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.