have a foundation before you
can build the house.
These are what these basement proteins do,
they hold everything together.
However, laminin does not literally hold
the entire human body together.
The sermon that I found had it described ~
as part of a much larger system,
but the hook was the shape of laminin.
The shape of laminin’ s th there’s a
popular picture of laminin because
drawings
take it make it to look somewhat like a
cross.
Now when you’re looking through the body,
these cells don’t keep their shape.
But if you were to take laminin and unroll
it,
it’s actually in the shape of a cross.
It’s very neat, but I would not build the
argument around its resemblance
to a cross. The stronger point is what it
does.
Even the smallest parts of our bodies
depend upon the other parts to work
properly.
Everything has to be in sync and in order.
Consider all that goes into keeping a
simple cell alive.
Cells are tiny living building blocks that
make up our body.
And there’s activity taking place inside
of each and every individual cell
at all times of the day, all times of the
night.
If our cells quit working, we stop living.
One example is a sodium potassium pump.
Name sounds complicated, but the basic
idea is simple.
It works like a tiny pump. It moves
certain materials in and out of the cell.
Kind of like how we pull up to the gas
station,
you have to pump gas into your fuel tank.
Now when you’re driving, you’re using a
similar pump to pump that into the engine,
which expels it out of the cell or the
car.
These particular ones help our nerves
carry messages and our muscle functions.
So while I’m standing here preaching,
do I have to tell those individual cells
to keep pumping?
That’d be a whole lot of instruction,
wouldn’t it?
I don’t have to remind my heart to beat.
I don’t have to sit here and go,
Okay, breathe. Exhale.
That would be a lot. There are processes
occurring all throughout
the body that every second of our lives we
never see and very rarely consider.
Even the instructions stored within our
cells need care.
Those instructions are contained in what
we’re called DNA.
For the fancy Jurassic Park people in
here,
deoxyribonucleic acid, right? You got the
little picture of the little
DNA guy with his anyway. They become
damaged throughout our ordinary activity
of life and through things we encounter
all around us.
Yet our cells have a way of finding and
repairing many kinds of damage.
Inside of our bodies, they use those
instructions from the DNA to repair
our bodies should anything happen to them.
This is a continual work taking place to
repair the damage.
Replace worn out part and keep things
functioning.
Now think if we could take control of
that.
I was talking to Megan when I was getting
this sermon together and I
had a crazy idea. When we’re born,
especially my little one now, he’s
teething,
he’s getting his first set of teeth.
And eventually when you start becoming a
teen,
you lose those teeth and you get your
adult teeth.
How cool would it be if we could get a
third set when we’re older?
I know I could use a new set.
But the instructions aren’t there in the
DNA.
God meant for us only to have two sets of
teeth.
We’re lucky we have a backup set.
So if we’re inappropriate to our teeth
younger,
we get a second set. I’ve already
destroyed half of mine,
but that’s apart from the matter.
All of this is part of keeping the body in
balance.
Your temperature, your temperature cannot
rise or fall beyond certain limits.
Your body needs the right amount of water,
it needs the right amount of oxygen,
it needs the right amount of sugar in your
blood.
All those things your body continually
adjusts.
We don’t have to think about it.
Those instructions are stored at a s at a
nearly atomic level.
Being alive is not something your body is.
It’s what your body is continually doing.
It’s active in staying alive. And
Scripture detects our attention beyond
the process of the one whom life
ultimately depends upon.
So in Acts seventeen and verse twenty
eight,
Paul said it, For in him we live and move.
So there’s movement in life, and have our
being,
as certain also of your own poets have
said,
for we are also his offspring.
Now, granted, science can help us
understand a whole lot about how
the world works around us. It can explain
how the tiny pump pushes a cell forward,
how our nerves can carry messages,
and how our bodies repair damage.
Scripture, however, answers the larger
question,
which is on whom do we depend for life?
Because it’s not found in the cells.
It says in this scripture here in him we
live and move and have our being.
There is nothing wrong with understanding
how the body works.
That understanding should only deepen our
appreciation of what God
has put into being.
