Giving Credit Where It’s Due

Written by Rev. Nicholas Davelaar
Published in the Courier of Russellville, Arkansas on May 29, 2015

Who made you?

Is it really true that no one did, as some people claim? Are you and I to believe that everything exists by mere chance?

Statisticians have observed that people are naturally very bad with very big numbers. That’s why most Americans don’t worry too much about our national debt. We can’t get our minds around it.

Likewise, that’s one big reason so many people who buy lottery tickets actually believe they have a shot at winning.

According to one calculation, the odds of winning the lottery on a single ticket are 1 in 175 million.

In other words, if you bought one lottery ticket every minute, day and night from the moment you turned eighteen, for a lottery drawing to be held on your eightieth birthday, you would still have less than a 1 in 5 chance of winning that lottery.

That noted, the odds of winning the lottery are many times greater than the odds of life coming into existence by mere chance.

According to one calculation, the odds of a creating a single working protein out of a pool of amino acids are 1 in 10 to the 164th power. That’s 10 followed by 163 zeroes.

Now put together 250-400 of the right proteins, and you’d have a simple single-celled organism.

Nothing to it, some people might yet say. Anything can happen by chance over the course of thousands or even billions of years, right?

Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

There’s simply not enough time, even according to the estimates of scientists who teach that the world is some 14 billion years old. That’s only 10 to the 16th power seconds.

And that’s only for a simple single-celled organism. We humans are far more intricate than one of those amoebas you looked at under a microscope back in school. Our consciousness is an even greater mystery.

So where did we really come from? Who made us?

In the Bible God tells us he did. The opening chapters of Genesis clearly communicate that out of nothing God created heaven and earth and everything in them.

In Hebrews 11 we likewise hear that “the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

Just to be clear, that means he created us too. Isaiah 45:12: “I made the earth and created man on it.”

The big reason some people find this idea offensive or reject it as primitive seems to have little to do with science. Granted, are there Christians who have done shoddy science? Yes.

When people reject God’s signature upon his creation, however, they may well be motivated primarily by rebellion. They refuse to accept or acknowledge God’s claim on their lives.

Do you give him the allegiance you owe him? Have you gratefully received his Son, Jesus Christ, whom he sent to die and be raised from the dead to reconcile rebellious sinners to himself?

Think about that.

For further study, read Romans 1:18-25.