If you have your Bibles this morning, if you would turn please to Psalm 139. As you're turning in your Bibles, I want to reflect back on one of the things that Sam said as we began our worship through music this morning. And that is how good it is to gather together with the body of Christ. We all can worship, and we're called to worship individually throughout the week. Amen? But oh, how great to gather together with the body of Christ and to lift our voices in praise to him. Psalm 139. Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I stand up. You understand my thoughts from far away. You observe my travels and my rest. You are aware of all my ways before a word is on my tongue. You know all about it, Lord. You have encircled me. You have placed your hand on me. This extraordinary knowledge is beyond me. It is lofty. I am unable to reach it. Where can I go to escape your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I live in the eastern horizon or settle at the western limits, even there your hand will lead me. Your right hand will hold on to me. If I say, surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me will be night. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night shines like the day. Darkness and light are alike to you. For it was you who created my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I will praise you because I have been remarkably and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, and I know this very well. My bones are not hidden from you when I was made in secret, when I was formed in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw me when I was formless. All my days were written in your book and planned before a single one of them began. God, how difficult your thoughts are for me to comprehend. How vast their sum is. If I counted them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I wake up, I am still with you. God, if only you would kill the wicked. You bloodthirsty men, stay away from me. Who invoke you, Lord, deceitfully? Your enemies swear by you falsely. Lord, don't I hate those who hate you and detest those who rebel against you? I hate them with extreme hatred. I consider them my enemies. Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my concerns. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Let's pray. All glory, all honor, all wisdom, all power are yours forever, Lord. We want your name to be exalted and magnified and honored for all generations. and into eternity and we now as we study your word want to worship you in the way that we listen. Lord I just I know there's sometimes I listen to a sermon and it's it's not worship it's just hearing it's just learning and there's other times when when instead of turning on music I'll turn on a sermon and I just exult I just lift up my soul to you And I pray that that's the way it would work this morning, Lord, that this message, all this is, is just marveling about your glory. That's all this passage, this paragraph we're going to study today, that's all it is. And my one prayer this morning is just very simple, Lord. Here's what I'm asking. I just would pray that the people in this room right now would experience in the coming week the same thing that I would experience this week in the levels of worship and gratitude and joy that I never really experienced before in marveling about your work in creating us. Lord, let that happen. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. The last two weeks in our study of Psalm 139, we have examined five attributes of God so far. Today, in verse 13, we come to a sixth wonderful, life-sustaining, joy-giving truth about God. And we could title this one, God as Creator, because this is all about His work of creation, starting in verse 13. But I don't think I'm going to title it that, because I think it's more specific than that. God as our Creator, but it's about God's work of creating me in particular. And the amazing craftsmanship involved with that. Look at verse 13. For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb. This is still part of the discussion of God's amazing knowledge of us. That's really the biggest theme in this psalm that goes all the way through is His knowledge of us. Started out with Him examining us, testing us, searching us. And then in verse 15 here, my frame was not hidden from you, you saw my uniform body, you see. It's the idea of you are deeply and thoroughly known by God. And we've seen that through observation so far. He knows you by his penetrating, omniscient gaze that can search and discern all your thoughts and motives and feelings and desires and all the rest. But even beyond that, here now we see that He knows you at an even deeper level through creation. He pieced you together in your mother's womb. That's a deep level of knowledge. You know, if you learn something, say you went out and got a new smartphone and you're trying to figure that thing out and you spend the weeks or months or however long it takes to figure one of those things out. Finally, you know everything about how it operates through examination and using it That's one level of knowledge. It would be a whole other level of knowledge altogether if you were the one who wrote every line of code in every one of the programs that that thing runs and you also designed and personally built every component and pieced that phone together yourself. Then you would really know that thing, right? That's the idea here. Every component of your being was pieced together by God. Designed and built by Him. You don't actually have to travel to the Redwoods to feel awe. All you have to do is look in the mirror. All you have to do is look in the mirror. One of my commentaries that I was reading on this verse said, it would have been natural for the pre-scientific mind like David's to wonder about the development of an embryo. I just have to shake my head when I read that. That's written in the 1800s, right after the Enlightenment, when they knew everything. A couple hundred more years of scientific advancement has gotten us to the point now where we are more baffled than ever about the development of the human embryo. It