HOW WE CAN KNOW THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD

Transcription

1 HOW WE CAN KNOW THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD I know any number of people who would be willing to go toe to toe with me after giving such a title to a message. They want to believe that there are many different gods that can be determined simply by what a person considers God to be. In other words there are an awful lot of people running around who want to create a God with whom they can feel comfortable. It s much easier to please a god you create yourself than a god who has established rules and expectations. But I ll make a deal with you if any of you feel that way. You listen to what we have to say on the subject and then, if you still feel the same way, we ll listen to anything you have to say and see who comes up with the most convincing evidence. Is that fair? Of course it is. So let s get started. One of the most commonly asked questions by both those who are seeking after God as well as those that deny His existence is: How can you prove there is a god? That is certainly a reasonable question and one that God anticipated would be asked even before He created the first man and woman. Because it was God s desire that every human being He created know Him personally, He built into every man and every woman a sense that He exists. Listen to what God says to us through the prophet and king, Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT: 11 God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God s work from beginning to end. This verse simply tells us that we can never be completely satisfied with earthly pleasures and pursuits because God has created us in His image and planted an awareness of everlasting life within us. We therefore know in our hearts that there is something out there that we need to listen to, glorify, and worship. We also have the sense that if we don t do this, something bad may happen to us. In other words God has given us a spiritual thirst and that thirst can only be satisfied by the one true God. It s unlikely that you would ever find a person who would claim they don t have any kind of spiritual belief even if it s misdirected. Even an atheist has a spiritual belief, even though that belief is that there is no God. Such people need to ask themselves this question: If I were God, would I trust all people to come to an understanding of me and my will for their lives based on their own intelligence? Considering that people have the tendency to create their god in their own image, our answer to that question would have to be a resounding, No! You would want people to know what is best for them even if they don t necessarily like it because 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 1

2 their eternity would depend on their getting it right. And if as god, you didn t tell them what was necessary in order to get to Heaven, how would they ever know? In fact, on their own they d probably come up with thousands of ideas, all of which would be wrong. We ve already determined there s no way people could understand the nature of God on their own. So perhaps the thing to do would be for God to write down everything He wanted them to know for their own good and give it to them in a nicely bound letter. He might even call the letter, the Bible, meaning book, as in a collection of sacred writings.0f 1 Now for those of you who think that all belief systems lead to the same God, I would have to ask you another question: Would God contradict Himself? Because that s what the many different religious systems of the world do. One religion says you please God in this way, and another says you please Him in yet another way, and a third yet another way, and so on and so on and so on. We ll provide you with irrefutable evidence this morning of the existence of God and that God is one God in three persons (the Trinity): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God revealed Himself to men and women from the very beginning through His creation, through nature itself, as we read in Romans 1:18-20 NLT: 18 But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who push the truth away from themselves. 19 For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts. 20 From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever 2 for not knowing God (when they stand before Him on judgment day).1f If a person is willing to open themselves up to the awe and wonder of the creator s handiwork in nature, God will reveal Himself to them. In other words that process might go something like this: A person looks at the trees, the flowers, the birds, the sky, rain, and crops growing in the field, and says, This just couldn t have all happened by itself. There must be someone somewhere with powers beyond anything we humans possess. It must be that someone or something created these wonders and I long to know Him/Her. Some of you may remember the name Hellen Keller, and if you do you ll probably also remember that she was deaf, mute, and blind. She had absolutely no ability to communicate until another woman by the name of Ann Sullivan spent hour after hour, day after day, and month after month attempting to establish some way of communicating with Helen. When Ann finally broke through by writing on Helen s palm 1 Easton s Bible Dictionary 2 Parentheses added Ron and Betty Teed 2

