The Great God of Creation (Drew Deighan)

Romans 1 .20 Since the world was created, people have seen the earth and the sky.

Through everything made, they can clearly see His eternal power and divine nature. There is no excuse for not knowing

Him. Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation.

O my soul, praise for His high health and salvation.

All ye who hear, now to His temple draw near.

Praise Him in glad adoration. Praise to the

Lord, whom all men have ordained. He shelters thee under His wings, ye so gently sustained.

Hast thou not seen how thy desires have been

Granted in what He ordained. Praise to the

Lord, O let all that is in me adore Him.

All that hath breath, that rises before Him.

Let the amen sound from His people again.

Gladly we adore Him. Praise to the

Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation.

O my soul, praise for His high health and salvation.

All ye who hear, now to His temple draw near.

Praise Him in glad adoration. O my soul, praise for His high health and salvation.

All that hath breath, that rises before Him. Let the amen sound from His people again. Gladly we adore Him. So far exceeds all human thought.

So with each breath I'll bless Your name, O God.

Your name will be revered by children yet to come.

As generations sing of wonders You have done.

Your strong and mighty deeds are always clear.

O God, most high, Your name will be revered.

How great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.

How great is the Lord, our God. How great is the

Lord, and greatly to be praised. Your gracious hand provides for all who live and breathe.

Your mercy runs to find the helpless and the weak.

When we call out to You, You hear our cries.

And all our needs Your gracious hand provides.

How great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.

How great is the Lord, our God. How great is the

Lord, and greatly to be praised. For whether without end, creation will rejoice.

When works of wicked men You finally destroy.

Your power will proclaim till Christ descends.

And You will reign forever without end.

How great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.

How great is the Lord, our God. How great is the

Lord, and greatly to be praised. Let's pray together.

Lord, You are great and greatly to be praised. Lord, we know that it's not about singing with our lips simple words.

We want it to resonate in our soul. We want it to be a response of our surrender, the surrender of our life to You.

We know that You made us to worship. Lord, let our lives be just that, completely and sold out, surrendered to You.

Let our lives only be for You. Take my life and let it be consecrated for to Thee.

Take my moments and my days. Let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love.

Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee.

Take my voice and let me sing always only for my

King. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from Thee.

Take my silver and my gold. Not a mite would

I withhold. Take my intellect and use every power as You choose.

Here am I, all of me.

Take my life, it's all for Thee.

Take my will and make it Thine. It shall be no longer mine.

Take my heart, it is Thine own. It shall be

Thy royal throne. Take my love, my

Lord, I pour at Your feet, its treasure store.

Take myself and I will be ever only all for Thee.

Here am I, all of me.

Take my life, it's all for Thee.

Here am I, all of me.

Take my life, it's all for Thee.

Take my life and let it be consecrated,

Lord, to Thee. You may be seated.

Good morning, everybody. A lot of stuff going on today.

Let's pray before we get started. Father, You are great and greatly to be praised.

Thank You so much, Lord, for this beautiful day. Thank You, Father, for giving us life and breath this day.

Father, we pray that You would use it to Your honor and to Your glory. We thank You, Father, for those who came up to the front today and,

Lord, that You are working in their lives, Father. Students gaining an education, Father, I'm just praying,

Lord, that they would use that, Father, to further Your kingdom and that You would be with them, protect them from false teaching,

Father, in anything they would see in the educational system. Father, just, Lord, cling hold to Your word and to Your glory.

We also thank You, Father, for those who were baptized last week. Lord, what a beautiful thing. We pray that You would be with all those who were baptized, not only committing their lives to Jesus before and then testifying of Your greatness in their lives at that baptism, but now working forward,

Father, in their hearts and lives each and every day, Father, so that, Lord, You would be king and first place in all that they do,

Father. We're so grateful, Lord, to You for this. We pray for this time now for You to guide us through Your spirit.

In Jesus' name, amen. Okay. So, yeah, what an honor to be up here.

It's amazing. So I don't have any context to start with, so I thought, well, what should I do?

And I'm going to start at the beginning. I'm going to turn in Genesis 1 -1. You don't have to turn there.

I'm just going to read Genesis 1 -1, but there will be some scriptures we'll turn to later, so keep your fingers on your

Bible for that. So Genesis 1 -1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

You've heard that, right? I hope we believe that. That statement is profound.

That statement tells us of God's great power, His great wisdom, and His great purpose, because someone who creates, or a great builder, a great creator, does things for enjoyment, for a purpose, to be with that creation, to see it through, and the

Lord certainly does that with His creation. Let's turn as well to Psalm 148.

We can turn there. There's five verses I want to read there, so a little bit of a lengthy section, and we're going to find out that this creation came about because of the word of God's power.

He simply spoke and it was, and the scriptures say that several times in several different places. For instance, in Genesis 1, the

Lord said, Let there be light, and there was light. Let's read Psalm 148, 1 -5. I'm reading from the

New American Standard. It says, Praise the Lord. Praise the

Lord from the heavens. Praise Him in the heights. Praise Him, all His angels.

Praise Him, all His hosts. Praise Him, sun and moon. Praise Him, all stars of light.

Praise Him, highest heavens, and the waters that are above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the

Lord, for He commanded, and they were created. He is the author of all things.

He created all these things in tremendous wisdom and power. And it's interesting in this verse 5 of that psalm, the word for created is bara, bara in Hebrew.

What that means is out of nothing. Meaning that out of nothing, God brought these things into existence just by the word of His power.