If David could sit there and say that I am
fearfully and wonderfully made,
and then we get access to a children’s
electron microscope,
should that not just elevate our wonder
how wonderfully and fearfully we are made?
Our knowledge has increased enormously,
the wonder should have increased with it.
But now let’s look outside of the body.
Let’s turn to the mind, something that’s
that’s less tangible.
The evidence does not stop at the physical
construction of man.
There’s something else about humanity that
absolutely demands our attention,
and that is how man thinks about living.
We reason, we judge.
We experience guilt. Some of us might not.
I know I do.
We ask questions about meaning.
We recognize obligations. We speak of
things like justice and injustice.
We talk about preferences and dislikes.
So let’s look at scripture. Go back to
Genesis chapter one and verse twenty
seven.
Scripture begins explaining why when it
says
the following So God created man in his
own image,
and in the image of God created he him,
male and female, created he them.
Now there’s something unique about man in
this scripture.
Whatever all the implications of bearing
God’s image may be,
and we’re not sure what God looks like,
we haven’t been told, Scripture clearly
separates mankind from all
the rest of creation. No other portion of
creation is made in the image
of God such as we are. One evidence can be
seen in Romans chapter two,
verses fourteen through fifteen.
For when the Gentiles, which have not the
law,
do by nature the things contained in the
law,
these, being the Gentiles,
having not the law, are a law unto
themselves,
which show the work of the law written in
their hearts,
their conscience also bearing witness,
and their thoughts the mean while
accusing.
One another. I got lost in my own notes
for a second.
Notice what Paul recognizes. There is a
conscience.
Everyone has a conscience, seared or not
seared seared,
and it is going to do one of two things.
It is either going to accuse someone of
something,
or it is going to excuse someone or
something.
People everywhere understand the
difference when I say,
I do not like that, and saying that is
wrong.
Case in point. I like ~ what is it?
a pineapple on a pizza. Now some of you
may say,
I don’t like that. I get that.
But if you’re being honest, you shouldn’t
be saying that’s wrong.
Now that’s a silly argument, but when we
get to more serious things,
it makes sense that there’s a big
difference between I dislike and that is
wrong.
These are not the same statement.
If someone deliberately tortures an
innocent child,
Are we going to normally say, well,
personally, that isn’t my preference?
Certainly hope not. We say that is wrong,
and rightly so. We mean something by it.
Which brings us to the moral argument.
The argument is sometimes stated so badly,
so I’m going to try to be very precise.
The Christian argument is not that an
atheist,
someone who does not believe in God,
cannot behave morally. They can.
Of course, an unbeliever can love his
children.
Of course, an unbeliever can tell the
truth.
Of course, an unbeliever can sacrifice
themselves for another person.
They can condemn injustice. They can do a
lot of good things.
In fact, Romans 2 helps us explain why.
Humanity possesses conscience or moral
awareness,
whether a person acknowledges the God who
gave it or not.
So what am I saying? The real question is
not:
can a person who does not believe in God
behave morally. The question should be
stated this way.
Without an objective standard beyond
humanity,
what ultimately makes anything objectively
right or wrong?
If morality is finally grounded in
personal preference,
what’s keeping someone else’s personal
preference,
your personal preference for pineapple on
a pizza to outweigh
my personal preference of the pineapple on
the pizza?
Again, it’s a silly illustration,
but I think it makes the point.
Your preference does not trump my
preference,
and so on and so forth. If morality,
however, is grounded in culture,
then whatever a culture approves of then
becomes moral,
doesn’t it?
That’s a rhetorical question. If it comes
ultimately from government,
then whatever government legalizes becomes
morally right.
You shaking your head no, that’s not how
that works.
History will not allow us to believe that.
Cultures have defended slavery.
Governments have legalized oppressions.
Majorities have mistreated minorities.
Human beings have repeatedly approved
things that later generations rightly
recognize as evil. When we say those
cultures were wrong,
we are clearly appealing to something
higher than the culture itself.
So what are we appealing to? C.S.
Lewis expressed expressed the thought.
Pretty memorably, in a book titled Mere
Christianity.
He said, and I quote, A man does not call
a line crooked unless he has some idea
of a straight line.
We have to have some form of measurement
here.