3 with her finger and tried to tell Helen about God, Helen s response was, I already know about Him, I just didn t know His name. Let s take just a few moments to examine the handwriting to us from the Master Creator. Even before the advent of the Scientific Age with all its knowledge about the way the universe functions, early man was surrounded by the wonders of God s creation: 1) Men and women could see the beauty of a flower and the wonder of a seashell or a bird in flight. 2) They could see the Sun rise in the morning and set in the evening in the same way day after day, month after month, year after year, and century after century. 3) In the same manner they would see the moon come out at night and develop from a small crescent shaped figure to a full moon throughout the course of each month. 4) They could see the seasons change from Fall to Winter to Spring and to Summer with the same consistency year after year. 5) They could see and hear the rolling, roaring waves of the sea, the rushing of the rivers, and the trickle of a brook. 6) They could experience the miracle of birth. 7) They could watch crops grow from tiny seeds they buried in the ground. Such things would speak to them of a Creator, and such things should speak to us of a Creator as well. We also see one miracle after another of God s creation within our own bodies. Consider your eyes for a moment. Imagine the intricate design that s required to take an object, such as a tree for example, and somehow transmit the exact image of that tree to be recognized as a tree in your brain. I can t possibly imagine how God did that. Science may have figured out how the process works but they cannot construct a human eye, nor can they create the tree that the eye sees. They can plant a seed, but God grows the tree. What about our heart, something that has been the subject of many a romantic movie and song. This incredibly fascinating muscle is only about the size of your fist. It begins to develop shortly after conception and begins beating regularly 5 weeks after conception; almost 8 months before we leave our mother s womb. It weighs less than half a pound and yet it pumps and circulates over 1800 gallons of blood through our bodies each day every day for an average of 76 years. That s approximately 4,200 hundred pumps per hour, 100,800 pumps per day, 36,792,000 pumps per year, and an average of 2,575,440,000 pumps during a lifetime. The heart generates enough pumping pressure in a 12 hour period to lift a load of 65 tons one inch off the ground. We also might want to consider another important life source for all of us, and that s the Sun. Without sunlight all life on earth would cease to exist. The Sun effects almost every essential function of our environment. The Sun provides our planet, Earth, with vast amounts of energy each day. The oceans and seas store this energy and help keep the temperature of the Earth at a level that allows a wide variety of life to exist. Plants use the Sun s energy to make food, and plants provide food for other organisms. All plant, animal, and human life depend on the Sun, not Al Gore or the Environmental Protection 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 3

4 Agency. The Sun s energy also creates wind in the Earth s atmosphere, wind that can be harnessed and used to produce power. The Sun s gravitational pull holds the solar system together. The planets, asteroids, and comets that make up our solar system are strongly attracted to the Sun s huge mass. This gravitational attraction keeps these bodies in orbit around the Sun. You might be surprised to learn just what a miracle it is that the sun keeps burning consistently year after year. The sun burns up 4 million tons of matter each second, that s 8,000,000,000 pounds of matter per second. This means that in 1 year s time the sun burns up 252,288,000,000,000,000 (252 quadrillion, 288 trillion) pounds of matter. If you could convert the energy the sun gives off to horsepower, you would end up with 500 million billion horsepower. If that s too big of a number for you to understand, it s the same amount of horsepower that would be produced by one-and-a-half million billion Corvette motorcars. That in itself is a miracle because I sure can t figure out how it can keep burning like that and never vary at all in its surface temperature. When I light a fire in my fireplace the fire burns hot and bright for perhaps an hour and then it begins to die down. The surface temperature of the sun remains consistently at 9,950 degrees Fahrenheit. And it s been burning that way ever since it was created a little over 11,000 years ago. Scientists have discovered that this can continue to occur because of what is called nuclear fusion, which changes hydrogen into helium, but that in itself is a miracle. And although God has given us the ability to understand some of His miracles, it remains clear that He designed these things, and only by His grace has He allowed us the ability to understand them and use them. And one final mind-blowing statistic on the sun is that we could place 1 million planets the size of our earth inside it. God makes Himself known to us all through these wonders that He has created and that we experience through our senses. God makes Himself known to everyone through these wonders of nature even if a person never picks up a Bible. Does that mean that everybody in the world has an opportunity to know God? It sure does! Somehow and in some way everyone knows there is a God. As our knowledge of science has increased since the age of Enlightenment, the miracles of creation have become even more evident. Scientists have come to understand the vastness of the universe and better understand the consistent functioning order of the heavenly bodies. For example, the earth is approximately 8,000 miles in diameter, 25,000 miles in circumference. That means if you were to start digging here in Wheaton and dug in a perfectly straight line, you would come out somewhere in China. And if you were to get in your car in Wheaton heading east toward New York and continue going east for 25,000 miles, you would come to the exact same spot in Wheaton where you had begun your journey still heading east toward New York. While you were digging through or driving around the earth, you might consider that it weighs approximately 6 septillion 588 sextillion (6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000) tons, yet it never falls, even though it is suspended in empty space. It moves through that 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 4