And that word bara is very interesting. In Greek, or excuse me, in Latin, the phrase is ex nihilo.

That's going to become important in a second. Now, all these statements

I just read from the Bible are some of the most beautiful and most profound we could ever read.

They're also the most attacked. If someone does not believe in the

Lord or wants to disprove in creation account, that person or that group of people will go after Genesis, go after God's existence, and try to disprove the very nature of our

God and His creative abilities. So we're going to talk today about some of the defenses for creation, and then spend a lot of time enjoying

His creation and praising His name for that very creation. And it's going to be a joy to do so.

The way this message is going to go, it's going to look a lot like our apologetics class on Monday nights, for those of the guys that are part of that class.

And if you're not, and you'd like to just watch online, go ahead. Go onto the Cornerstone YouTube channel and you can do that.

Right now, it's only the guys in there. But you can watch online. And I feel a little bit bad because creation and evolution is not my subject.

It's Matt's subject. But we cross over sometimes. It's okay. We enjoy each other, yeah.

So he's going to teach on this coming up shortly. So this is going to be kind of a starter for that. Now, can something come from nothing?

That's what we just said. God created something from nothing. But it's not like the philosophers who used to speak of something from nothing.

Parmenides was a philosopher in before 300 B .C. He predated Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.

And he came up with the phrase, and this is a Greek, or excuse me, he was a Greek, but the phrase is

Latin again. It's ex nihilo, nihilo feet. For out of nothing comes nothing.

Meaning that if you don't have anything to start with, the end result of nothing is going to be nothing.

There's not going to be all of a sudden something that pops into existence. But God, when it says he borrowed, he created,

God existed from all eternity past. He is self -existent. He is not a created being, and he existed from all time.

So when it says God borrowed, it means he, the beginning, was the creator.

He was the effect, or the cause of the effect that was the creation. So the philosophers put together a lot of logical rules and logical, basically theorems and proofs to try to understand how the world came into existence, what its origins were, and also how to study what the truth was.

So they came up with another law. It's called the law of causality, meaning that if we see an effect somewhere, we know it had to have a cause.

So there's a cause and effect, which means it's impossible, again, for something to come from nothing, because there's no cause, and the effect, again, would be nothing.

So that's great, but scientists aren't so easily swayed.

They think, well, wait a second. If I say what you just said, if I believe what you just said, if I force you to believe,

I have to believe in a holy God. I have to believe in a loving and all -powerful God. I don't want to do that.

I want to find another way that creation could have happened. So they formulate theorems and theories.

We're going to see if some of those hold water today. So first is, could energy come from nothing?

Well, first law of thermodynamics says there's a conservation of energy.

Any system that has a total energy, and an isolated system cannot change.

That means energy is conserved. Energy is not created, nor is it destroyed. That means energy can't come from nowhere in a system.

It's going to be disseminated somewhere. It's going to be used somewhere and then pushed to somewhere else. It can't just come out of nowhere.

So that would break the first law of thermodynamics. Okay. What about matter?

Could matter come from nowhere? Could it just pop into existence? And this includes, by the way, the

Big Bang. Because when they talk about the Big Bang, they talk about this incredibly dense singularity that's all compressed.

It's like when you think of a white dwarf or something. Gravity is just there. But they can't explain where gravity came from.

They can't explain where the singularity came from. They can't explain where the explosion came from. They just say, well, it was there.

Okay. So their god is the eternal singularity. That's what some of the arguments would be.

But we're also going to talk about why that breaks down in a second. Let's get back to nothing. Can matter be produced from nothing?

Well, the logical statement is no, it cannot. Scientists aren't easily disproved.

Some scientists, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, who most people haven't heard of Stephen Hawking, right?

And Michael Cailloux define nothing as an unstable quantum vacuum.

And they say, well, in that unstable quantum vacuum, you can have potentially a particle here.

Because in the quantum physics world, you can have these particles that mirror each other and some of them are visible. And they say, well, you could actually possibly read.

Now, that's a theory. And that's a very unproven theory that this actually could happen.

But it's a theory. But we have a response from a philosopher named David Albert.

And he criticizes Krauss, pointing out that his definition of nothing presupposes quantum fields obeying the laws of physics.

He has nothing whatever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, why the world should have been consisted of particular fields as it would have, or why it should have consisted of fields at all, or why should there have been a world in the first place, period, case closed, end of story.

He says, you're presupposing all of these things before you get to your theory. You're stacking theory on top of theory on top of theory on top of theory.

And this David Albert says, we're not going to accept that as an explanation. So the scientist's response to that is this.

I don't give a blank what David Albert says.

When nothing is mentioned by the philosophers, I don't care. Albert is a moron.

So that's the scientific response to somebody questioning your theories. It's like, okay,

I have a theory. Don't dare question it. You know, I don't care if all my suppositions and assumptions don't really stack up.

I'm just going to keep on going with my theory. So they didn't particularly like the philosopher's answer to that.

Now what about life? We don't have an answer for energy matter.

What about life? What if actually we said we're not going to be concerned with the fact that there is a world, there are elements in the world, there is energy in the world.

We're not going to explain where any of that came from. But if we have all these inorganic pieces of material, is it possible that life could come from inorganic sources?

So if you could put up the next slide, if there's ever work in the slides back there. There was an experiment done in the 50s, actually.

And it was done by two scientists named Miller and Urey. And what they wanted to do is they said, well, look.

If we get hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen together, and we put them in a container in the right amounts, in the right forms, and you can see there's compounds here.

