DAILY DEVOTIONAL – August 21, 2020

“Written IN You”

Prayer:  Our Creator God, each of us knows deep down in the depths of our souls that You and You alone are God.  Yet, we confess, that we too often think and behave as though we are our own maker.  Forgive us for such pride Lord, and in Your mercy help us to remember that we are all but dust and ever desperate for Your love and presence.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Scripture: Romans 1:18-25

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰ For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 

Devotional – “Written IN You”

Never before have we been so blessed to be able to see into and understand the miracle of the human body God has created in each of us.  In his book More Than Meets The Eye, award winning medical doctor and acclaimed author Richard Swenson outlines just a cursory list of the testimony and witness God has left about Himself in our very own bodies.

• Each human is composed of ten thousand trillion trillion atoms (more than all the stars in the universe!)
• Each human body contains between 10 and 100 trillion cells and each cell is made up of a trillion atoms.
• In a lifetime, the human heart beats over two billion times and pumps sixty million gallons of blood through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels.
• We breathe 600 million times over an average life span with each breath processing over a billion trillion air molecules. (and we don’t even think about 99.9% of the breaths we take!)
• The retina of the eye contains over 100 million rods and cones that take continuous pictures. In one-third of a second, the retina solves the equivalent of nonlinear differential equations that would take a  supercomputer 100 years to solve.
• The human ear has a million moving parts and can vibrate twenty thousand times per second, hear sounds over a range of intensity that varies by a trillion, and can distinguish among two thousand different pitches.
• The human nose can distinguish ten thousand different smells. 
• Our three-pound brain is the most complex arrangement of matter ever discovered in the universe. It contains ten billion neurons and has 100  trillion neurological interconnections that if stretched out would extend  100 thousand miles.
• Billions of skin cells are replaced every day and the entire surface of the skin is replaced every two weeks.
• Humans have five million hair follicles which over a lifetime grow over two million feet of hair.  (And Jesus tells us in Mathew 10:30 that God has numbered and knows each one of the hairs on our head.)

With just those few facts alone, how is it that so many people use science as an excuse for rejecting faith in a Creator?  Paul tells us exactly why in our text from Romans 1.  God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived…so they are without excuse.”  The blessing of technology and science has clearly perceived the unimaginable and necessary power of a Creator.  Only the God and Creator of all things could create such an astounding miracle as the human body.  Sadly however, as Paul continues to say, “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”  In the futility and darkness of humanity’s sinfulness (v. 21), and I would add that in our absolute arrogance, humanity has somehow claimed responsibility for and taken credit for what science and technology have revealed to us.

I don’t believe you have to be a scientist or have a bunch of abbreviations in front of or behind your name in order to know full well the truth that we all, along with the whole universe, have been fearfully and wonderfully made.  Long before the microscope and long before anything regarded today as “technology”, King David knew the miracle of the human body and how it fundamentally testified to the reality of our Creator God, just by taking a long hard look at himself.  David wrote in Psalm 139:

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

Friends, even more amazing than the miracle of our body, is the fact that when we chose to sin against God and go our own way, instead of letting us be forever destroyed by our own wickedness, God Himself put on flesh and became a man, sending His One and only perfect Son Jesus to die in our place and rise again so that not only would our souls be saved, but that we would have the sure and certain hope of being physically raised and restored to new and everlasting life by grace through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Only because of Jesus do we have the hope of one day, very soon, of seeing God face to face.  Until that glorious and final day, God has left us not only the testimony of Creation itself but has even given us His precious Word through which He reveals His Truth.  May we daily thank and praise our God for such indescribable love and mercy.

Well thanks for joining me today for another time of devotion in God’s Word, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow.  Amen.