5 empty space in an orbit around the sun that covers 580,000,000 miles at a speed of 1,000 miles per minute, which comes to 60,000 miles per hour. And it does this year after year with such precision that it completes its trip exactly at the same time to the second each year. In fact, time all around the world is gauged to the earth s movement around the sun. The earth is always running exactly on time, but occasionally the clocks need adjustment by a fraction of a second. Do you think it s possible that such perfection could have been accomplished by accident? Or if you accept the idea that there are any number of gods, which one of them do you think was responsible for accomplishing this feat? And why exactly do you think that? On what grounds of knowledge do you base your opinion? Do you base it on what you alone think? Or perhaps you base it on what some other human being thinks. If you do, you ll probably both find yourselves falling in a ditch. The blind leading the blind, you know. In Matthew 15:14, Jesus said: Ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch. Now let s take a look at some more miracles that occur every day all around us. The state of Missouri covers approximately 70,000 square miles and has about 38 inches of rainfall per year. That amount of water is equal to a lake 22 feet deep, 250 miles long, and 60 miles wide, and that s only 1 state. The U.S. natural museum tells us they have calculated that there are to be around 10 million different insect species. There are 2,500 different kinds of ants alone and just one colony can contain 100 million ants. Did you know that the head of a comet can be from 10,000 to 1,000,000 miles long? Just think of that. The smallest comet would have a head alone that would stretch from England heading westward all the way to Japan. That s a lot of comet, and that would mean that the largest comet could have a head that is equivalent to traveling up and back from the moon to the earth twice. If you think that s big, the tail of that comet can be as long as 100,000,000 miles, which is about the distance from the earth to the sun. A comet travels at a speed of 350 miles per second, or 21,600 miles per minute, which means it could go from New York to Los Angeles in less than 10 seconds. Perhaps you ve been giving some thought recently to vacationing somewhere on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live. If you do you ll need a special space vehicle with the capability of traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, or to put it in terms we re more familiar with, 669,600,000 miles per hour. At that speed you d be able to travel around the world 7 times in 1 second. Before you leave you might want to say good-bye to everyone you know because you ll never see them again, that is in this life. For you see traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, it would take you 125,000 years to go from one end of our Milky Way Galaxy to the other. By the way, that s traveling 6 trillion miles per year. Our sun is included in the Milky Way galaxy, but it is not the only sun in the galaxy. Would anyone like to take a guess at how many other stars there are just within the Milky Way Galaxy? There are 100 billion stars or suns in the Milky Way Galaxy, and the closest sun to ours is almost 28 trillion miles away. And our Milky Way Galaxy is only 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 5

6 one of more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone. Would anyone like me to stop for a moment so that you can catch your breath? Such wonders are almost too much for our minds to imagine. How do you think so vast a universe functions century after century with such precise order? Do you really think it just takes care of itself without a Master Creator sitting at the control panel? Now let s get back to earth. How do you suppose we keep supplied with an adequate amount of rain to grow our crops, keep our oceans, lakes and rivers filled with water even though the world s population consumes huge quantities each day? The phenomenon is called the hydrological cycle of water, and the process is truly amazing. Water is actually lifted out of these oceans, lakes, and rivers and carried skyward against the natural force of gravity, thousands of feet into the air where it is suspended and collected in clouds that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. I bet some of you thought clouds were just big puffs of colored air without any mass. Not so, and what keeps them up in the air without crashing to the ground is certainly beyond my capacity to understand. But as the clouds float over the land the moisture collected in them is released as rain. No one could build a machine to do that, but scientists have discovered that God provided one and it s called the Sun, and it s only a mere 93,000,000 miles away. Let s consider yet some other aspects of creation. You re probably all aware that all matter in our universe is composed of extremely tiny building blocks called atoms. A molecule is the next size building block and is composed of a number of atoms. To give you a better idea of just how small these atoms and molecules are, it would take 3 atoms to make 1 water molecule. If you were to take those water molecules that compose just one drop of water and blow each molecule up to be the size of a grain of sand, you d have enough grains of sand to make a highway one foot thick and half-a-mile wide that would stretch from New York to Los Angeles. If you are not stunned by this reality, you need to read it over and over again until you are. And did you know that the atoms that make up molecules consist of mostly empty space? The actual amount of solid material in an atom makes up just one-trillionth of its volume, which means that everything in our world that looks to be made of solid materials actually consists mainly of empty space, and that includes you and me. In fact if you were to take all the air out of a politician who was six feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, he/she would be reduced to the amount of space that is on the head of a pin. Now if you think that s remarkable, think about the fact that the matter on the head of the pin would still weigh 185 pounds. This further means that you could solve the problem of congestion in our major metropolitan areas because you could fit over 5,000,000 people in the space occupied by 1 cubic inch. In other words the entire population of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan area could be contained within an area no larger than a cup of coffee. But you d have trouble picking up that cup of coffee because it would weigh about a billion pounds. When someone tells me that creation just happened and then evolved, it simply doesn t make any sense. How could such an incredible, diverse, mathematically perfect universe 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 6