So they're also assuming chemical compounds, chemical bonds. We're not going to explain where those laws came from as far as chemical attractions and things like that.

We're just going to say, we know this stuff existed in a primordial state, in some kind of an atmosphere that was very volatile.

And by the way, there's electricity in that atmosphere, so there's going to be lightning strikes. And we're going to apply a charge to all these things.

And you know what? We're going to bet that nitrogen produces lightning. And they're also going to have a heat source down here.

Well, guess what happened? Well, they did produce, down here, organic compounds.

They're known as amino acids. And you guys know amino acids are part of the whole DNA chain, protein chain.

Amino acids chain together to form the basic building blocks of life, which is protein.

And the scientists worked it. I told you so. And they did their little dance. And they were so happy.

We knew it. But what happened here? First off, they have a very controlled environment.

They controlled this environment. They controlled the exact materials they had. They controlled the electrical charges.

They controlled the heat source. They controlled the whole process. What do we have here?

We have an intelligent design of an experiment that presupposes, by the way, what the building blocks of life are.

Because they had to know ahead of time that these things are going to comprise the basic building blocks of life.

Not only are their assumptions amazing, because they're assuming that all these things exist, but then they actually form this experiment with exactly the right parameters.

And they come up with the result that they were looking for. What they proved was, yes, if there is an intelligent design, with an intelligent designer, yes, life can come from that.

So they actually proved intelligent design in their little model here. So I thank them for that.

And basically what they did is they reverse engineered life as we know it and the compounds we know it.

But that doesn't dissuade the scientists very often. As I said down here, this is amino acids that they produce in amino acids.

Well, amino acids themselves are just a very small part, they're a building block, of a protein.

And a protein is really the building block of life. Mathematical calculations have been shown to say, well, if you really did have these elements existing in nature in some kind of random form, and you did have energy and electricity and all that, the odds of a amino acid chain being formed together, coming together by chance, is 10 to the 150th power, just to form one protein.

10 to the 150th power is beyond numbers we can imagine. If we think of billions, it's 10 to the 6th.

Or excuse me, 10 to the 9th. Millions is 10 to the 6th. So quadrillions, quintillions, we kind of lose the numbers after that, and even like, maybe the next baseball contract will be a quadrillion or something, we're not really sure.

But those kind of numbers are off the charts as far as imagining things. Those odds are astronomical.

But the scientist says this, some of them. This is a blogger named Dwayne Anderson, he's a biologist.

He says, now in the video, now this is a video that describes what I'm just talking about and the probability of something coming together to form life.

He says, they calculate the odds of a particular protein being formed by chance. It's a relatively small protein, but it still has 150 amino acids chained together.

The odds of that particular sequence coming together purely by chance is indeed astronomically low, to the point of being virtually impossible.

But then he says this. He says, that's irrelevant. For one thing, that particular protein didn't come together purely by chance.

It evolved through a long selection process. Selection can change the odds.

He doesn't understand mathematics too well. He might understand biology a little bit, but he doesn't understand mathematics too well.

He says, selection can change the odds of something happening from being virtually impossible to being inevitable.

That sounds really good if you're not a mathematician. If you're a mathematician, you realize what he did there is he inserted a force, an intelligent force he called selection.

That's not the way probability and chance works. He's saying there is an intelligent selection that continues to move along the chain.

And what he is also doing is basically proving that, yes, these things can happen if there is an intelligent design and an intelligent selection made along the way.

But folks, you are not going to win the argument very often with folks who are set in scientific ways.

You can share a lot of information. You can share a lot of truth. The way the truth is going to be revealed to you is going to be the specific revelation of God's Word because it's going to speak to your heart.

The Holy Spirit will speak to you when you open the Bible. But he will also speak to you when you behold his creation itself.

I believe Michael said earlier, if he didn't we'll say it now, Michael Stockland who is leading our worship, that in the creation

God has revealed himself. His eternal attributes and divine nature are clearly seen by what he has created.

And for those who deny that, they are basically suppressing the truth in their hearts because even someone who doesn't believe, really down in their heart they really do believe.

It's just that they don't want to. They don't want to accept that there is a holy, loving creator that is going to hold them accountable for what they know.

Because if we admit that there is a creator and we have been created by a God who is all powerful, we also have to say,

Lord, that means you have basically a control of my life is really what it comes down to.

You have to admit, you have to give an account of that. People don't want to do that. So they come up with explanations like this man,

Dwayne Anderson, and try to get around the mathematical odds of creation.

Now, if we ignore everything we just talked about, if we say, okay, forget about energy coming into being from nothing.

Forget about matter coming into being from nothing. Forget about the fact that life might be able to be produced from nothing or by chance through various means.

Is there a process then if all of this has been started, if we have eternal elements that came from somewhere, if we have this basic building block of life, these proteins that can be made, can we say then that there's a process of evolution that will take over at that point and things will naturally get more and more complex and more and more,

I'll say interesting as the chain goes on. Can we make that argument?

Well, there's some laws against that too. The first one we'll talk about is the law of entropy, which is the fact entropy is the measure of disorder in the system or in the environment.

So the definition of entropy is this. All things tend towards disorder, especially as the second law of thermodynamics states that as one goes forward in time, the net entropy or degree of disorder of any isolated or closed system will always increase or at least stay the same.

Entropy is simply a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives.

In fact, you can think of entropy as nature's tax. So things decay.

Things get more disordered. And as you got out of bed this morning, when you went to bed, maybe your hair kind of looked okay, but you found out what disorder was in the morning.

