Stealing From GodSample

You Are More Amazing Than You Thought!

Think you’re no big deal? You’ve been a big deal from the beginning. During the process of ovulation your mother unconsciously perfumed her egg with a special chemical attractant to lure the sperm of your father.  Then, just to make sure at least one got there, your father sent 300 million “soldiers” toward your mother’s egg.

Then there was a race—and you won!  (Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re not special — you beat out 300 million others!) Despite the fact that the head of your sperm cell was twenty to thirty times smaller than a grain of salt, it contained half of your 3.5 billion letter genetic code. The other half was in your mother’s egg, which was about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.  

Upon fertilization, a biological construction project of astonishing intricacy and precision began without any conscious direction from you or your mother.  As if they had minds of their own, your new cells knew where to go and what to do in order to become each of your major organs. And right now you are creating about 25 million new cells every second!

Those cells display design unrivaled by any human invention. For example, the bacterial flagellum, which propels certain cells, has a rotary motor so small that 35,000 of them laid end to end would take up only 1 millimeter. Its motor runs at a sizzling 100,000 rpm in one direction, and can stop in only a quarter turn to run just as fast in the opposite direction! 

Keep in mind that all of this biological choreography is happening inside of you right now without any conscious input from you.  This raises a question:  Since order and direction require an intellect, if your mind isn’t consciously directing all of that goal-directed activity, then what mind is?  

A mind outside of us.  Indeed, Jesus is “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews. 1:3); “In him all things hold together” (Colossians. 1:17); and “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  If God were to stop directing nature and holding us together, we would all cease to exist.

So God is not some distant historical watchmaker who wound things up and isn’t needed anymore—God’s sustaining power is present to you and me right now. (See Chapter 3 of Stealing from God)