God of Creation: Invisible Things

Welcome to the Preaching Cross Radio Podcast, featuring the radio ministry of Pastor James W.

Knox of the Bible Baptist Church of the Last of Florida.

Our prayer is that we have our Bible study programs to bring the lost to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and enable the state to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Savior.

Now here's your host, Pastor James W.

Dox.

All right.

Thank you for that kind introduction and a very pleasant good day to each and every one of you.

I'm Brother James, and I greet you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

This is the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast.

We certainly do thank you for tuning in today, and we hope and pray that God, by His grace and love and mercy, will bless your heart and your soul as you listen to the program today, that God will speak to your heart by His Holy Spirit, through his word, and bear witness to the truth that by God's grace we will present to you on the broadcast today.

This is uh another broadcast in our series on the God of creation, and we are trying to show from the physical creation that the heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament showeth his handiwork, that the invisible things of him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power and Godhead, God's creation, the things that God made in and through the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, John chapter 1, Colossians chapter 1, the things that God made manifest in many ways and shapes and forms the Maker, the Creator, the Lord God Almighty.

John 1 · chapter mention Colossians 1 · chapter mention

Now, you know it's been commonly believed that the material universe was made of nothing.

The Bible does not state it in that way.

The word creation in the opening sentence of Genesis is to be compared with Hebrews 11, verse 3, which says that by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Hebrews 11:3

That means the visible came out of the invisible.

The visible came out of the invisible.

Let me read that to you again.

This is Hebrews chapter eleven and verse number three.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Now, the whole trend of recent discovery in the realm of physics and chemistry has been toward the unseen.

It is now sometimes since students of the universe began to say that everything that exists might be traced back to one or two gases, and now that the electron has been isolated, they are able to point fairly clearly to the progressive steps by which all visible and tangible things have been constructed.

The electron's a very interesting and mysterious thing.

In relation to a positive portion of electricity and to other electrons, it is the basis of what we call chemical elements.

Speeding over a wire with a multitude of its kind becomes an electric current.

The size of the electron may be imagined from the illustration given by Milliken, who we've quoted on other studies.

He says that such is the infinite infinitesimal dimension of this marvel of nature, and such is its rate of speed, that it would take Chicago's well, let's say two and a half million of the people living in Chicago, counting twenty thousand years, to get the number of the electrons that pass through an electric light filament in one second.

Two and a half million people counting twenty thousand years.

And just then they would count the number of electrons that pass through an electric light filament in one second.

That's how small they are.

Striking as this may be, the nature of the electron is eclipsed by interest or eclipsed in interest by its variety of combinations and divergent results.

It is now known that the characteristic of every chemical element is due to the number of electrons that appear in its atom.

Here we have pictured for us an astronomy, if you will, as wonderful as that which we behold in the skies, for the atom of any element consists of a central portion of positive electricity, together with from one to ninety-two electrons whirling about it at incredible speed as the planets revolve around the sun.

The spaces between are comparable to the spaces between the planets, or as someone has said, the proportion of a gnat to a cathedral.

With this picture before us, let's look at the construction of the various elements and compounds about us, beginning with the simplest of all hydrogen.

This is an invisible, odorless, tasteless gas, the lightest substance known.

At the center of an atom of this element is a particle of positive electricity, and about it whirls one and only one particle of negative electricity, the electron.

This electron is held in place in its revolutions by a force like that by which the sun holds the earth and all the planets in their stated places.

And in all the universe, wherever one electron is found to the atom, there is hydrogen.

This is a cosmic law.

It admits no variation.

Then you'll ask, what would happen if an extra electron should slip in from somewhere and join this solitary invisible speck?

The answer is that the new combination would cease to be hydrogen and would become helium, another invisible gas, and a very different thing.

This is the gas that is manufactured for balloons, and though it's twice as heavy as hydrogen, because two electrons weigh twice as much as one, it is not inflammable, while hydrogen is, and therefore is uh not dangerous to that degree.

So that two electrons in combination do not, as one might expect, make twice as much volume and weight of the first gas, but a new and entirely different thing.

Then when there were three electrons in relation to their positive center, we have lithium, which is different from either hydrogen or helium, and when we have four, we have uh glucinium and five boron.

When there are six, we have that familiar substance known as carbon, the basis of plant life and the necessary element of all the combinations of protoplasm and its products.

This is not a gas, neither is it invisible.

It is a solid, apparent thing, and it must not be supposed that it becomes apparent by reason of the number of electrons that compose it, for when we have eight of these electrons assembled in an aggregation, we find that we have gone back to the invisible again, and this time it's oxygen.

So we go on through the list of elements iron, silver, gold, mercury, radium, helium, and find an unbroken series of substances, the nature of each determined by the number of electrons that it takes to constitute it.