That's the normal event of things. And unless you take active, put an active force to that disorder, you kind of look like me when you come in to the sanctuary.

Your hair's all messed up or whatever. But that happens all over the place in nature. Does anybody watch the

Mysteries of the Abandoned? That's a show on, it's like A &E or something like that.

But they'll show these incredible facilities or structures that people have made.

There are marvels of engineering some of these things that you see on A &E. The Mysteries of the

Abandoned, though, show what happens after things have been abandoned for 50 years or so.

Incredible things. And do we see those things getting better or are those things decaying?

Those things end up crumbling. Those things end up decaying. And that's the natural order of the second law of thermodynamics.

Things decay. Things go into more chaos. The only way you can have things coming into order is if forces apply.

And there's an intelligent design that brings things together. Now, there's also another concept in nature called irreducible complexity, which means that if there is a system out there that has many intricate parts working together, but if you remove one of those parts, the system will fail.

That means that system is irreducibly complex. And Darwin himself said this. He said...

So this is Charles Darwin, the father of the evolutionary theory concept. He said, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications through mutation and whatnot, my theory would absolutely break down.

So Darwin said this. So do we see irreducibly complex systems in nature?

There's a man named Michael Behay who put out a book in the early 90s called Darwin's Black Box. And he brought up this issue and he talked about blood clot.

He talked about the human eye. He talked about flagella, which is the organ at the back of a single cell that would make it move.

You remember from biology class the flagella that would flap around and the little cells would move around. And then the cilium as well.

That's another complex. There's a ton of them. The bombardier's beetle defense system, which has poison within itself.

And it's gonna, like if a predator or a threat comes, it's gonna inject that poison out the back end of itself and try to dissuade that predator.

But the problem is, if you say, well, over time, the bombardier beetle has evolved, you have to consider that because he has to have a mechanism for releasing the poison.

He has to have a mechanism for generating the poison. He has to have a mechanism for storing the poison when he's not using it.

And all of these things have to come together. It's a lot more complex than that. But basically, if he doesn't have one of those things, this defense mechanism fails and Mr.

Prangmanis that comes along has a snack called the bombardier beetle because he couldn't defend himself. So there would be no more defense system for the bombardier beetle in that case.

But there's so many other cases where this happens. Now, again, scientists didn't give up here because they tried to go after Behay.

As a matter of fact, in 2005, there was a conference where they say Behay didn't approve his point enough.

And they did so by creating two computer simulations that showed that what we think could be irreducibly complex systems in nature actually could come about by another means, which is incredible to me.

You think of the human eye and all the things that are necessary for the human eye to operate. What the argument was in some of these cases were some of the scientists said, well, evolution is a random process which can go in any direction.

So what you could have here is like, okay, you have an irreducibly complex system at level this.

But what could have happened is that in evolution, it could have gone around this way and gotten actually more complex and then it actually devolved back into this incredibly complex system which cannot be reduced any further.

And what I say to that is that's a faith -based approach.

That is not a scientific -based approach. That is a faith -based approach to the possibility of evolution ever occurring.

The mathematical odds are incredible. The intelligent design of these systems is incredible.

But as I said before, usually you don't win arguments with folks that are set in their ways.

And the fact that somebody would actually say that it has to be more complex first in order to devolve into a less complex system is an incredible statement to make.

But the scientists at that convention said, Mr. Behay, we think they proved you wrong.

And by the way, they proved you wrong with computer simulations. I'm a computer programmer. I write simulations for a living.

I very, very much understand what random number generators are and how you can make random draws by chance.

It's a kind of simulated nature. But the problem is when you write a computer simulation program, you do so with a bunch of algorithms that you have designed.

You have done so with a model that you think is going to work. And you don't necessarily predict the results all the time because you're making all these random choices.

But you can't say that computer simulations aren't driven by the programmer.

I know very much that all the assumptions I put into my programmers are very much based in here and in here.

The things I've known, the things I've learned, the things I've put together. So basically, again, they have proven that, yes, if there is an intelligent programmer behind the simulation, then yes, you can direct these things to happen.

So in all the cases that I've mentioned so far, there's always been the problem of intelligence behind it.

How did all this happen without an intelligent designer? So I think the horse has been out of the barn for a long time about intelligent design.

Scientists are even coming to that conclusion now. But now they're coming up with crazy theories about, well, maybe we were planted by aliens at some point in time.

Really, they were much smarter than we were, but they left us here and we don't know where they are now.

When you think about all these assumptions, presuppositions, this ends up not really being science.

This ends up being a belief system, a philosophy, of those who are willing to hold tight to the concept that there is no

God. They are not willing to relinquish control or give an account to a holy and loving creator.

They want to hold to the fact that there is no God. But as I said before, even in their hearts, down deep, they know, the scriptures tell us, that they're suppressing the truth right now.

But what do we say? Do we know an intelligent designer who has created all things? Let's turn to Psalm 8, verses 1 through 4.

So I'll read from the NASB version. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is all thy name in all the earth, who has displayed thy splendor above the heavens.

From the mouth of infants and nursing babes, thou hast established strength, or praise, because of thine adversaries to make the enemy and the revengeful cease.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou dost take thought of him, and the son of man, that thou dost care for him.

The psalmist was reflective. The psalmist looked out at what they see.

And hopefully we all do that at some point. We should do that. We should look at what is out there.

We should take care of the things that are around us to observe things.

Life is so busy. Life goes so fast. The Lord said, Jesus said, observe the sparrows.

When he was talking about anxiousness in the great sermon on the mount, he said, look, they don't toil and they don't spend.

