Wonders of Creation Redemption - Part 2 — William MacDonald

The Wisdom and Knowledge of God in Creation

Chapter 11, Romans chapter 11, beginning in verse 33. Romans 11, 33. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments in his way past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?

For who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him? For of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen. This morning we were starting a little series on the wonders of God in creation, providence, and redemption.

And we thought for a while this morning of the wonders of the human body, and then the wonders of the starry universe. Wonder of wonders! Vast surprise! Could greater wonder be that he who built the starry skies once let his eyes on me?

Does it impress you tonight to think one day you're going to see him? Redeemed by his precious blood, he'll stand in his presence, and gaze upon the one who flung the planets out into space, who upholds them by the word of his power.

And even if there's someone here tonight who's not saved, you're going to see him too. You're going to see the marks of Calvary in his hands, feet, and in his mouth. It's really quite breathtaking to me that God has ordained it that those who are saved by grace through faith in him are destined to be conformed to the image of this wonderful one.

The Planet Designed for Human Habitation

And I'd like to take some more with you tonight about some of the wonders of God in creation. I think of the planet on which we live. Paul writes in Romans chapter 1 verses 19 and 20, what may be known of God is manifest in them, that is, in people, for God has showed it to them.

But since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and spot is, so that they are without excuse. When the Lord finished the work of creation, he said that it was very good, and no one of us tonight can realize how very good it was.

Everything the Lord made is perfect. And this is never more true than of the planet on which we live. He designed this planet so that it would be absolutely fit for human habitation. We take for granted that there are a lot of amazing things connected with a simple statement like that.

Perfect for human habitation as to beauty, as to comfort, and as to economy. As far as we know, the earth is the only planet in the universe that can boast those advantages. The planet earth is just the right size.

If it were different, the blanket of atmosphere around it would be either too dense or too thin, and we wouldn't be able to live. It's very hard for me to accept that that happened by chance. The tilt of the earth is just exactly right.

The tilt of the earth in its orbit, that's what causes the four seasons, and it makes the cultivation of the land possible. Without the earth tilted the way it is now, this whole planet would be a vast Sahara, a vast desert, and the rotation of the earth is not accidental.

It's finely tuned to just the right speed in its 24 orbit around the sun, and it disperses the warmth of the sun uniformly, and it guarantees the wind and the ocean currents. Who would have ever thought of that?

Just think of impersonal forces calculating all of that. The atmosphere around the earth is just what we need to breathe. Take a deep breath. 21 oxygen and 78 nitrogen, and every one of us is living proof here tonight of the suitability of the atmosphere around us.

Be thankful for that breath you just took. And God designed an ozone layer around the earth to protect us from the harmful rays of the sun. Man is poking holes in that ozone right now by uncontrolled contaminants, but that's man's problem, not God's.

Man is doing that. Water is indispensable. As far as we know, the earth is the only planet that has water in liquid form. It's an amazing coincidence, isn't it? He's so generous that he covered four-fifths of the earth with water.

God is generous in all that he does. He's a prodigal God. Four-fifths of the earth, oceans, streams, lakes, rivers, and as I say, science knows of no other planet that has such a supply of water in liquid form.

It's a major constituent of all living matter, and as good as a solvent in your laundry, isn't it? As good as a coolant for our beverages and steam for your mind. He loves that, because his delights are with the sun sitting in.

Design that planet so it'll be just right for human occupation. Water is not like some other liquids, you know. Some water is heavier than other water, and it's a good thing, because the heavy water sinks to the bottom of the lake where it doesn't freeze, and thus allows the fish to live down there.

Free that such a thing would happen by chance, isn't it? So, he said that to think that all of this would happen by chance would be comparable to taking blobs of tape and pouring them against the wall and producing the Mona Lisa.

That's exactly right. It would be comparable to that. Taking blobs of tape in your hand, pouring them against the wall, and coming up with a massive marvel of the planet on which we live. But, of course, as we said this morning, this extends to all that God has made.

The Migratory Wisdom of Birds

Not only the human body, not only the starry skies, not only the planet on which it is, everything that came from the hand of God is filled with awesome thunder. Psalm 148, verses 10 and 13. "...wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds, let them praise the name of the Lord.".

I think, for instance, of the migratory instinct of birds. It's really enough to stagger the imagination. The birds know their proper destination. They know the right place for them to nest, and to feed, and to winter.

