By Pastor Nate Powell
In reflecting in the afterglow of preaching on the creation story of Genesis, I didn’t want a small detail to get left in the mix. That detail is this: You are blessed.
Some people might call it lucky. But if there is a God, and we know that he has tipped the insane odds of our existence in our favor, it means that we are not simply lucky; we are infinitely blessed. A couple items that reminded me of that fact this past week:
- One was a YouTube video I saw. It is a video about the actual size and scale of just our solar system. (I’m linking to it here, so you should go watch it, and then come back to this article.) Wasn’t that incredible? That is the size of the planet that you are on in just one solar system, based around one star, in just one galaxy, in just one galaxy cluster of the universe. WE ARE TINY. Yet it has all been perfectly balanced and hung so that we might walk, talk, live and breathe. A video like that humbles me to know that I’m just a very small creature, and my God is a very big God! And he has given life, spoken, and acted so that we might be with him for all eternity, because of Jesus. If you know that, my friend, then you are blessed!
- The other was a stat came across again in reflecting on the insane odds that life could come to exist from non-life. The stat comes from Lee Strobel’s book “A Case for Faith”. Within the book, he is interviewing Dr. Walter Bradley of Texas A&M University. Dr. Bradley explains the odds of the simplest of amino acids (or life building blocks) coming from nothing: “If you took all the carbon and put it on the face of earth, allowed it to chemically react at the fastest rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in a 10 with 60 zeroes after it.” But that’s not all … he goes further. “[Michael] Behe has said the probability of linking together just 100 amino acids to create one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara Desert—and doing it not just once, but three different times. Sir Frederick Hoyle put it colorfully when he said that this scenario is about as likely as a tornado whirling through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a fully functional Boeing 747.” Wow! What an incredible stat. Life is no accident.
We are not here by accident. We are here by design. We are not lucky. We are blessed. I hope that each time you see videos or hear stats like these, you will pause to remind yourself that you are blessed. There is a God, and he has shown himself to you in His word and in Jesus Christ.
Thanking the maker with you,
Pastor Nate