7 just happen? It would be as unlikely as creating an automobile by placing some nuts and bolts and scrap metal in a pile and expecting the pile to develop into a fully functioning automobile. No matter how long you waited that pile would never become anything more than just a pile of junk parts with no function whatsoever. In fact, can you imagine a couple of molecules sitting on a beach one day long ago and deciding that they would join their individual abilities together and evolve into, or become an eye, or a brain, or even a butterfly? Design, my friends, speaks of a designer. Listen to what one of the top scientific minds in our country had to say on the subject. Robert Jastro, an astrophysicist and former director of Nassau s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said: Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the world. The essential elements in astronomy and the biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. That s exactly what the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us. Jastro goes on to say: It wasn t evolution at all. The question is what cause produced this effect. Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer that question. For the scientist who has lived his life by his faith in the power of knowledge and reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He/she believes they have scaled the mountain of ignorance and that they are about to conquer the highest peak, and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of biblical scholars who have been there for centuries. In other words when you study science, the only conclusion you can reasonably draw is that God created the world. And it was through all these wonders that God revealed Himself to each of us. But He didn t stop there. He went on to let us know what He expects of us as His children that He created, as sons and daughters of the Almighty God. He gave us a personal letter that He called the Bible, and in it God tells us everything that He wants us to know. How can we be certain that the Bible was written by God and not by mere men and women? There have been many arguments through the centuries on this very topic and some good arguments have been presented for and against. But the simple fact is that there is proof that makes it clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Bible was written by God Ron and Betty Teed 7

8 He did use scribes, who were most commonly prophets and apostles, to write down His dictation on paper, but the content came solely from God. There are any number of proofs we can offer that God wrote the Bible, but the one which is conclusive is the prophecy which God provided in the Old Testament, and specifically the prophecy about the first coming of Jesus. For our purposes we can define prophecies as predictions about the future. Over a period of a little more than a thousand years over which the Old Testament books were written, the prophets included a combined total of 109 prophecies, or predictions, about different aspects of the life of Jesus and where and when He would appear. These predictions were made anywhere from 400 to1,500 years before Christ was born. Every one of these predictions came true and we find verification of that in the New Testament. Do you know what the statistical probability is of 100% of these predictions coming true simply by chance? It is statically impossible for all 109 of 109 predictions to come true by chance because the statistical probability goes way off the chart. In fact the actual probability of these predictions all coming true by chance is 1 in the number 1 followed by 72 zeroes. That is 1 chance in: To give you a better idea of just how big this number is, imagine 200 billion planets the size of our earth, and each of those planets being inhabited by 4 billion people (the population of the earth is currently 6 billion plus). The number of people living on those planets would only total a number having 18 zeroes. Therefore we can conclude that whoever is responsible for writing the Bible has the ability to predict the future and the outcome of history. Because of the science of statistical probability there can be no doubt that God is behind these prophecies and that therefore we can rely on the entire Bible to be the Word of God. We can therefore see that God had good reason to fill the Old Testament with so many predictions about Jesus. And another reason other than proving the accuracy of the Bible was that Jesus was to be God s greatest revelation to the world that God was the one true God of all the people. Through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, all the world was provided with proof of God s power over sin and death, and all the world was offered the free gift of forgiveness and eternal life if they just would reach out and accept it. Romans 10:9,10: 9 For if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 8

9 and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved. We get a great picture of this in Revelation 3:20-21: 20 Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If you hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends. 21 I will invite everyone who is victorious to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my Father on his throne. There is no other religion in the world today that can say its God rose from the dead. Only Jesus Christ was able to rise from the dead because He is the one and only Lord and Savior. The main figures of all other religions are still in their graves. What religion do you want to follow? One that raises people from the dead to eternal life or one that doesn t? In order to become a member of the kingdom of God, one must accept Jesus death on the cross as the only way they can be forgiven for their sins. If you haven t already opened that door and you hear Him knocking right now, don t delay, open it and invite Jesus in and He will grant you that special place one day in Heaven Ron and Betty Teed 9