So where does the straight line come from?
The moral argument remains a serious
subject within philosophy.
Secular philosophers have proposed non
theistic accounts of objective morality.
So we should not pretend that every
philosopher agrees with
the Christian conclusion. They simply
don’t.
The Christian argument is that objective
moral obligation calls
for an adequate foundation, and logic
would tell us the very same thing.
And that’s God’s existence and character
provide that foundation in a
way that is consistent with our experience
of morality as genuinely binding rather
than simply put as personal preference.
Scripture does not present goodli
goodliness as something higher than God,
to which God Himself must attain to or
hold Himself accountable to.
What we are talking about is God’s very
nature by which we have
our measuring stick of morality.
Goodness flows from the character of God.
Turn your Bibles over to Deuteronomy,
chapter thirty two and verse four.
Moses wrote here about God, He is the
rock,
his work is perfect, for all his ways are
judgment.
A God of truth and without iniquity,
just and right is He.
David later reflects this in Psalm 119 and
verse 68.
Thou art good and doest good.
Teach me thy statutes. He’s asking God
because he knows that if
the statutes come from God, they are
morally correct.
There’s our straight line. God is good,
God is just, God is true. Every single one
of God’s commandments that
he passes down to us reflect his very
nature.
They are good to the very core.
If human beings become the final standard,
Scripture describes the result in very
simple language.
Judges chapter twenty one and verse
twenty-five is it writes In those days
there
was no king in Israel. Every man did what
was right in his own eyes.
Now notice carefully the wording there.
It is not saying that they did right,
it’s saying that they did right what was
in their own eyes.
What they thought were right. They were
making themselves
the objective moral standard. So we go the
we see it right there in
the book of Judges. They chose personal
preference instead of objective,
measurable morality.
Scripture warns us elsewhere in Proverbs
fourteen and verse twelve.
There is a way which seemeth right unto a
man,
but the ends thereof are the ways of
death.
Look, the human mind is remarkable.
There are people far more intelligent than
I am.
But it can never safely become its own
God.
It just cannot. And morality is not the
only thing about our minds that points
beyond ourselves. Human beings possess an
unusual awareness of meaning and purpose.
How many times in in simple movies do we
get asked questions of what’s
our purpose here on Earth? I think it was
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made
fun of this.
They said, Well, the answer must be forty
two.
We do not merely ask what something does.
We ask what it means. We contemplate our
own existence.
We think about death on a day-to-day
basis.
We search for purpose. We wonder whether
our lives matter beyond the grave once
we pass away. And yes, it absolutely does
matter.
Look at what Solomon observed in
Ecclesiastes 3 and verse 11.
He hath made everything beautiful in his
time.
Also, he hath set the world in their
heart.
So that no man can find out the work that
God maketh from the beginning to the end.
Now I’m not going to try to turn that
verse into some psychological theory.
Solomon’s larger point concerns man’s
limited perspective beside the work
of an eternal God. Yet the passage
captures something we all recognize.
Humans by nature reach out past the
present.
We’re only ever living in the present,
but we’re always looking to the future,
case in point.
Several people, as soon as you walk out
this door,
you’ll still be living in the present and
you’re going to be thinking,
What am I gonna make when I get home to
eat tonight?
w what does my job have on the agenda
tomorrow?
Do I have enough time to watch that movie
before I go to bed tonight?
We’re always looking forward.
We have to understand that we can’t
understand the whole when we’ve only been
given
a piece. If I gave you a piece of a jigsaw
puzzle,
just one piece, and I told you to go ahead
and describe in ornate detail what
the whole puzzle looked like, we could not
do it.
Because we’re only given a small piece of
the puzzle while God has the entire thing.
Our minds ask questions that are much
larger than our lifetimes.
We ask many times where did I come from?
Why am I here?
What is right? What is wrong? What happens
when I die?
Does life have any meaning? Those
questions shouldn’t come as a surprise.
God’s fingerprints are not only seen all
over the structures of the body that
we showed before, but they reach very deep
in the consciousness of man.
If we’re made in his image, it’s pretty
safe to say that our minds are made
in that image as well. We look past beyond
ourselves.