One sandpiper flies 9 ,900 miles to get to its winter home. How does that bird know how much fat to allow to accumulate in its body before it takes off? It does, and the computation has to take in the distance, and it has to provide for adverse winds.

It can't fly too fast to use up too much fuel. It can't fly too slow to use up too much fuel. Talk about a calculation. It knows just when to start to get to its desired habitation, and it can't land on anywhere in between.

It's a land bird, and there's no land on its flight. It's the same as if you went in to buy a new car in the dealership, and you write out all the papers, and you get all through, and just as you're going out the door with the keys, the dealer says, oh I'm sorry, I forgot something.

He says, here's a cup of gasoline. This will do you for the life of the car. That's comparable to the fuel efficiency of these birds, and they have a built-in navigational system. It would be fatal for them to drift off course, so they constantly adjust for the winds that they're encountering, and you know it's an interesting thing that men have tried to disorient them over and over again.

You know, to put them inside a box, and turn the box around, and do everything that the human mind can think of to disorient the bird. They take off and fly properly to their desired habitation. There's a bird in Germany called the lesser white-throat warbler, and flies up from the south Germany during the summer, and lays its eggs and rears its young, and then a very strange thing happens.

Those parrot birds are guilty of parental neglect. They take off on their migration south, and they leave the little ones behind them. Not to worry. A little while later, the birds, the little ones, take off and fly to exactly the same place that their parents have gone, and they've never been there before.

Lesser white-throat warbler is more than horrible, and mankind understand how they do such a thing. They arrive at the right place at the right time. What a wonderful God. To put that ability into a little bird, a little bird you can hold in your hand.

If you took the feathers off it, it wouldn't be enough to make food for a sick grasshopper, and if you think that's wrong, what about the butterflies? Butterflies go south to a plateau in Mexico, the monarch butterfly, and then it comes up north, and it lays its eggs on milkweed in the north.

The little ones develop, the little ones are born, and the old monarchs go on their way, and all ties to the ancestral site are cut, and then an incredible thing happens. Those little butterflies that have never been in Mexico, root there the next winter.

You know, sometimes I think we're so spiritual that we don't take account of the things around us. The world around us is filled with the marvel of God, if we only had eyes. Let me think of wonders of God in creation, we're probably apt to overlook the seagulls.

Seagulls, Shellfish, and Divine Design

Seagulls are everywhere. I think they're in Missouri. You ever seen a seagull in Missouri? What do they do here? Seagulls. But it's interesting, if you take an ocean liner and cross the Atlantic or the Pacific, you'll find them all the way.

They're, they fly along by the ship looking for a handout all the time. What do they drink? Nobody ever gives them fresh water, and yet if they ate, if they drank salt water, they wouldn't survive. You know that.

It's all there is. So, they take the salt water into their gullet, and they have a marvelous mechanism that God has put there. The Lord Jesus is there. They have a filter membrane there. The salt water goes through the filter membrane, passes down into their system as fresh water, and the salt comes out as a teardrop in seagull's eyes.

And evolutionists want me to believe the thought this is all an accident of nature. I was a boy, my family used to go down to a beach in Massachusetts called Brewster Beach, and the tide at that particular place goes out a mile, and you can walk out on the sand a mile, and if you do, there are sea clams out there.

Not little co-logs, but sea clams, and a sea clam, I'm not exaggerating that big. One clam could make a very nice trout, and we used to love to go out and dig for the sea clams. The seagulls were up there too.

Sea clams are never visible. They come up to the surface of the sand, and there's a little geyser there. They have a way of just spreading, you know, water up, but they're close to the surface anyway.

The seagull knows when the clam is close to the surface. It comes down, and it dips its bill right into the sand, and grabs the seagull, and lifts it up. Tags like the peanuts on the airline, they're adults.

You ever try to get those peanuts on a plane? You can't get through, I mean, it won't care. The clam is something like that. You know, man, you can't break it. You go take the clam, it flies up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and then it's just the right height.

You get to that point, and the clam starts to go down with the force of gravity, and the seagull comes down with the force of gravity too. But just before it gets to the sand, it spreads its wings, the clam is smashed open, deathly, and I tell you, we were fascinated just watching it go.