10 Wade, I hope you find this as convincing as I do. If you would like to share this with anyone who might benefit from it, you have my permission to do so. I would very much appreciate if you would tell me your honest opinion. It helps me to make any necessary changes to the text that might improve it. God Bless, Pastor Ron Teed Village Church of Wheaton 213 W. Wesley Wheaton, IL villagechurchofwheaton.org Publisher: WordSearchBible.com HOW WE CAN KNOW THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD? I know any number of people who would be willing to go toe to toe with me after giving such a title to a message. They want to believe that there are many different gods that can be determined simply by what a person considers God to be. In other words there are an awful lot of people running around who want to create a god with whom they can feel comfortable. It s much easier to please a god you create yourself than a God who has established rules and expectations. But I ll make a deal with you if any of you feel that way. You listen to what we have to say on the subject and then, if you still feel the same way, we ll listen to anything you have to say and see who comes up with the most convincing evidence. Is that fair? Of course it is. So let s get started. One of the most commonly asked questions by both those who are seeking after God as well as those that deny His existence is: How can you prove there is a god? That is certainly a reasonable question and one that God anticipated would be asked even before He created the first man and woman. Because it was God s desire that every human being He created know Him personally, He built into every man and every woman a sense that He exists. Listen to what God says 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 10

11 to us through the prophet and king, Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT: "God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God s work from beginning to end." This verse simply tells us that we can never be completely satisfied with earthly pleasures and pursuits because God has created us in His image and planted an awareness of everlasting life within us. We therefore know in our hearts that there is something out there that we need to listen to, glorify, and worship. We also have the sense that if we don t do this, something bad may happen to us. In other words God has given us a spiritual thirst and that thirst can only be satisfied by the one true God. It s unlikely that you would ever find a person who would claim they don t have any kind of spiritual belief even if it s misdirected. Even an atheist has a spiritual belief, even though that belief is that there is no God. Such people need to ask themselves this question: If I were God, would I trust all people to come to an understanding of me and my will for their lives based on their own intelligence? Considering that people have the tendency to create their god in their own image, our answer to that question would have to be a resounding, No! You would want people to know what is best for them even if they don t necessarily like it because their eternity would depend on their getting it right. And if as god, you didn t tell them what was necessary in order to get to Heaven, how would they ever know? In fact, on their own they d probably come up with thousands of ideas, all of which would be wrong. We ve already determined there s no way people could understand the nature of God on their own. So perhaps the thing to do would be for God to write down everything He wanted them to know for their own good and give it to them in a nicely bound letter. He might even call the letter, the Bible, meaning book, as in a collection of sacred writings. Now for those of you who think that all belief systems lead to the same God, I would have to ask you another question: Would God contradict Himself? Because that s what the many different religious systems of the world do. One religion says you please God in this way, and another says you please Him in yet another way, and a third yet another way, and so on and so on and so on. We ll provide you with irrefutable evidence this morning of the existence of God and that God is one God in three persons (the Trinity): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God revealed Himself to men and women from the very beginning through His creation, through nature itself, as we read in Romans 1:18-20 NLT: "18 But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who push the truth away from themselves. 19 For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts. 20 From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God (when they stand before Him on judgment day)." 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 11

12 If a person is willing to open themselves up to the awe and wonder of the creator s handiwork in nature, God will reveal Himself to them. In other words that process might go something like this: A person looks at the trees, the flowers, the birds, the sky, rain, and crops growing in the field, and says, This just couldn t have all happened by itself. There must be someone somewhere with powers beyond anything we humans possess. It must be that someone or something created these wonders and I long to know him/her. Some of you may remember the name Hellen Keller, and if you do you ll probably also remember that she was deaf, mute, and blind. She had absolutely no ability to communicate until another woman by the name of Ann Sullivan spent hour after hour, day after day, and month after month attempting to establish some way of communicating with Helen. When Ann finally broke through by writing on Helen s palm with her finger and tried to tell Helen about God, Helen s response was, I already know about Him, I just didn t know His name. Let s take just a few moments to examine the handwriting to us from the Master Creator. Even before the advent of the Scientific Age with all its knowledge about the way the universe functions, early man was surrounded by the wonders of God s creation. Men and women could see the beauty of a flower and the wonder of a seashell or a bird in flight. They could see the Sun rise in the morning and set in the evening in the same way day after day, month after month, year after year, and century after century. In the same manner they would see the moon come out at night and develop from a small crescent shaped figure to a full moon throughout the course of each month. They could see the seasons change from Fall to Winter to Spring and to Summer with the same consistency year after year. They could see and hear the rolling, roaring waves of the sea, the rushing of the rivers, and the trickle of a brook. They could experience the miracle of birth. They could watch crops grow from tiny seeds they buried in the ground. Such things would speak to them of a Creator, and such things should speak to us of a Creator as well. We also see one miracle after another of God s creation within our own bodies. Consider your eyes for a moment. Imagine the intricate design that s required to take an object, such as a tree for example, and somehow transmit the exact image of that tree to be recognized as a tree in your brain. I can t possibly imagine how God did that. Science may have figured out how the process works but they cannot construct a human eye, nor can they create the tree that the eye sees. They can plant a seed, but God grows the tree. What about our heart, an organ that has been the subject of many a romantic movie and song. This incredibly fascinating muscle is only about the size of your fist. It begins to develop shortly after conception and begins beating regularly 5 weeks after conception; almost 8 months before we leave our mother s womb. It weighs less than half a pound and yet it pumps and circulates over 1800 gallons of blood through our bodies each day every day for an average of 76 years. That s approximately 4,200 hundred pumps per hour, 100,800 pumps per day, 36,792,000 pumps per year, and an average of 2,575,440,000 pumps during a lifetime. The heart generates enough pumping pressure in a 12 hour period to lift a load of 65 tons one inch off the ground Ron and Betty Teed 12