So let’s go beyond ourselves, beyond
ourselves,
and look into society now. God permeates
society.
God’s influence does not disappear when
human beings gather together in flocks.
It becomes woven throughout cultures,
language, laws, arts, sciences,
civilization itself.
However, this does not mean that every
society is godly.
It can be woven throughout, and we’re
going to take a look at that.
Acts seventeen gives us an excellent
example of a society that was deeply
religious,
while also being very deeply mistaken
about God.
Acts chapter seventeen, verses twenty two
through twenty three.
Here we have Paul walking up. Then Paul
stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said,
Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all
things ye are too superstitious.
Man, how many times I could have said that
whenever I visited Japan.
There’s a there’s a temple on every
corner.
For as I pass by, I beheld your devotions,
I found an altar with this inscription to
the unknown God,
whom therefore ye ignorantly worship,
him I declare unto you. Athens was full of
religious thought.
So much so that we we see exhibited in
Acts chapter 17 that these people
of great thinking would go up on Mars
Hill,
presumably on a daily basis, and talk all
day.
about different gods and their existence
in the universe and what life
was going to be like. A there’s no telling
what all they talked about.
Almost sounds like academia today,
right? A whole lot of talking and not a
whole lot of doing.
He continues in twenty four and through
twenty seven,
God that made the world and all things
therein,
seeing that he is Lord of heaven and
earth,
dwelleth not in temples made with hands,
neither is worshipped with men’s hands,
as though he needeth anything,
seeing he giveth to all life, and breath,
and all things, and hath made of one blood
all nations of men for
to dwell on all of the face of the earth,
and hath determined the times before
appointed.
And the bounds of their habitation,
that they should seek the Lord,
if happily they might feel after him and
find him,
though he be not far from every one of us.
I want to concentrate now on that last
expression there,
though he be not far from every one of us.
Humanity as a whole,
society as a whole, has spent its entire
history searching,
reaching, looking for meaning,
for purpose, for God, sometimes obeying
God,
and sometimes, unfortunately, rebelling
against him.
But this
Key phrase in this verse shows us that God
has never been far from us.
Consider the way we number years,
the traditional Western system of B C and
A D for a moment.
Just our dating system, something as
simple as that.
It was developed from a Christian method
of reckoning,
years, associated with someone’s name whom
I can’t pronounce,
Dionys Exigus I don’t know how to
pronounce that.
But he was born in the sixth century.
A D Enos Domini means literally translated
in the year
of our Lord.
BC originally before Christ. Now today we
see that people are trying
to remove this. They have added B C E and
C E instead of A D.
They are trying to do bec before Common
Era and the Common Era.
I don’t like that. I think a much better
tell for that would be before
the Christian era and the Christian era,
separated by the cross, right?
They still can’t get too far away from it.
They’re still using letters that we can
use against
It demonstrates that the influence of
Christ has become so deeply embedded
in not only Western civilization,
but civilizations across the globe,
that centuries of human history even came
to be numbered by him.
And yet people want to deny him.
The single most prominent person in all of
history,
and they want to deny him. Take something
in your pocket right
now American currency.
When we look at the the Almighty Dollar,
doesn’t it not say, In God We Trust?
Now where did this come from? In 1955,
law required that motto on all U.S.
currency. It first appeared on paper
currency on the series 1957
$1 silver certificate before appearing
later on Federal Reserve notes.
Again, printing in God We Trust on money
does not make every person
who spends it faithful to God.
A national motto does not prove
Christianity.
But isn’t it remarkable evidence of how
embedded into public life
the Bible’s teachings have become?
It’s everywhere. You can’t get away from
it.
The same can be observed in one of the
most important documents in American
history:
the Declaration of Independence.
It does not claim that government gives
mankind its own fundamental rights.
It speaks of men being created equal and
endowed by their Creator with certain
Unalienable rights. Even our country’s
founders admitted the existence of God.
Now, whether every signer understood God
exactly as scripture reveals
is a separate historical question that I’m
not going to touch with
a ten-foot pole today. But the important
observation is the argument reaches above
government for the basis of what human
rights are.
Government does not create human value.