is absolutely... I mean, think about it. How do you start with a single cell, one cell, and it starts to divide and within a matter of weeks it has a brain? A brain and a skeleton. Five weeks, it's got a brain. I mean, most cells, when they divide, they don't do that. Most cells, when they divide, all they do is replicate the same cell. They just keep making copies of themselves. That's what cells do. But this cell, how does it know to divide into 300 different kinds of cells? The brain cells, skin cells, fat cells, bone cells, all the different, 300 different kinds of cells in your body. And then, when it turns into those different kinds of cells, those cells, all they do is go back to the normal thing of just replicating themselves. All they do is divide and create more skin cells. They never create any brain cells or bone cells. How does that happen? How does it know to do all that? Take just the brain for a second. Let's talk about that. If you're pregnant right now, then in the past 60 seconds, your baby added a quarter million new neurons. I don't know if you feel like you're gaining any weight or anything, but 60 seconds. a quarter million neurons and every single one of those quarter million new neurons that are forming every single minute behaves as if it knew exactly where it belonged in the brain and which other cells it needs to make connections with. Each cell in the brain as it develops joins only with the other cells that it needs to be connected with and no others. And it's not just that each cell has to be connected with one or two other cells. It's each one has to make thousands of connections across gaps. The way these connections are made, they're across these little gaps that we call synapses. And the signals are sent across the synapse from neuron to neuron through a very, very complex chemical and electrical process. You can think of each one of those synapses like a little on-off switch. Now, you think about the wiring involved in your brain. Just take the cerebral cortex, just one part of your brain. It's just a layer of tissue on the surface of your brain. Just in that, there are about 20 billion neurons. And every single one of those has to make thousands of connections with other neurons. Just in the cerebral cortex alone, there are between 100 and 500 trillion synapses. 100 to 500 trillion of those little switches. Now that is more electrical connections than all the appliances, all the computers, routers, internet connections in the whole world. By far. In fact, that number, say between 100 and 500, let's take 300, 300 trillion, that is like the number of stars in 1,000 Milky Way galaxies. It's staggering. For your baby's brain to work, it's going to need to be properly wired with that many connections. Those things connect in the wrong places. The cells connect to the wrong other cells. The brain doesn't work. When you were in your mother's womb, who made sure that none of those hundreds of trillions of connections got their wires crossed? It's staggering. And all that was completed by the time you were born. The whole thing was developed by the time you were born. In fact, that was when you had your most brain cells. You never have had more brain cells than when you were born. By age three, you had already lost half of your brain cells. And it's been declining ever since. Which explains a lot, right? But here's the amazing thing. A few years ago, just like three years ago, Some scientists developed a new method of mapping out those connections in the brain, and they found out that the figures that I just gave you are off. They're not quite right. It's true there are 100 to 500 trillion synapses. That part they got right. Where they were wrong was in thinking that each one of those synapses is like an on-off switch. It turns out, in looking more carefully, each synapse contains more like a thousand different switches. They're all switching in different ways all the time. Which means the overall complexity of the function of the brain is orders of magnitude beyond even what they thought five years ago. The complexity of the brain is staggering beyond comprehension. And all these hundreds of trillions of electrical connections operate in your brain constantly, continually, around the clock, night and day, for 70 plus years without stopping, on 20 watts of power. Fueled largely by cheeseburgers and french fries. I mean, that's the fuel running this thing, right? 20 watts! I mean, just think of like a 20-watt light bulb, which is absolutely useless. If anybody ever calls you a dim bulb, you know, 20 watts. Not much. And that's just one organ out of the body. Think about all the other organs. You could just go on and on with any organ. Take the heart. Your heart is about the size of your fist. It weighs less than 8 ounces. And since yesterday, it has already pumped 1,800 gallons of blood just in the last 24 hours. Every single day, that little 8-ounce blob in your chest does enough work to lift 36 tons one foot off the ground each day. And you go through all the organs in your body and then you move up to the systems The circulatory system, respiratory system, nervous system. I think there's 11 different systems in the body. You could spend your whole life studying one of those systems and never get it all. It's complexity beyond what words can describe. And what is it that orchestrates all this complexity? Keeps it all going? If you ask a scientist that, how does this all fit together? I mean, who keeps all this from just turning into a giant train wreck? Scientists would say, oh, that's easy. acid. It's all mapped out in an acid called deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. Coiled up inside every single one of your cells is a little strand of DNA that is encoded with information. All the information that dictates how every single one of your trillions of cells in your body will develop and operate throughout your entire life and how they'll interact with each other. Everything, including features that are unique to you, eye color, hair color, height, aspects of your personality, all that. All that's in your DNA. You stretched out one strand of