13 We also might want to consider another important life source for all of us, and that s the Sun. Without sunlight all life on earth would cease to exist. The Sun effects almost every essential function of our environment. The Sun provides our planet, Earth, with vast amounts of energy each day. The oceans and seas store this energy and help keep the temperature of the Earth at a level that allows a wide variety of life to exist. Plants use the Sun s energy to make food, and plants provide food for other organisms. All plant, animal, and human life depend on the Sun, not Al Gore or the Environment protection Agency. The Sun s energy also creates wind in the Earth s atmosphere, wind that can be harnessed and used to produce power. The Sun s gravitational pull holds the solar system together. The planets, asteroids, and comets that make up our solar system are strongly attracted to the Sun s huge mass. This gravitational attraction keeps these bodies in orbit around the Sun. You might be surprised to learn just what a miracle it is that the sun keeps burning consistently year after year. The sun burns up 4 million tons of matter each second, that s 8,000,000,000 (8 billion) pounds of matter per second. This means that in 1 year s time the sun burns up 252,288,000,000,000,000 (252 quadrillion, 288 trillion) pounds of matter. If you could convert the energy the sun gives off to horsepower, you would end up with 500 million billion horsepower. If that s too big of a number for you to understand, it s the same amount of horsepower that would be produced by one-and-ahalf million billion Corvette motorcars. And where does the fuel come from to keep such an enormous furnace going? To the best of my knowledge there aren't any railroads or interuniversal highways carrying wood, oil, or liquid gas to keep the fire burning. So the sun must produce its own fuel while it burns. That in itself is a miracle because I sure can t figure out how it can keep burning like that and never vary at all in its surface temperature. When I light a fire in my fireplace the fire burns hot and bright for perhaps an hour and then it begins to die down. The surface temperature of the sun remains consistently at 9,950 degrees Fahrenheit. And it s been burning that way ever since it was created a little over 11,000 years ago. Scientists have discovered that this can continue to occur because of what is called nuclear fusion, which changes hydrogen into helium, but that in itself is a miracle. And although God has given us the ability to understand some of His miracles, it remains clear that He designed these things, and only by His grace has He allowed us the ability to understand them and use them. And one final mind-blowing statistic on the sun is that we could place 1 million planets the size of our earth inside it. God makes Himself known to us all through these wonders that He has created and that we experience through our senses. God makes Himself known to everyone through these wonders of nature even if a person never picks up a Bible. Does that mean that everybody in the world has an opportunity to know God? It sure does! Somehow and in some way everyone knows there is a God. As our knowledge of science has increased since the age of Enlightenment, the miracles of creation have become even more evident. Scientists have come to understand the vastness of the universe and better understand the consistent functioning order of the heavenly bodies. For example, the earth is approximately 8,000 miles in diameter, 25,000 miles in circumference. That means if you were to start digging here in Wheaton and dug in a perfectly straight line, you would come out somewhere in China. And if you were to 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 13

