Vacation

Hi everyone, and a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your families. My family and I just returned from sunny Mazatlan after a week's stay Oceanside. We were blessed with a hotel room overlooking the hotel's pool and the Pacific Ocean. Yes, there were palm trees and a gentle breeze most days that made me almost forget about what winter is like in Minnesota. But as we returned on Saturday night, the cold reality of our winter hit us – as well as a driveway almost filled knee high with snow (I am very grateful to our neighbor who before we arrived shoveled a path for our car to get up our steep incline of a driveway.)

 

But as I was relaxing this past week, one thought kept returning to me: how powerful and destructive nature is. The ocean's wave's relentless and never-ending pounding of the shore destroyed everything it touched. My son Elijah and daughter Olivia built several sand castles on the edge of where the water would come up to on the beach. And they were able to mostly protect their construction with a protective wall on the side that the waves would come. But it turns out that the water rushing back was even more destructive to the sand castles than even the on-coming waves. The pull of the water back to the ocean was so strong that it would tear away the backside of the castles. But the combination of the wave's pounding and drawing back leveled every castle in short order.

 

So why did I think about nature's destructive power during this trip? It made me appreciate God our Creator all the more, the Maker and Creator of all of life around us. You see, the atheist belief is that nature's forces can build and create the marvelous designs of creatures, plants and animals by itself, without the need for Divine aid – that life started simply with even a single one-celled life, and then life through nature's forces grew more and more complicated, even to the point of creating the human brain/central nervous system/circulatory system, etc. And somehow the process of variation and mutation of the cell's DNA, the argument goes that nature can creatively make more and more complex living creatures, with the aid of nature naturally selecting the survival of the fittest life.

 

But let me ask the question – does this make any sense? Does it make sense to believe that nature alone can create a plant, an animal, or even man itself? I don't believe the atheist/naturalistic position makes sense. There is nothing in the world around us that shows that nature can create anything. The sun decomposes and breaks down anything left in its rays, as shown by an apple left out. Oxygen is the same way. The wind, the ocean's waves, rivers all cut and destroy everything in it's' path. Lightning? Of course, lightning destroys anything it hits – and yet people still cling to the 1950's Miller-Urey test tube experiment (over 50 years ago, and it is still relied upon – crazy?! The experiment showed that amino acids were created when an electrical current was run through a mixture of chemicals), as somehow proof that life can originate on its own. The hit of a lightning bolt kills life, and doesn't create it, the movie Young Frankenstein notwithstanding.

 

So with nature so clearly destroying order, and creating disarray in its' path, how have we departed so far from the path that lets us see that God is responsible and the Originator of everything in the world around us? Join me in praising the Triune God, Creator of the Heavens and Earth, and of all life around us.