He's talking about the lilies of the field in that case, but he says they don't gather or reap in the barns the little birds of the air.

But your heavenly father provides for them. He says, observe the birds. Now some of us know those verses real well.

Actually, you know, those verses are kind of familiar. But I wonder how many of us actually go out and do what the

Lord commanded us to do, which is observe the birds. Go out and take a look at the birds.

Go out and look at the night sky. And how does that compare to man?

Like when we look at the expanse of the heavens and we think, oh Lord, this is beyond comprehension, the things

I see, the things I wonder about, the things that you have created. Who am

I that you would care for me? I'm just a little speck of dust in the universe. But yet he does care for those he's created.

He's created you with a great purpose. And he does care for you. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later as well.

Let's turn to Psalm 19, verses 1 through 4 as well. So we'll be in the

Psalms today a little bit. The heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands.

Day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor there are words.

Their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth. And their utterances to the end of the world.

So what's he saying here? He says, well first he says that the expanse of the heavens is declaring the glory of God.

But then he says, but they don't say anything. Their voice isn't heard. But then he says, but the utterances of those things go out through the entire world.

Even those things don't speak audibly to us. They speak to our hearts. All of creation is speaking and it's speaking loudly that the

Lord God created all these things and they did so for his glory. They're declaring the work of his hands.

And the psalmist again in Psalm 19 is just acknowledging the beauty and the wisdom and the power and the might of a great creator

God. Now if we go back to the human eye for a second, we talked about the complexity of the human eye just a little bit.

The human eye is very complex. And Darwin struggled with the eye a little bit.

He was wondering how he's ever going to prove that this is an evolutionary process that this came to be.

And I think it's interesting because man has tried to mimic certain things in creation.

Because we have observed things and we see things that are just incredibly complex and wonderful and we think, gosh, that's a good design.

I think I'll try to copy that. The camera is one of those things. The camera is an attempt for us to, like the human eye, capture an image.

And it is amazing to me, I just, you know, the human brain is another whole issue.

But the fact that we can actually capture an image with all the apparatus that we've been given with the lens and the cornea and the retina and the optic nerve and everything that has to come together, the rods and the cones and all that, and our eye adjusts so quickly to light and able to focus so much more than really any camera and do so much more than any camera.

But then that image gets sent to our brain and that image means something to us.

Like how then do we process all these things? Because I know what I'm seeing right now and I can see, you know, all your faces and in my memory bank,

I have all these things stored up and I know so many of your faces and know who you are and it's like, how is that possible?

It's just incredible. Now a camera is fantastic and you remember way back in the day,

I think the camera was late 1800s, something like that, but I'll say photographs, where they had the flash powder on a strip and then you had the light, the flash powder, and it went, and it blew up, but that light then was reflected on an image that was behind,

I guess it was in front of the people who were getting the photograph and you see all those old pictures from the 1800s.

You're like, you know what, that was incredible that man figured that out, how to do that, and the cameras have been getting better and better and better ever since then.

And some of you guys have an iPhone, and that's pretty good, but from what I hear, the Samsungs are better,

I think, maybe, for the pictures. So I was like, sorry, you know, if you have an iPhone, sorry about that.

But this is another example of there was a design already out there.

Did man create this? Oh yeah, we did. We created in the image of God and we have creative abilities.

But what we did is we saw how things worked and we mimicked them. We do that with airplanes and the flight of birds, things like that.

And the original is always so much better and so much more complex than what we've tried to mimic or recreate.

We try to create robots. We try to create airplanes that fly, and usually when you get on a flight and the

Falcon is like, boom, you never see a bird do that to a tree, right? You see the birds, you know, flying in and out of trees and they come in and they're so precise, so beautiful.

They fly so much better than anything we have ever created. And the same thing with the camera.

But the idea is all of these things, all this complexity, testifies to the brilliance and the wonder of God.

But there are also so many things that humans have no idea. When we observe things, we have no idea how they occurred or how they happened.

I have some examples of that here. If you go in a desert, and in particular where it's very dune -y, like a sand dune, like a beach kind of thing, but it's across the long expanse, you hear music playing.

You hear musical notes. You hear sounds. And you're like, well, where's that music coming from?

Somehow the sand dunes are creating that. You know, the wind obviously is sweeping over the sand dunes.

Somehow there's musical notes coming from that. You look it up, singing sand dunes. Scientists don't even know how that happens.

They know that if the grains of sand are a little bit smaller, you know, the pitch is different. So they understand there's got to be something going on with the vibration of the sand, but they don't know how it happens.

Did anyone ever hear of star jelly? You know, I looked some of this crazy stuff up, right?

Star jelly is gelatinous blobs that fall from the sky at different times.

People are trying to figure out why exactly. They think it happens during meteor showers, but they don't understand where this stuff comes from or exactly what it is.

So all kinds of natural phenomena around that. Now this one, somebody might know about this one. This is the

Catatumbo lightning. This is down in Venezuela, and it happens at the mouth of a river.

It's a swampy area around this river. It's like a delta. But this lightning happens 140 days out of the year, and it happens nine hours out of the days.

And these lightning strikes are just voluminous. There's one strike every couple of seconds.

So if you're standing here watching this, it's just a light show. And apparently a lot of people go down to see this, but they do not know why it happens.

They think because it happens 140 days out of the year that the other days out of the year might be a little drier, and there might be less moisture, so there's maybe a little less electrical tension between the earth and the atmosphere.