Here is a wide variety of objects, most of them visible, but all of them the mysterious products of a still more mysterious thing that is known only through its effects.

The unseen becomes the seen.

It is literally and actually that what is seen was not made of things which appear.

A marvelous thing has occurred, in that a microcosm has become a macrocosm, and a thing less tangible than gas and more fluid than air has been made to assume the proportions of a solid and abiding earth, a miracle more striking than anything recorded in the Christian scriptures.

Such a process of construction is more challenging than any of the concrete objects we have to deal with in our mechanical way.

It is so simple that a nine-year-old boy will grasp the mechanism, but so far beyond us that the chemist in his laboratory can only copy, much as a monkey copies table manners by holding a knife and fork in his hands without really knowing what it's all about.

But what follows is not so simple, and therefore far more admirable because of complexity.

Out of the less than one hundred elements come by combination all the thousands of substances in the material world.

Water, which covers three-fourths of the Earth's surface, is a combination of two invisible gases.

Hydrogen enters into union with different substances and forms acids.

Elements of coal tar recombine in thousands of new products.

Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen unite in various proportions to give starches and sugars.

With fourteen atoms of carbon and thirty of hydrogen, it is possible to make eighteen hundred and fifty-five compounds.

Protoplasm, the substance of living cells, is a combination of the same essentials as stars, earth, rocks, and oils.

Literally, man is made of the dust of the earth and nothing else, just exactly as the Bible stated it before any scientist was ever around to argue with it.

Physiologically speaking, man is 175 pounds of animated dirt.

Thus it all goes back to this matter of things which do not appear, leaving us with the impression that the farther we go toward beginnings and ultimate causes, the nearer we come to the intangible and immaterial.

There is no way that a scientist dealing honestly and rationally could hold forth any such idea as the eternity of matter, and that the universe is a result of matter exploding and combining and falling into place.

But you see, the matter, the things which do appear had to originate somewhere.

And you have to begin to comprehend a little bit better what Jesus meant when he said, God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth, as the Holy Spirit moved the apostle Paul to write, uh, under the King immortal, eternal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen.

Now, having received this meager outline, doesn't it strike you that the building of worlds on a plan of such complexity, out of such simplicity, is exceedingly admirable?

But the whole inference hinges on your own reactions, because next in importance to the facts of the outside world is your own interpretation of the facts.

To this extent, all systems of belief or unbelief are subjective, so that two men with the identical information before them will declare for two opposite views if their temperaments so direct, in which case the one who is most open-minded, most sincere, and most constructive in thinking, may be presumed to come nearer to the truth.

The one who lacks honesty will be but little moved by the quality of evidence.

To him, a tree is a tree because it is a tree, a butterfly has wings because that is its nature.

When you explain to him the intricate processes of growth, he will see nothing but cause and effect.

He will ask in naive simplicity, what is there wonderful about that?

Such a mind won't wonder at anything.

And the soul that cannot wonder cannot grow, the vistas are gone, the world and the future are blank.

On the other hand, God has given man, if he doesn't burn it out and sear it as with a hot iron, God has given man a conscious, a conscious awareness of his presence, a conscience, if you will, that testifies to God's reality and God's truth.

And the more he sees, the more he admires, and the more he stands in awe, and the more he realizes there is a far greater power in this universe than he himself.

It is this faculty that discovers and produces.

It makes artists, it makes scientists, it makes inventors, but it keeps gnawing, and it keeps pleading, and it keeps drawing until eventually it makes Christians.

It makes men see and realize that they are not the measure of all things, and there is something in some one out there far greater than man or men.

And then they begin to seek, and the Lord said, If you seek me with all your heart, you will find me.

To wonder, to admire, to adore, these have been steps in the processes of human progress since the dawn of history.

Also, these qualities have belonged to the leaders of men.

They've made advancement possible for the race.

Interrogation, wonder, and astonishment is nothing to be ashamed of.

When Agassiz began the study of nature, he was almost an atheist.

But such was his capacity for response that as his contact with the world widened, it was said of him, quote, every natural object was to him a thought of God.

End of quote.

In fact, this capacity for response is to a large extent the measure of man.

Most men adore without effort and true religion and racial development of the offspring of wonder.

A rational mind will do no less than trace the marvels of creation back to the Creator.

If the old and new testaments declare the love and forgiveness of God, nature declares his infinite wisdom and power.

The divine order is first that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual.

What a mistake to open God's word, written, and close his word in nature.

Most of us would be more worshipful worshipful Christians if we knew more about the marvels of the universe, because we would realize how exceeding great, how exceeding powerful, how exceeding wise the God of the Bible really is.

Now what about the matter of the gospel?

And this listen, this might sound a little strange to you, but hear me out.

Give me a good hearing now.

What about the gospel according to carbon dioxide?