Isn't it wonderful to be in a world like this, and realize it's all the Lord's doing? The one who we love and adore, he planned it all. I know you feel that when you go to some gorgeous place in the world.

We go to Yosemite, and I don't think I ever go to Yosemite without thanking my Savior, Mother Nature. There was a hunter in South America, and he was attracted by the cries of a very distressed bird, and he thought, what's going on here?

So, he just decided to stay around and see what was going on. This bird was flying around crazily, and making a lot of noise, and pretty soon this hunter realized that there was a nest in the tree, and then he saw a snake crawling up the tree.

The snake was absolute. The bird flew off, and went to a particular plant, and took a twig with some leaves attached to it, flew back, and laid that twig with the leaves on it across the top of the nest.

The snake went up, went out on the branch, out toward the nest, and deployed, started down the tree again. The hunter, later on, learned that the leaf was from a bush that deadly poisons the snake, and the sight and smell of the leaf caused the snake to retreat.

The hunter wondered and saw it. Some of you have seen the bird playing the broken wing action. Have you seen that? The bird has a nest, and the little ones are in the nest, and there's a cat. The cat's nest is the little one.

The bird comes out of the nest, he comes down to the ground, and sits barely above the ground, flies, and sits ahead of the broken wing. Dinner, the bird with the broken wing, no broken wing at all. There's this one, the seed, the bird.

Hummingbirds and the Marvel of Small Creatures

Think of the hummingbird. Talk about a small creature, and yet what wonderful things they are. I don't know how you can watch a hummingbird, and know about a hummingbird, without worshiping the Lord, its creator.

That hummingbird can hover, it can power dive, it can fly upside down in order to elude predators, it can fly sideways and backwards, it can do anything but float. It has the most rapid wing beat of any bird.

Its little heart beats 1 ,260 times a minute. And all hummingbirds weigh less than an ounce, and some only weigh two grams. Last three of the summer, they don't have hummingbirds. They've never seen a hummingbird.

The brains of the hummingbird, though they're small, are proportionally bigger than any other bird. Proportionally bigger. And in migration, some hummingbirds fly 500 miles. Hummingbirds can fly across the Gulf of Mexico without refueling.

I want to tell you, that's amazing. When you see them around the flowers at your home, they're always darting in and out, and getting the nectar, and the honey. Just absolutely marvelous, but they can they can go for 20 hours on a gram of horse fat.

Tremendous fuel efficiency. In fact, you don't have it. You think of the wonder of the homing instinct. And we never had a dog when we were growing up, but we did have pigeons. We used to take them up to a hill with a reservoir, and we used to let them go and try to get home before they did.

Forget it. It's not only, it not only does this. There was a cat that came back to his home after eight years. The story was told in R. J. D. Fred by M. R. D. Hahn II. He says a homeowner in Van Croft, Wisconsin said he heard a cat meowing on the front porch, and when he opened the door, a big long-haired gray cat walked in, checked things out, began purring, and then jumped up on the chair.

Turned out to be his favorite chair. Family members couldn't believe their eyes, but when they compared the cat's pictures taken eight years earlier, they could only conclude that Clem was a cat that had left, and is now in the movie film.

I'm sure some of you saw that movie film. I was intrigued by the archer fish. There's a fish swimming below the surface, and there's a plug flying above the surface of the water, and the archer fish lets go a stream of water, tells a myth.

Quite a lot of mathematical computations involved in that. That fish has to think about his own speed, has to think about the speed of the plug, and the direction that it's going. And then, and milk aces.

There's an ant milking aces in order to get honeydew from them. And sometimes, of course, the food chain is involved. The ladybird beetle feeds on those aces that are bad for your apple trees, and can walk, lay their eggs on bloodworms, and then the little ones develop and eat the bloodworms.

You know, the complexity of God's marvelous creation. Crop damage is reduced by friendly bugs that prey on harmful insects, or how bees pollinate. They have a mind. There's a poll of these things, termites, and they take these flowers, they aerate the soil, and they turn it, and they drain it, and they enrich it, and they scatter plant seeds, and they serve as scavengers, consuming 90 of their body.

Camouflage, Iridescence, and Natural Ingenuity

I think it's wonderful how God has created creatures with camouflage. How they can just merge into their environment, and you can't see them. The pigeons, of course, the illustration changed color with their background.