They don't know. They don't know. There's craters in the Siberian area, Russia and Siberia, that are just straight down tunnels.

No idea why they're there, where they formed, where they came from. And there's a bunch of things like that.

It really goes beyond description. We can't explain these things, but yet they're there.

Complex, unbelievable, and we really don't know about. Now I want to look at a few things in creation that we do know about that are fascinating, and I think they're wonderful examples of God's creativity and his design.

The first one is going to be our big friend that we see down in the Cape May Zoo. A giraffe.

So there he is. So we think of them being out in Africa, right? But we have them in Cape May.

Anybody goes down to Cape May Zoo, you can see a giraffe. They're still there, right? I haven't been down there for a while. They had a baby giraffe born a few years ago.

That was a big deal. But those are beautiful animals. Do you know how big they are? They're 18 feet tall, the boys are.

Boys can get that tall, and the boys can be 4 ,200 pounds. That's a big animal.

Big. Now the girls, they can get up to 16 feet tall, and they can weigh about 2 ,600 pounds.

For those 2 ,600 pounds, it's keto diet time, I think. You can get up to 2 ,600 pounds.

And they have two cones on their heads. They don't really know what those cones are used for.

They're called ossicones. But the girls have black fuzzy fur on the top of their cones, but the boys are bald.

So girls, you get us back on that one, okay? You know, because some of us do have, some of our ossicones are a little bit less hairy than others.

As a matter of fact, some of us are totally bald. But this is a beautiful animal, and we really don't see anything like it in nature.

The closest animal to it is the very next slide we have up here. And the quiz is, does anybody know what that animal is?

You do. What is it? It is an okapi. They knew it in the first service, too.

You went to school. Very good. Everybody else knew that, too?

Yeah, okapi? No, yeah. Now, what does that animal look like, you would say?

Looks a little more like a zebra, right? The reason they put it in the family of, you know, if you're talking about the evolution of it, they put it in the family of the giraffe because of the way its feet are, the way its toes are, and the way its tongue is.

But that animal stands 4 '9 at its shoulder, so, you know, so big. And it can be up to 440 to 700 pounds, but that's a much different animal.

It's got very different characteristics than a giraffe has. So if that's its closest relative, they say, well, how did we get from that to the giraffe?

I don't think we did. I don't think this was an evolutionary issue at all. I think these are both beautiful, unique creations of the

Lord. But in particular, let's turn to the next slide, which shows a particular part of the design of a giraffe that is extremely important.

The giraffe has a problem because the giraffe's head is way up here, and its heart is way down here.

Now, what's the most important organ in the body to receive blood flow? How does blood get from this heart that's way down here, way up here?

Well, you've got to have a good pumping heart. And that causes, obviously, a very, very high blood pressure in the animal itself.

So it's like, well, how does the animal deal with that high blood pressure? Well, it has some thickening of its vein walls.

Actually, things built into it, which helps thicken its vein walls to handle the blood pressure.

But it's got another problem, too, which is this. If it's pumping so hard, hard, hard to get that blood flow up that hydrostatic column of water that goes up to its brain, what happens when it wants to get a drink?

Now, elephants take care of this because they have a trunk. They scoop the water in. Giraffes, if you've seen them over by the watering holes in Africa, they do this, right, with their legs.

They spread out, and they dip their head down. If that heart is pumping, pumping, pumping, and that blood pressure is so high, and he bends his head down like that, how in the world does he not blow blood vessels?

And really, really damage his brain. How does that happen? Well, this particular animal has a very complicated system of valves and thick veins that handle the blood pressure flow.

And they make it so that the blood pressure when he dips his head down is the same as when he has it up. Unbelievable design.

And it has to work, folks. This isn't something that can evolve slowly, but this has to work where the animal perishes because he would blow his brain out when he went down.

Now, what happens when he lifts it up? Like, you know, when you get lightheaded sometimes, you stand up real quickly or something, and you might fall down, pass out.

Well, him, he's in a watering hole, and he has predators and threats around him.

He may have to pick up his head really fast and get moving. How does he pick his head back up and reverse all that pressure that was there and now is not there?

How does he get not so lightheaded? So that's the next slide. What happens is when he pulls his head up, he has a series of veins and a little storage area of capillaries in the top of his head.

And this area, what happens is when he puts his head up, that area shoots blood into his brain so that he remains at the same pressure within his brain.

Now, what happens is the blood pressure in his cheeks and the veins in his cheeks and his neck and whatnot, they all reduce, but his brain stays constant, and he is able to move right away.

He's able to get going. That kind of design can only be explained by an intelligent, wise creator.

We try to design machinery like that, and we do it with hydraulics and things like that, but again, we see the design already existing in nature, and we just try to mimic things.

A giraffe is an incredibly majestic animal. If I had a domestic giraffe, that would be a real story.

And he's a design marvel, to say the least. But if we can say how wonderful the giraffe is, what can we say about the one who created the giraffe?

Let's turn to Isaiah 45, verse 18, where thus says the

Lord, who created the heavens, He is the God who formed the earth and made it.

He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited.

I am the Lord, and there is none else. And that's what we say, too.

There is none other besides God Himself. There is no other. He is the one and only, and He is the creator.

And praise God that He didn't create this universe to be a waste place. He created it to be inhabited.

He created it to be a blessing to those who He created. And it is. And we live in a world right now where we do see pain, and we do see suffering, and we see sicknesses.

And we know that for a time this world is cursed by sin. Sin has entered this world.