14 get in your car in Wheaton heading east toward New York and continue going east for 25,000 miles, you would come to the exact same spot in Wheaton where you had begun your journey still heading east toward New York. While you were digging through or driving around the earth, you might consider that it weighs approximately 6 septillion 588 sextillion (6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000) tons, yet it never falls, even though it is suspended in empty space. It moves through that empty space in an orbit around the sun that covers 580,000,000 miles at a speed of 1,000 miles per minute, which comes to 60,000 miles per hour. And it does this year after year with such precision that it completes its trip exactly at the same time to the second each year. In fact, time all around the world is gauged to the earth s movement around the sun. The earth is always running exactly on time, but occasionally the clocks need adjustment by a fraction of a second. Do you think it s possible that such perfection could have been accomplished by accident? Or if you accept the idea that there are any number of gods, which one of them do you think was responsible for accomplishing this feat? And why exactly do you think that? On what grounds of knowledge do you base your opinion? Do you base it on what you alone think? Or perhaps you base it on what some other human being thinks. If you do, you ll probably both find yourselves falling in a ditch. The blind leading the blind, you know. In Matthew 15:14, Jesus said: "Ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch. Now let s take a look at some more miracles that occur every day all around us. The stare of Missouri covers approximately 70,000 square miles and has about 38 inches of rainfall per year. That amount of water is equal to a lake 22 feet deep, 250 miles long, and 60 miles wide, and that s only 1 state. The U.S. natural museum tells us they have calculated that there are around 10 million different insect species. There are 2,500 different kinds of ants alone and just one colony can contain 100 million ants. Did you know that the head of a comet can be from 10,000 to 1,000,000 miles long? Just think of that. The smallest comet would have a head alone that would stretch from England heading westward all the way to Japan. That s a lot of comet, and that would mean that the largest comet could have a head that is equivalent to traveling up and back from the moon to the earth twice. If you think that s big, the tail of that comet can be as long as 100,000,000 miles, which is about the distance from the earth to the sun. A comet travels at a speed of 350 miles per second, or 21,600 miles per minute, which means it could go from New York to Los Angeles in less than 10 seconds. Perhaps you ve been giving some thought recently to vacationing somewhere on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live. If you do you ll need a special space vehicle with the capability of traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, or to put it in terms we re more familiar with, 669,600,000 miles per hour. At that speed you d be able to travel around the world 7 times in 1 second. Before you leave you might want to say good-bye to everyone you know because you ll never see them again, that is in this life. For you see traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, it would take you 125,000 years to go from one end of our Milky Way Galaxy to the other. By the way, that s traveling 6 trillion miles per year. Our sun is included in the Milky Way galaxy, but it is not the only sun in the galaxy. Would anyone like to take a guess at how many other stars there are just within the Milky 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 14

15 Way Galaxy? There are 100 billion stars or suns in the Milky Way Galaxy, and the closest sun to ours is almost 28 trillion miles away. And our Milky Way Galaxy is only one of more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone. Would anyone like me to stop for a moment so that you can catch your breath? Such wonders are almost too much for our minds to imagine. How do you think so vast a universe functions century after century with such precise order? Do you really think it just takes care of itself without a Master Creator sitting at the control panel? Now let s get back to earth. How do you suppose we keep supplied with an adequate amount of rain to grow our crops, keep our oceans, lakes and rivers filled with water even though the world s population consumes huge quantities each day? The phenomenon is called the hydrological cycle of water, and the process is truly amazing. Water is actually lifted out of these oceans, lakes, and rivers and carried skyward against the natural force of gravity, thousands of feet into the air where it is suspended and collected in clouds that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. I bet some of you thought clouds were just big puffs of colored air without any mass. Not so, and what keeps them up in the air without crashing to the ground is certainly beyond my capacity to understand. But as the clouds float over the land the moisture collected in them is released as rain. No one could build a machine to do that, but scientists have discovered that God provided one and it s called the Sun, and it s only a mere 93,000,000 miles away. Let s consider yet some other aspects of creation. You re probably all aware that all matter in our universe is composed of extremely tiny building blocks called atoms. A molecule is the next size building block and is composed of a number of atoms. To give you a better idea of just how small these atoms and molecules are, it would take 3 atoms to make 1 water molecule. If you were to take those water molecules that compose just one drop of water and blow each molecule up to be the size of a grain of sand, you d have enough grains of sand to make a highway one foot thick and half-a-mile wide that would stretch from New York to Los Angeles. If you are not stunned by this reality, you need to read it over and over again until you are. And did you know that the atoms that make up molecules consist of mostly empty space? The actual amount of solid material in an atom makes up just one-trillionth of its volume, which means that everything in our world that looks to be made of solid materials actually consists mainly of empty space, and that includes you and me. In fact if you were to take all the air out of a politician who was six feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, he/she would be reduced to the amount of space that is on the head of a pin. Now if you think that s remarkable, think about the fact that the matter on the head of the pin would still weigh 185 pounds. This further means that you could solve the problem of congestion in our major metropolitan areas because you could fit over 5,000,000 people in the space occupied by 1 cubic inch. In other words the entire population of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan area could be contained within an area no larger than a cup of coffee. But you d have trouble picking up that cup of coffee because it would weigh about a billion pounds. When someone tells me that creation just happened and then evolved, it simply doesn t make any sense. How could such an incredible, diverse, mathematically perfect universe just happen? It would be as unlikely as creating an automobile by placing some nuts and bolts and scrap metal 2010 Ron and Betty Teed 15