DNA from one cell, it would be nine feet long. You take all your DNA, it would reach from here to the moon. DNA in your body. But it's all coiled up so that it fits inside a microscopic cell. And unlike your extension cord at home, it doesn't get tangled. Which is amazing. In fact, the way that it's coiled up inside there is crucial for its function. If it coils up the wrong way, it doesn't work. Every cell in your body contains enough information to fill 5,000 books with 200 pages each. One strand of DNA. A lot of storage capacity. It's amazing that you can get that much information inside a space much smaller than a cell. But what really struck me this week, and I never knew this before, but I was reading this week about DNA and the thing that amazes me is the relatively small amount of information that actually is. The amount of information that's stored in your DNA is actually less than a half a gig. The Excel file that we use to record attendance here at church is three times that size. In one-third the space it takes to keep track of which one of you showed up on a Sunday is all it takes for God to encode all of the directions and all the instructions for all the characteristics how every single one of your trillions of cells in your body will function throughout your entire life. From the time you were one cell until now, nothing has been added except nourishment. Nothing. It was all there, one cell. The complexity of the human body is staggering beyond comprehension and Darwin knew that you know Darwin the reason he figured evolution could be possible is because He's here's what he figured. He said if cells are very simple That's just the basic building block and and so you could imagine a cell I mean it's cells just a blob of jelly really and and so you could imagine that thing just sort of coming into existence by chance and then it starts to divide and next thing you know you get a button you get enough of those things and they start to fall into place and you can get a Living organism and then the organism can start to develop complexity over time. That was his theory Well, one of the many modern discoveries that has totally debunked Darwinism is the fact that cells are nothing like what Darwin thought they were. They are not simplistic little blobs of jelly that could come into existence by chance. Cells are incredibly complex machines. In fact, it's a little misleading for me to compare them to a machine. They're not really like a machine. In fact, not even really like a supercomputer. A more valid comparison would be a city. If you think of like the city of Denver with all the communications and the infrastructure and the activity and the highways and the transit systems and the waste management and electrical grid and the plumbing and all that stuff, all of that, that's what each cell in your body is like. That does not just form by chance. And all of it has to be functioning. The whole city has to be functioning in order for the cell to be operational, in order for it to work. A friend of mine was working on a master's degree in biology and one of his classes was titled Introduction to the Cell. A whole semester at the graduate level just to introduce the basics of a cell. Exploring the human body is like exploring the universe. It's not long before you short out every one of those billions of neurons. I mean, it's just incomprehensible. And all this information that was orchestrated and organized with all this complexity Where did that information come from? That information that's encoded in your DNA, that half a gig, where did it come from? You know, there's a lot of problems with the theories of naturalism and evolution and all that, but none greater than this. This is the biggest problem for evolutionists. The more they advance in the study of information theory, the more they have realized that Information absolutely cannot come through natural processes, evolutionary process. It always requires intelligence. Always. No exceptions. And that's intuitive. I mean, you would know that. If you just walked down the beach and you saw some sticks washed up on the shore and they happened to form a triangle, you might think, oh, how about that? Look at that. Look what the waves did. They just formed a perfect triangle. But if you were walking down the beach and you saw a bunch of sticks arranged and you stood back and they spelled out new 125 groups starting on Friday nights at the Montoya home. No one in his right mind would see that and say, ah, look what the waves did. What are the odds? Right? Nobody. You would instantly assume that a person put those sticks together. Why? Because no matter how much time you wait for waves, there's no way information can be communicated except through somebody's mind. There are no examples anywhere in the creation of information appearing where it didn't already exist apart from intervention by an intelligent source. None. So the presence of all this incredible information in our DNA points to a creator. And the nature of that information points to a creator with an intelligence far beyond what the human mind can even conceive. So the piecing together of your body in your mother's womb is a marvel beyond comprehension. But that's not even the most amazing thing of what happened to you in the womb. David says, you created my inmost being. That's talking about the inner man. Heart, soul, mind, spirit. God created the material part of you and he created the immaterial part of you. The physical part and the non-physical part while you were in the womb. Now what is that? What is the non-physical part of you? What is your soul? With all of our vast scientific research and study we have no idea what the soul even is. No idea. We can say with absolute certainty that it exists I mean, it's easy to prove that it exists, because if you want to doubt that it exists, you need it to do the doubting. Right? You need the immaterial part of you to do the doubting, to wonder about the immaterial part of you. So it's obvious that we have both a physical material part and a non-physical immaterial part, but yet we can't even begin to imagine what it is. What is