And unfortunately we deal with a lot of issues that are very difficult. But He's also promised that one day

He's going to make things right in this world. And He's going to recreate things without even the possibility of sin being in its existence or in its presence anymore.

And at that point in time there will be no more sickness and no more death. And those who believe that He is creator and God of all will enter that kingdom that He's going to create.

Now I'm not going to talk necessarily about how to have your sins forgiven today, but what

I would like to say is this. If you don't know God today, and I'm going to keep going with a couple other things.

If you don't know who He is, He wants you to be His child. He wants you to come to Him.

If these things are touching your heart, the word of God touching your heart, with a consideration of the complexity and the beauty of nature itself around us, come and talk to one of us.

Either myself or Matt or Ivan who's over here or Michael. The God who created all things wants you to be

His child. So that's what I'll say about that. There is one God who has created all things.

Now let's look at a couple other wonderful designs that we see in nature. Let's turn to the next slide which is one of my favorites of all time.

And it should be familiar to you. Now everyone knows what that is, right?

Red belly? Red belly woodpecker? Now I feel incredibly blessed when a woodpecker comes to our house.

And we put stuff out especially to see them. They're beautiful, beautiful birds. Now let's go to the next picture because this one's a little more rare.

But yet He still is in our area. Does anyone know what that is?

If you know, don't say. You already spoke. She probably does know.

Does anyone know what that is? You got it. Yellow shafted flicker. Beautiful bird.

Very much related to the red belly. And woodpeckers. Now there's some very interesting things about woodpeckers.

Obviously the colors and the beauty of the bird are impressive. I think.

I just love them. I really do. Love to see a woodpecker. But the woodpecker has a problem.

And you can imagine what that problem is. The woodpecker, when it goes into the hardwood and is trying to chop away to get at the insects in the tree.

He's got a real problem. His head goes from 20 feet per second to zero.

In an instant. What that is, is pulling a thousand G's. The effects of gravity.

9 .8 meters per second on us. A thousand G's. Now you can relate this to...

Has anyone seen the Top Gun 2 movie? Supposedly, I have heard that they pull some wild amount of G's in that movie.

But you know what a man can withstand? I think it's around 5 or 6 before we pass out.

Let's just say they stretch it a little bit in the movie. I don't give anything away. I didn't see the movie.

I'm not endorsing the movie here, by the way. But I know they fly fast and hard.

I know they take hard turns. But you think about 6 G's and how it would affect a man.

We'd feel like we'd be flattened against the plane. If we were flying like that. These guys have a thousand

G's of force put on their heads. And yet they don't destroy themselves in the process.

How in the world is that possible? Well, there's been a lot of research in this area.

Specifically Japanese, I think. Japanese have really tried to figure this out. They have taken x -rays.

They have taken super slow -mo photography and videos.

They know a few things. There's a little membrane that separates the beak from the skull.

But that little membrane is nowhere near enough to absorb that impact. They also know that the bird's brain does not have a lot of subdural space within it.

Which means that the amount of the ability for the brain to move around it's kind of locked in.

So that's kind of working against it as well.

There is a bone called the hyoid bone which kind of wraps around the bird's head.

And they think it acts like a shock absorber. But you know what? Scientists don't understand how the bird can survive.

They really don't. They don't understand how this impact doesn't severely damage the bird.

But you know what? The bird lives and the bird does what it does. And this design, although it eludes us, enables the woodpecker to do what it does.

And it gets the bugs just fine. And you can hear it in the morning pecking at your trees waking you up in the morning.

And if you're lucky, once in a while they'll land in your gutter. You ever had that happen? Where they start pecking at your metal gutter?

That'll really wake you up in the morning. It happens sometimes too. But it's a beautiful bird.

And the design is unexplained and unmatched.

Beautiful creation of the wood. Now I think my last example, My last example is something also

I love very much. Pine cone. That's a good one, right? Pine cones are fascinating.

Now the majority of the purpose of a pine cone is to protect the seeds of the tree.

The tree doesn't want its seeds to be exposed to extreme cold. So it tightens up.

And protects it. But it also doesn't want all its seeds to be eaten by potential predators.

In this case, probably birds. Birds were our friend last time, but birds are enemies of the pine cone. But of course trees and birds get along just fine in symbiotic relationships.

So they do okay. But the pine cone is fascinating.

Because its job is to protect the seeds. And by the way, this particular pine cone is a sugar pine.

And it can go up to be 24 inches long. That's actually the longest one in the world. We got this in California near Kings Canyon National Park.

It was not in the park for those who are National Park people. Not allowed.

Can't take anything from the park. This guy is also from California. It's called a coulter pine.

And this guy is so funny because it's a little wispy pine tree. These guys can grow up to 10 pounds.

Man, how many of you like to be under the tree when this guy falls off? But the coulter pine is like a little

Charlie Brown tree. And if you ever go out near the Inukern area and travel from Inukern to Bakersfield there's trees on the side of the road that produce these guys.

And this is the heaviest pine cone in the world. It's amazing to me because it says the pine cone's purpose is to protect the seeds.

So it does what it does. Some pine cones stay on their trees for 10 years before they fall.

Why do they fall at that particular time? Why does that happen? We don't know exactly but sometimes they fall and then they don't open right away.

They open based upon temperature quite often and possible trauma.

There's one particular kind of pine called the jack pine that doesn't release its seeds unless a strong fire blows through the area.

So what happens then? The fire blows through the area, the trees are burnt but the pine cones go and they release the seeds.

What happens? Those seeds become the next forest. And that's not by accident.

That's exactly the way those pine cones were programmed. How does a pine cone even determine temperature?