Outside my door this morning was a walking. Some birds look like, some bugs look like bees that are thorns. God is endlessly ingenious and original. I think it's iridescent. The male pigeon, you know, has the colors, like the colors of the rainbow around its neck.

I think that has a lot to do with the way those feathers are in the glory of iridescence, especially hot feathers, to an unusual degree, as well. It's all done by the arrangement of a, you know, it's so marvelous that years ago, there was a book called The Glory of Iridescence, a whole book written on it.

Isn't it wonderful to think that the one who did all of this, walked the dusty streets of of Nazareth, and plodded on through the winter meadows. Gravitation is a mystery. We know what happens, but we don't know why it happens.

Nobody understands gravity. It's kind of an everyday thing. You throw it up, and it'll come down. Objects fall towards the earth, and it's the force that holds the universe together. And the moon's gravitation causes a tide on earth.

It was brought up on the Atlantic coast. Now, you can read about the Gulf Stream, a stream of warm water originating down in the Caribbean. It comes up north, and then it crosses the Atlantic, and it goes up by Ireland, and the north of Scotland over to Norway.

And it's still warm water. Some of those places, from being ice floes, that weren't called the Gulf Strait, but we have one on the west coast too, the Japanese Strait. Now, how can God do that? I want to tell you, the Atlantic and the Pacific are whole, whole oceans.

How can God, a stream of water going through those oceans, and still maintain this warmth? Don't try it in your bathtub. It won't work. You cannot duplicate that in any way. Some years ago, I was on a hike out in the high Sierras in California with Tom Olsen.

And we stopped for a month one day by a stream, and I saw something that I couldn't have believed. There's a bird out there in the Sierras, known as the Wanda Weasel. And that little bird came in and flew right into the water, walked along the bottom of the stream, feeding as it went.

And then it had its meal. It came up out of the water. Some of you saw the movie film, Prior Claim. And it's no secret, in a very real sense, there's nothing new under the sun. And God had a prior claim on many of the things that we take for granted.

Bees, Insects, and Technological Lessons from Creation

A Frenchman was watching a wasp build its nest. And that's how a discovery was made, how to make paper out of wool. The Frenchman learned that the temperature inside a beehive rises too much. The bees know how to position themselves near the entrance.

They flap their wings if the beehive would melt and they lose the honey. They know how to air condition that beehive by flapping their wings at a rate fast enough to do the job. Actually, their cooling system puts the electric fan to shame.

And incidentally, the brains of the bees grew up to the size of a pinhead. Electric eels came long before electricity. And fireflies can provide light without heat. That's amazing how many things we can't build.

We can't cure a cold. We can't cure that. It's funny, we can fly to the moon, but we can't build roads without potholes. So many things we can't do. I think God allowed bees to share with our farms. They made threads long before men made them.

And female moths broadcast something like radio signals when the males have a receiving set. And bats are noted for their remarkable radar. How much food does it take to sustain such an animal? Probably four tons of krill every day.

Four tons every day. That's three million. A blue whale can put away a hundred gallons of milk every 24 hours. A hundred gallons of milk every 24 hours. And when a blue whale surfaces, it takes in the largest breath of air of any living thing on the planet.

Its strength is higher than us. And you know what we've said about animals, and what we've said about human beings? We can say about flowers, and plants, and trees, and all this. It's not a race. I want to see the blue anemones out on the hillsides of Israel, and that orange, or straggly.

There's never been a beauty contest. But some of them have been growing there before. Give us time to think of what we owe to trees, because of shade, olives, oil. And we've been refreshed by them on a hot day.

And they provide lumber for building, pulp for paper, and turpentine in the host. I was with a man in Tucson, and he told me that they have a mine out there. And they found that the roots of a misty tree seven hundred feet below the surface of a misty tree was in certain forms, following what Bill calls a tent.

And it went down seven hundred feet, as you were saying. That's what they call the rubru. It's marvelous to think of the genus flytrap, isn't it? That can capture insects. And I think it's marvelous, too, when you think of plants that God had put on earth as nymphs.

Turpentine is right. Beautiful for medicinal purposes. In fact, I saw that they were sending some nymphs, some organizations were sending them down to the Amazon Valley, and checking with the natives, the nationals who lived there in the Amazon Valley, and finding out what roots and plants they used for medicine.

