Creation-Providence-Redemption - Part 1 — William MacDonald

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.

The Greatness of God’s Works in Creation

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. Oh 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, oh 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, all your works shall praise you, oh 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. 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 the 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 happen by chance.

The Human Body as God’s Masterpiece

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, you 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 a person 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's Book of Records. Running over 27 miles per hour. Marvelous, isn't it? A wonderful mechanism, the human body. My father made it all.

The Digestive System and God’s Provision

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, 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 happened by chance, really. Don't insult my intelligence by telling me that it all happened by chance.

You know why men believe in evolution? Because they don't want to believe God. It says that in Romans chapter one, 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.

The Human Eye and the Gift of Sight

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. Isn't it? That's marvelous. You ever thank God for your eyesight? I tell you, I do, because I should be blind.

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.

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.

Hearing, Speech, and the Marvel of Human Communication

It gets those words in the form of sound waves, and it converts them to nerve impulses, and transfers these impulses to the brain. It'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? It'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 we're thankful.

He's done all of these things for mankind, and they could care less. Of course, the 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. 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 cords. 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.

How foolish. Adaptation. When the pressure on those, the tension on those vocal cords is released, your voice goes lower like this. Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous. Do you ever think how amazing your skin is?

The Skin, Smell, and Touch as Evidence of Design

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. I'm 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, 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. 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 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 a million 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. 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? 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?

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.

The Human Brain, Memory, and Accountability

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? 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 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 anesthetics, and he had a little electrode, and he would touch, 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'd touch 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. I think that can be all retrieved at the judgment seat of Christ, or 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 no trouble at all. But how did it happen? In my thirst, I reach over and lift up this glass of water. 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. 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 Denson, 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 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, man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.

Seeing God’s Glory in Creation

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.

Prayer for Greater Thoughts of God

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, O 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.