You know, the cycle of carbon dioxide reads like a story, really.

Chemically speaking, burning, breathing, decay, and rust are all near relatives, which means that oxygen consumes substances by combining with carbon and passes off into the air as carbon dioxide.

About three or four hundredths of one percent of air is made up of this gas.

A human being exhales about a hundred gallons of it every twenty four hours.

It has been estimated that the whole human race gives off two hundred and fifty billion cubic yards a year, the carbon of which, Bobray computes, would make a solid mountain three miles in circumference and nearly half a mile high.

We eat and burn up such a mountain of carbon every year.

Animals will exhale more of this gas than men.

Add to this the discharge from smoking chimneys and the immensely greater volume from volcanoes, and it will give some idea of the aggregate amount.

This gas is not so deadly as was once supposed, but it's bad enough for us.

It is death to man, but life to plants.

If it were not disposed of, all animal life would disappear from the earth.

And the way in which it is consumed is what makes the story interesting.

The carbon and oxygen were combined by heat, welded by fire.

To separate them requires the complex efforts of the chemist, but the thing can be done in the laboratory with time and work.

However, plants do it easily, but no chemist knows how they perform the task.

Every plant is constantly breathing in carbon dioxide through the myriads of little holes in its leaves known as stomata or breathing pores.

They take it and take in the compound and the leaves decompose it, the operation going on only in the sunlight.

The plant deoxidizes the compound gas, that is the chlorophyll, in the leaves, splits it, appropriates the carbon, and turns it into wood, starts for sugar, and gives back the oxygen into the atmosphere.

All the fruits in the world are part of the carbon product.

All the lumber in our houses was taken out of the air.

What scientists mean by the cycle of carbon is the round of relations it makes in its journey.

As we have seen, plants take in the gas from the air and appropriate the carbon for fruit or grain or fiber and return the oxygen whence it came.

Animals eat the carbon products of plants in their bodies.

This meets oxygen in the blood, and the two burn, infuse, and pass back again into the air in the breath exhaled.

The round of carbon is from air to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to air, and around again.

Thus a remarkable balance is maintained.

A sort of a jack sprat arrangement occurs.

One writer said the kangaroo no carbon breathes, the pansy asks no oxygen.

So twixt them both each takes its own and gives the other back again.

The genius of this plan would be enough to point to intelligence and mechanism and declare a wise creator even if no other evidence existed.

But let us make a concrete reference.

Here is a stagnant pond.

In it are tadpoles, snails, small fish, and other forms of animal life, all drawing on the oxygen resources of the water and all giving out carbon dioxide.

In the course of time, the life-giving oxygen would be exhausted, and the resulting poisonous gas would kill every living thing.

But nature is there to set the carbon cycle going.

Hair weed begins to grow and absorbs the carbon dioxide, giving off oxygen to purify the water and make it a fit habitation for animal life.

Better than the ancients knew, and more than the present-day theologian is aware of, some superhuman power has set in perpetual motion the mechanism of purification and provided the denizens of the pool with the literal water of life.

Now it's time to introduce into the picture another application, the sweep of which is tremendous.

Whatever it was that set about to evolve a superior form of life that we call man, according to Charlie Darwin, that creator began long millions of years back, so they say.

Well, let me ask you something.

If God Almighty is all wise and all knowing and all perfect, it wouldn't have taken him millions and billions of years to perfect this system.

He simply could have spoken it into existence, and so the Bible says he did.

That creator was a personal God.

We understand that everything he made was intelligently planned.

If the original gases alone and unaided worked out the complex scheme, we're at a loss to account for the provision in the far past for emergencies that would arise a hundred million years afterward.

Somehow the present provision implies a past provision, and carbon tells the story.

But did carbon think it out carefully back there when the world was young?

Did the plants get together with the animals, and the animals and plants get together with the carbon and decide on this scheme of things?

Or did it just happen by chance or by accident?

I don't believe that any more than I believe that the automobile and the uh conversion of crude oil into gasoline and the gasoline getting into the gas tank and the automobile engine running, I don't believe that was an accident.

I believe there was a wise uh uh force behind that, I believe there was intelligence behind that that thought that out and planned it out and put it together.

And the same is true of this cycle of the carbon dioxide.

You see, once upon a time, long before uh you and I were around, animals appeared upon dry land.

When they did, the air was saturated with the same carbon dioxide.

Animal life would have been impossible.

So God, what God does in his wisdom, he creates the plants, then he creates the sun the next day, then he creates the animal life the next day, then he creates the man and the woman.

You know, it's a marvelous thing when you think about it.

What we burn today in our furnaces is what do we call, canned heat.

They say it's uh it's been uh preserved through long millennia by tree ferns becoming coal and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but then the combustion liberates the heat of the carbon that was taken out of the air by the sunlight acting on the chlorophyll of the leaves.