I think they could learn a lot from them, and they probably did. When you think of the fragrances of the flowers that God put through their studies, how beautiful they are. Which is more than you can say for wax.

Creation's Design and the Witness of Skeptical Scientists

No wonder Paul said, Oh, the depth of the rich is both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his testaments and his ways. And every work of God is marvelous beyond description. And there's nothing that God has made that doesn't indicate intricate and perfect design.

There are infinitudes of wisdom and knowledge that we have not seen before, and for sheer beauty and efficiency, nothing has there been. You know, even men who don't acknowledge the Lord know that. I'd like to read you a quotation from Immanuel Kant, a philosopher.

He wasn't a believer, and his sentences are inexcusably long, but I'll translate them. He said, The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that whether we pursue our observations into the infinity of space in the one direction, or into the illimitable divisions in the other, for instance the human self, whether we regard the world in its greatest or least manifestations, even after we have attained to the highest summits of knowledge which our weak minds can dream, we find that language in the presence of wonder so inconceivable has lost its force, and numbers have lost their power.

Well, I was thinking of that when I was speaking about the dimensions of the universe. Numbers have lost their power. Kant takes it in to reckon that even thought fails to concede adequately, and our conception of the whole dissolves into an astonishment without power of expression, all more eloquent because of its own translation.

The creation is so marvelous that it's beyond the power of words or numbers to express, and beyond human thought to take it in to witness. No language can express the greatness of God's creation, and no mind can possibly take it in.

Sir Fred Hoyle, he was a British scientist and astronomer, and he was a skeptic as well, and he said that for the first cell to have originated by chance was like saying that a tornado could sweep through an airplane junkyard and assemble a giant jet plane.

He's an unbeliever. Harold Morowitz, department of molecular biophysics at Yale, says that the probability of a single bacterium being formed spontaneously in five billion years, so it's infinitely remote, and other illustrations have been used to show the absurdity of attributing the wonders of creation to chance.

Somebody said it's like taking all the parts of a typewriter, putting them in a washing machine, turning on the switch, and waiting till the typewriter disassembles. Believing that a tornado could blow through a printing shop and assemble the cold type so accurately as to produce an English dictionary, or throwing bricks randomly and building a tower, or hurling pieces of scrap metal to the wind and building a fort.

In spite of their stubborn clinging to evolution, scientists stand amazed at the wonders of creation. I like it. They use such words as incredible, wonderful, intriguing, and marvelous, and one of them acknowledges that what we see should be sweeping us off our feet in amazement.

They don't have any idea that they're going to cause believers to worship the Lord with increased intensity. Yet that's the next result, the net result. Somebody says this, and with this I close. The book of Psalms climaxes with a mighty crescendo of praise to God.

The last six psalms add instrument to instrument, until, in one final blast, everything that has breath praises the Lord. Hear the antiphonal choirs as one generation praises God's work to another. Listen to their percussion section, fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind fulfilling his word, and the wind instruments add their notes.

The birds and the flowers, the sun, moon, and stars, angels in heaven praise him, the kings of the earth. Is your voice in there? Praise the Lord. While all creation, all animate and inanimate creation is praising him, I want my voice to be heard praising him as well.

From Creatorial Glory to Providence

Tomorrow I'd like to go on with the subject of the wonders of God in Prophets. We heard about his creatorial glory, but there's more to it than that. And I think the wonders of his providence is just as great.

How he runs the universe is marvelous. And I think it's especially marvelous for those who are, you know, how he intervenes in their lives and does things in our lives that have never happened according to the laws of chance or providence.

Prayer of Worship for the Creator and Redeemer

Father, what can we do but bow and worship, to think of the simplicity with which it's all said in the Bible, in the beginning God created a heaven and the earth, and yet all eternity will not be able to exhaust the meaning of those words.

Thank you that you've given us minds and eyes and to take in in some little measure your glory in creation. We pray that as we go through life we might not be too busy to stop and examine the things you've created and see you in them all.

Let me marvel tonight that same one who did all of this, the one that came down to planet earth, went to Calvary, was lifted up between heaven and earth as if worthy of be the one, that he died there as a sacrifice for our sins.

It's all overwhelming, my dear Lord, but we pray, we worship, we adore, our hearts are full, we just want to look up into your face tonight and say we love you. The Savior's word is in you.