Day 10
Amazing Artist, Brilliant Engineer
Read your Bible: Psalm 148
Spotlight Verse:
Let them praise the name of the Lord, for at his command they were created.Psalm 148:5
We went big yesterday, thinking of the cosmos. Today let’s go small.
Remember the old Disneyland ride Adventure Through Inner Space where you were “shrunk” to the size of a molecule? Well, try to imagine that actually happening. Let’s say you decreased in size a billion times, until a single human cell looked as big as a city the size of New York.
Dr. Michael Denton, quoted in Jerry Bridges’ book The Joy of Fearing God, describes what you’d see: On the surface there are millions of portholes, opening and closing to allow a stream of materials flowing in and out. You enter one of these openings and discover “a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity”:
You see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units… a huge range of products and raw materials shuttle along in orderly fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell… [like] an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth.24
In at least one respect it would be different from a factory, though: “It would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a few hours.”
Now consider that there are about 75 trillion of these cells in your body!
What does all this have to do with the power of God?
As Jerry Bridges points out, it’s just one illustration of millions that could be drawn from nature to show how God is an amazingly creative artist and brilliant engineer.
God is like the ultimate Leonardo Da Vinci, an artist and engineer — or I should say, Da Vinci reflected this aspect of the image of God. And when you create art, or engineer a solution, or do math, you do too!
We looked upward yesterday at the stars. Take time to stop today and look more closely at the tiny world around you. Where do you see the brilliance of God’s power displayed — just with your naked eye, never mind the microscope it would take to unlock the wonders we just described?
Pause to see… with eyes wide open.
Take in the flowers. Butterflies. Dogs. Cats. Babies. Leaves. Water droplets. Blades of grass. The rise and fall of your own rhythmic breaths.
And take in some of the creative ways that human artists, made in God’s image, try to reflect all these things.
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes…25
God is… infinitely creative.
Questions For Reflection
How does Psalm 148 impact you?
What did you praise God for today — something you noticed in the world around you for which you have rarely given Him thanks, perhaps one of the “smaller” things?
Why is seeing the world in this way a good habit?