16 in a pile and expecting the pile to develop into a fully functioning automobile. No matter how long you waited that pile would never become anything more than just a pile of junk parts with no function whatsoever. In fact, can you imagine a couple of molecules sitting on a beach one day long ago and deciding that they would join their individual abilities together and evolve into, or become an eye, or a brain, or even a butterfly? Design, my friends, speaks of a designer. Listen to what one of the top scientific minds in our country had to say on the subject. Robert Jastro, an astrophysicist and former director of Nassau s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said: Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the world. The essential elements in astronomy and the biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. That s exactly what the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us. Jastro goes on to say: It wasn t evolution at all. The question is what cause produced this effect. Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer that question. For the scientist who has lived his life by his faith in the power of knowledge and reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He/she believes they have scaled the mountain of ignorance and that they are about to conquer the highest peak, and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of biblical scholars who have been there for centuries. In other words when you study science, the only conclusion you can reasonably draw is that God created the world. And it was through all these wonders that God revealed Himself to each of us. But He didn t stop there. He went on to let us know what He expects of us as His children that He created, as sons and daughters of the Almighty God. He gave us a personal letter that He called the Bible, and in it God tells us everything that He wants us to know. How can we be certain that the Bible was written by God and not by mere men and women? There have been many arguments through the centuries on this very topic and some good arguments have been presented for and against. But the simple fact is that there is proof that makes it clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Bible was written by God. He did use scribes, who were most commonly prophets and apostles to write down His dictation on paper, but the content came solely from God. There are any number of proofs we can offer that God wrote the Bible, but the one which is conclusive is the prophesy which God provided in the Old Testament, and specifically prophesy about the first coming of Jesus. For our purposes we can define prophecies as predictions about the future Ron and Betty Teed 16

17 Over a period of a little more than a thousand years over which the Old Testament books were written, the prophets included a combined total of 109 prophecies, or predictions, about different aspects of the life of Jesus and where and when He would appear. These predictions were made anywhere from 400 to1,500 years before Christ was born. Every one of these predictions came true and we find verification of that in the New Testament. Do you know what the statistical probability is of 100% of these predictions coming true simply by chance? It is statically impossible for all 109 of 109 predictions to come true by chance because the statistical probability goes way off the chart. In fact the actual probability of these predictions all coming true by chance is 1 in the number 1 followed by 72 zeroes. That is 1 chance in: To give you a better idea of just how big this number is, imagine 200 billion planets the size of our earth, and each of those planets being inhabited by 4 billion people (the population of earth is currently around 6-1/2 billion). The number of people living on those planets would only total a number having 18 zeroes. Therefore we can conclude that whoever is responsible for writing the Bible has the ability to predict the future and the outcome of history. Because of the science of statistical probability there can be no doubt that God is behind these prophecies and that therefore we can rely on the entire Bible to be the Word of God. We can therefore see that God had good reason to fill the Old Testament with so many predictions about Jesus. And another reason other than proving the accuracy of the Bible was that Jesus was to be God s greatest revelation to the world that God was the one true God of all the people. Through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, all the world was provided with proof of God s power over sin and death, and all the world was offered the free gift of forgiveness and eternal life if they just would reach out and accept it. Romans 10:9,10: 9 For if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved. We get a great picture of this in Revelation 3:20-21: 20 Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If you hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends. 21 I will invite everyone who is victorious to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my Father on his throne. There is no other religion in the world today that can say its God rose from the dead. Only Jesus Christ was able to rise from the dead because He is the one and only Lord and Savior. The main figures of all other religions are still in their graves. What religion do you want to follow? One that raises people from the dead to eternal life or one that doesn t? In order to become a member of the kingdom of God, one must accept Jesus death on the cross as the only way they can be forgiven for their sins. If you haven t already opened that door and you hear Him knocking right now, don t delay, open it and invite Jesus in and He will grant you that special place one day in Heaven Ron and Betty Teed 17