We are literally warmed by the heat that the sun gave out, while Adam and his descendants were walking on planet Earth.

Thus nature, I don't know if you're ready to say God yet or not, but it it's God.

It's God's work.

Nature performed two tasks in one act.

In the first place, the atmosphere was rid of its noisome abundance of carbon dioxide by the plant life, destructive of animal life, and the way was made for the introduction of uh land life to appear, and this all had to take place very rapidly and very quickly indeed.

The um question has to be asked, is there a wise creator behind all this?

If you accept the idea of intelligence in the universe, then you have here a proclamation of God's interest in man, a demonstration of his thoughtful goodness.

It's a gospel of love.

It may not be a complete gospel for the needs of the whole man, but we could say that God so loved the world that he fed the tree palm from the excess of the carbon dioxide.

God so loved the world that he caught the sun's rays and hid them in the recesses of the earth against the time of need.

God so loved the world that he established a balance of gases so that both the plant and animal world play back and forth, each to the advantage of the other.

Now, why are we too dull to see the fact of divine grace and goodness?

Why is science so concerned with the law of cause and immediate effect that it loses sight of the causes that have a purposive and distantly removed effect?

Probably because they'd have to admit to a true and living God behind all this.

Popularly viewed, there's a lot of bunk in the reasoning that goes no further than the next step in a series and does not connect the cause with its more remote results.

Here would be an example of such an A to B reasoning.

Gutenberg and Foss, or Faust, are credited with the invention of printing.

They got out big sheets and stamped with crude wooden types.

The cause of the big printed sheets is the invention of the G and F.

The effect of the G and F invention is a b is big printed sheets of paper.

Hurrah for printing.

But the historian who treats the philosophy of progress relates the discovery of type to the movements of four centuries of human progress, and shows that.

The invention of printing led up to a new civilization and a wide spread of knowledge with democratic institutions in its wake and the spreading of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to the corners of the world on the printed page.

He interprets the twentieth century as a product indirect but nonetheless real of the movements of four hundred years ago in which the invention of printing played so prominent a part and sees in the first stamped sheets only the crude promise of great things that were to be.

The philosopher spends little time on immediate effects and much time on the ultimate, but he does not lose sight of the first cause as a primary importance.

In the same way, the Lord Jesus Christ took note of the fact of divine provision as a part, though a lesser part, in a progressive series of causes and effects.

He pointed to the evidence of care for the lilies and ravens.

He said, Shall not God much more take care for you of ye live l ye have little faith?

He evaluated the sheep.

He said, Is not a man much better than a sheep?

He measured the promise of spiritual good by the familiar standards of physical good.

He said, God makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

He makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.

He made the Father's beneficent care to be the great primary cause of all good things.

Even as the writer of James says in James chapter 1 and verse 17, every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from above, from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

James 1 · chapter mention

And what is that greatest gift?

Well, you know as well as I do that God so loved the world, you say, I know that he gave us carbon.

Well, God so loved the world that he gave us the carbon cycle.

Well, it's better than that.

God so loved the world that he gave us oxygen, it's even better than that.

God so loved the world that he uh gave us uh carbon down in the soil and coal and fuel oil so that we could uh have these advancements.

It's uh you still haven't even scratched the surface yet.

These are just little tiny things that God has done to try and point your uh thoughts and your attention in his direction.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to suffer, bleed, die on Calvary's cross to pay for the sins of the world.

That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

For ye are saved by grace through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.

God's love gift to man is the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

If you will receive His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, as your personal Savior, Jesus Christ will not only come and save you, forgive your sins, born you again, make a new creature out of you, bestow upon you his Holy Spirit to comfort you and dwell within you forever.

But he will also give you his life, and the only life he has is eternal, everlasting life, and the gift of God is eternal life through his gift, the Lord Jesus Christ, which he gave, because he so loved the world.

Now, you know as well as I do that God is not a tree, he's not a plant, he's not carbon, he's not hydrogen, he's not oxygen.

These things are just testimonies of God.

But I'll tell you something, they point to a marvelous God, they point to an all-wise God, they point to an all-knowing God, they point to a God who is who loves you and is and is concerned about you and cares about you, and he proved his love.

The Bible says God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Will you believe on this Lord Jesus Christ, the gift of the true and living God, to any sinful fallen man that will humble himself and repent and receive this great Savior and this great salvation?

It would be the delight of Almighty God, so much so that the Bible says that all the angels of heaven rejoice over one sinner that repenteth.

Would you repent?

Humble yourself, confess to God that you're a sinner who desperately needs to be saved, and then believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, for in so doing thou shalt be saved.

Thanks for tuning in today.

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Until next time and throughout eternity, may Jesus Christ be praised.