The majority does not create human value.
Human beings possess a value before
legislation ever took a vote.
So when I say God permeates society,
I’m not saying that every institution is
Christian and every nation belongs
to God in some special or political sense,
or every religious reference proves the
gospel.
But human civilization repeatedly
encounters the question of God
and how they react to it is very
important.
We find him discussed in our philosophy,
we see him row woven throughout our
history.
We see him reflected in our vocal in our
moral vocabulary.
We see him acknowledged in our
institutions,
worshipped correctly in some places and
terribly in others.
Even rebellion against God has to define
what it is they are rebelling against.
Isn’t that funny?
Paul walked into pagan Athens and found a
society searching.
His answer was not, you guys have enough
religion already.
And I can tell you right now, religion’s
not going to save you.
Because man’s religion is just all over
the place.
But God’s religion is exactly what you
need.
His answer to those pagan people were,
Let me tell you about the God you don’t
yet know.
Let me explain the one that you don’t
know.
Let me tell you who you need. Because he’s
not very far from you.
He’s right around the corner.
But let’s look out further, beyond
society.
Now we’re going to look up into the
universe.
Paul wrote in Psalm 19, verses 1 through
4:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night
unto night showeth knowledge.
There is no speech, nor language,
where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the
earth,
and their words to the ends of the world,
in them that hath
Set a tabernacle for the sun. Again,
David did not have an electron microscope,
nor did he have a Hubble telescope.
He could not look any further outward than
he could look inward.
He could simply look up.
But what he could see declared the glory
of God.
And today we can look much further.
Astronomers estimate that our Milky Galaxy
contains more than
one hundred billion stars. NASA notes that
it on several estimates
of the universe as a whole can reach as
high as approximately one septillion
stars.
Now I had to look this up. I didn’t even
know what a septillion was.
That’s one with twenty-four zeros behind
it.
That’s a lot of stars.
Now look at this. Turn your Bibles over to
Isaiah chapter 40,
and we’re going to read verses 25 through
26.
The prophet Isaiah wrote something very
cool.
Now remember that as we read through this.
One followed by twenty-four zeros,
twenty-four one septilian stars.
To whom then will you liken me?
Or how shall I be equal? said the Holy
One.
Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who
hath created these things that bringeth
out their host by number.
He calleth them all by names, by the
greatness of his might,
for he is strong in power, and not one
faileth.
I don’t know about you, but when I look up
at the night sky,
when it’s clear and the streetlights
aren’t on,
I struggle to see all the stars in the
sky.
You can’t, your eyes can’t hold them all.
And that’s just a small snapshot of what
we see in the sky.
Stars form and operate according to
consistent physical relationships.
Things like gravity, nuclear interactions,
matter, other other features of the
physical universe behave with regularity
so that we can even predict those.
We live in a universe that we can study.
We can describe it mathematically.
We can even make predictions about it.
We do so all the time with weather.
We can send instruments millions and
millions of miles away based upon
calculations
and expect nature to behave tomorrow the
same way that it did today.
And yet we get models that
That tear apart God’s order, that try to
propose very weird ideas,
and I think that the order God has put
into the universe deserves contemplation.
Does sleep and woke up. I have a Lego set.
Now I want you to imagine for a moment
that I took every piece necessary
to construct a Lego model and placed them
in this box.
They are not all here in this one.
And I’m not gonna open the box.
I shake the box, and after a while I open
it.
If I pull out a completed model,
is anyone gonna believe me? No.
Okay.
Well, are you gonna accept my explanation
if I say,
Well, I didn’t build it, I just shook it
long enough?
Does that make sense? No.
What if I tell you I shook it for a week?
Is it ever gonna assemble itself into this
little little spaceship that’s on there?
No.
If I say I shook it for a thousand years.
I’m not gonna make you sit that long.
Adding time does not suddenly make
intelligence an unreasonable inference.
It doesn’t make sense just simply because
you added time to it.
When we see the finished model,
there are things that we can understand
that the arrangement
of pieces reflect intention, the intention
of the designers who created it.
And possessing material is not the same
thing as it explaining the source
of its order. In this example,
I gave all the material that was there.