I don't see any thermostats on pine cones. I have enough trouble figuring out the thermostat in my house to get the temperature right.

How do they know? Now that one pine cone that I already put back in a bag my wife and I had had that pine cone for 15 years and we went to clean off the shelf where it rests.

You know, dust the shelves once in a while. And it's the first time we'd ever seen seeds fall out.

So 15 years after we had first had the pine cone all these seeds started falling out. Why in the world after those 15 years did seeds start falling out at that particular time?

That pine cone knew what to do. It knew exactly the right timing at the right event. It's just amazing to think that all of these things and it's still very, very hard to get a grasp on why do these things happen at these exact times for these exact reasons.

But the Lord had a purpose in designing all of these miraculous things. And I'll tell you, if you look at all of these things and these are just a small sampling of the complexity that God has what should we say?

Let's turn to Psalm 104. We'll see what we should say. This is

Psalm 104. And for those of you who may not have seen this psalm before this is another great creation psalm.

It speaks of all the wonderful things that the Lord has done. So verses 1 and 2. I'm going to skip through verses.

It says, Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, Thou art very great. Thou art clothed with splendor and majesty, covering thyself with light as with a cloak, stretching out the heavens like a tent curtain.

Verse 5. He has established the earth upon its foundations so that it will not totter forever and ever.

Verse 10. He sends forth the springs and the valleys. They flow between the mountains.

They give drink to every beast of the field. Verse 14. He causes the grass to grow for the cattle and the vegetation for the cultivation of man so that he may bring forth food from the earth.

Verses 18 and 19. The high mountains are for the wild goats. The cliffs are a refuge for the rock badgers.

Those are like little rodent things. He made the moon for the seasons, and the sun knows the place of its setting.

Verse 24. O Lord, how many are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all.

The earth is full of thy possessions. He certainly has made them all in wisdom.

So thinking about all these things today, you're a believer today. You're here. What does this mean to you?

Well, let's read verses 33 and 34. I will sing to the

Lord as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. Let my meditation be pleasing to him.

For as for me, I shall be glad in the Lord. The believer cannot help but praise

God. When we consider the wonders of his hand, the work of his fingers, the moon, the sun, the stars, it is impossible for someone who loves

God and believes in him not to rejoice in the things that we see around us. It is incredible.

But beyond that, if you're a believer and you know God has done all these things, what does it mean for you?

It means his promises for you are going to be held true.

Because he is that powerful. He is that wise. He is going to be able to hold you as his child.

Is he going to be able to care for you? Yes, he is. You can have peace in this world because you know that a

God and great, great creator, if he promises to care for you, he will and you can have peace in that.

What about purpose? We all wonder about purpose. Why are we here?

Revelation 4 .11 says this. I'm going to turn back to Psalm 104 in a second.

Revelation 4 .11 says, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power for thou hast created all things and for thy pleasure they were created.

You do have a purpose, an incredible purpose, and that is fellowship with the living

God. Actually rejoice in him and be his child. Your life has great value and he has desired you to come to him and acknowledge these things and be part of his family.

So when you think of a great purpose in your life, being a child of the king is a great purpose.

So the believers think about these things. What about unbelievers? When we hear all these things about God's great power and creation, what does it mean for the unbeliever?

Let's turn to verse 35 in Psalm 104. It says,

Let sinners be consumed from the earth and the ungodly be no more. Bless the

Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord. Those who do not embrace God as creator and acknowledge him as the giver of life and the one who owns all things will be held accountable one day.

There is a day of judgment, and those who refuse to acknowledge him as king and lord will give an account in those days.

That's a scary prospect, but it doesn't have to be that way. If you want to acknowledge

God as creator and king and you want him to be part of your life, as I said before, come up and talk to us.

Talk to me or talk to Mike or talk to Matt. We'd love to tell you how you can know this great creator of the universe.

So let's close in prayer. Father, we're in awe of who you are.

Father, we look at these things and we are astounded. Father, we would love to know why the lightning happens down at Catatumbo, Venezuela.

And quite honestly, we'd all like to take a trip there and see it. We would love to know why a hummingbird can do what it does.

And we're just in awe of that. Father, we pray, Lord, that today your name is exalted in what we have talked about and what we have thought about and the holy scriptures we've read,

Father. And we want to go home today, Father, and rejoice in the things you've created, but most of all rejoice in you,

Father. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. We will fear the night.

We will walk the valley with you by our side. You will go before us.

You will lead the way. We have found a refuge only you can save.

Sing with joy now. Our God is for us. The Father's love is a strong and mighty fortress.

Raise your voice now. No love is greater. Who can stand against us if our

God is for us? Even when

I stumble, even when I fall, even when I turn back, still your love is sure.

You will not abandon. You will not forsake. You will cheer me onward with never -ending grace.

Sing with joy now. Our God is for us. The Father's love is a strong and mighty fortress.

Raise your voice now. No love is greater. Who can stand against us if our

God is for us? Neither height nor depth.

Neither height nor depth can separate us.

Hell and death will not defeat us. He who gave his

Son to free us, hold me in his love. Neither height nor depth can separate us.

Hell and death will not defeat us. He who gave his

Son to free us, hold me in his love. Sing with joy now.

Our God is for us. The Father's love is a strong and mighty fortress.

Raise your voice now. No love is greater. Who can stand against us if our

God is for us? Sing with joy now. Our God is for us.

The Father's love is a strong and mighty fortress. Raise your voice now.

No love is greater. Who can stand against us if our God is for us?