All the pieces already in the box,
already painted, already ready to be
assembled.
The directions are even in there,
but just randomly shaking the box isn’t
going to put anything together.
And yet we have science telling us wild
theories like Big Bang,
something happened, there was a large
explosion,
and all these minute cells that we looked
at,
those
sodium potassium pumps, the stars,
our bodies, our minds, everything just
fell perfectly together.
I can’t even shake this for a thousand
years and get a Lego set to be put
together.
When you look at the Lego set,
you can tell me what the pieces are made
of and still have not explained the model.
You can describe every chemical in the
paint and still have
not explained the painting process.
You can describe the physical process
within the universe and still
ask the larger question why is there a
universe governed by these processes at
all?
Why is it here? Remember,
we were going through the mind,
man looks likes to ask those kind of
questions.
So let’s keep going.
Modern cosmology describes evidence that
the universe developed from
an extremely hot, dense early state and
has undergone cosmic expansion.
Scientists continue studying the early
stages.
NASA openly notes that the cause or
trigger of the earliest rapid expansion
is,
and I quote from NASA, not known.
I know it ’cause the Bible tells us.
In the beginning, God created the heavens
and the earth.
Genesis answers at the level of ultimate
cause.
And I skipped the slide.
Our argument should never be as Christians
scientists do not understand everything,
therefore God.
That would make our faith dependent upon
gaps in current scientific knowledge,
wouldn’t it? It would. So even if tomorrow
scientists describe some physical process
far better than they can today,
they are still quoting and describing
creation.
Sometimes they do it wrong, though.
Paul writes in Romans 1 and verse 20:
For the invisible things of him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen.
Being understood by the things that are
made,
even his eternal power and Godhead.
Important part, so that they are without
excuse.
That is precisely what David said in Psalm
19.
The creation speaks very,
very loudly. The microscope can point
inward,
the telescope can point outward.
At one end we find systems so minute that
we can’t see them with the naked eye.
On the other end of the spectrum,
we have distances so great that we can’t
even fathom the number of zeros behind
it in the terms of miles to get out there.
But look at Colossians one seventeen.
Scripture will tell us that at neither end
of that scale,
and no point in between will ever exist
independently of God.
Colossians one seventeen states,
and he is before all things, and by him
all things consist.
God permeates everything.
We began with God’s question Do I do not I
fill the heaven and the earth,
set the Lord? It is possible to live in a
universe filled with the evidence
of God while refusing to let God’s
influence govern your life.
You can carry a body that’s fearfully and
wonderfully made by Him,
and you can still use that body for sin.
I can possess a conscience that recognizes
right and wrong and still choose
the wrong.
I can live surrounded by reminders of God
and train myself not to notice them.
I can look into the heavens that declare
the glory and simply refuse to glorify
Him.
Paul gives us a beautiful conclusion in
Romans 12,
1 through 2. I beseech you,
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of our
God,
that you present your bodies a living
sacrifice,
holy, acceptable unto God,
which is your reasonable service.
And be not conformed to this world,
but be ye transformed by the renewing of
your mind,
that ye may prove what
Is that good and acceptable and perfect
will of God?
Now look at that verse close, because we
notice how beautifully that returns
us to everything that we’ve considered
this evening.
Your body presents yourself as a living
sacrifice.
Your mind be ye transformed by the
renewing of your mind,
and then your life begins to conform to
the will of God.
Paul expressed it differently in
Colossians chapter three.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly
in all wisdom,
teaching and admonishing one another,
and psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing with grace in your hearts to the
Lord.
And whatever ye do in word or deed,
do all in the name of the Lord,
giving thanks to God the Father by him.
Let the Word of Christ dwell in you
richly.
We can’t do that unless we spend time in
God’s Word.
When those on Pentecost realized their
guilt and asked what they needed to do,
Peter answered them, didn’t he?
Acts two thirty-eight. Peter said to them,
Repent and be baptized, every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ,
for the remission of your sins,
and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy
Ghost.
If you need to do just that this evening,
we stand ready and willing to aid you do
that.
Make sure that you allow God to permeate
your life today before it’s too late.
As we stand and as we sing.