your soul made out of? What is the meaning of something that exists without physicality? What does that even mean? And what tethers your soul to your body? Because it's tethered, right? It's attached. Have you ever noticed that? Wherever your body is, that's where your soul is and your heart. Your soul, the material part of you never just like drifts off into another room somewhere. It's always there where your body is. Wherever your body is, that's where you're present. Nowhere else. It's tethered to your body. And yet, the tether is breakable. We know that because soul and body are separated at death, right? Obviously, the immaterial part of you leaves at death. Even the most limited intellect can observe that. If you see someone die, there's a huge difference between one minute before they die and one minute after they die, right? Anyone can look and say, okay, he's gone. He's not here anymore. The body's there. The chemical's there. DNA is there. Everything is still there. He can be sitting in the sunshine, so energy is being pumped into the process. Still, no life. Something's gone. The soul, the immaterial part is gone. So, the tether can be broken, but while you're alive, it stays connected. And the connection, what is the nature of that connection? How do those connections work? How does one affect the other? You know, if somebody comes to you and hands you a note that says that it's a message saying one of your loved ones has died, was in a horrible accident and has died, that piece of information, is that physical or non-physical? It's non-physical, right? The piece of information, I mean, it's written on a physical paper, but the piece of information, that's non-physical. That's not made out of any stuff. It's just an idea. So this non-physical idea goes inside you and it's interpreted and evaluated by the immaterial part of you, the non-physical part of you. But then that starts to have an effect on your physical part, right? All of a sudden tears are forming and streaming down. How does that work? And it works the other way too. Doesn't the physical part of you affect the non-physical part of you? I just told you last week there are times when Tracy can physically lay her hand on me And the effect on me is a whole lot of non-physical things like encouragement, and happiness, and inner strength, and motivation. How does that happen? When your inner man causes your body to move, where does the power come from to do that? Suppose you decide to read your Bible. You make a decision, I'm going to read my Bible. How does that start? It starts in the inner man, right? The immaterial part of you starts with motives, and attitudes, and desires, and resolve, and things in your inner man. They all come together and they result in a decision, okay? So you make the decision in your mind. There's a difference between your mind and your brain. Your mind is the immaterial part, brain is the physical thing. So in your mind you make this decision and then your brain sends commands to your body to open your Bible. The way your brain does that is chemicals start moving. What power in your soul makes those chemicals start moving in your brain? How does that work? When David says that God created his inmost being and then knit him together in the womb, that's more than just the formation of the body. The formation of the body is mind-blowing enough, but the knitting together of body and soul and heart and will in the womb is just staggering. When you look in the mirror, try not to become preoccupied with how you compare good or bad with other people or what people will think of you. You look in the mirror, what do people think when they see that? Try not to think about that. Try not to become preoccupied with yourself. Try to become preoccupied with God and His handiwork, what He's done. Think about what happened to you when you were in the womb. Verse 15, my frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. Here, David describes the womb as being like the depths of the earth, the most secret place no one can see. The whole time your mom was looking through books of the development of a baby inside the womb in the different stages, God wasn't looking at books. He was just observing firsthand. And not just observing, He was doing it. He was making it happen, proactively piecing you together in the womb. You see that phrase in verse 16, my unformed body? That word refers to a formless, unfinished mass. You know, if you look at a picture of a baby in the womb in the late stages of the pregnancy, it looks like a human being, right? But the earlier you get, the less that looks like a baby. In fact, I just read an article this week about somebody who was arguing that it's okay to kill what's in the womb because it's not human in the early stages because it doesn't look human. It doesn't look human at all. It looks like something else and so therefore it's not human. But what we see here is what David's saying when he uses this term is David was David even before he was, even when he was just an unformed shapeless little blob. Before he looked human he was David. So when did he get his soul? Let's think for a minute about this whole abortion debate and everything. When does a person get a soul? Is it the day you're born? Well no, we know that's not right because we saw in verse 13 that it's inside the womb where God knits together your innermost man, right? Your inmost being. So the immaterial part of you, your soul, exists in the womb. So at what point are you first an actual person and not just a part of your mother's body? Well, what does science tell us? From science, we learn that an embryo is actually not just a part of the mother's body. Some people have said, oh, well, it's just like your appendix or something. It's just part of your body. No. The development and the behavior of every part of a woman's body is determined by that woman's DNA. But the development of the child from the moment of conception on is not determined by the mother's DNA. It's determined by that child's DNA. It's a different person. It's a different DNA. That's what we know from science and scripture verifies that. Psalm 51.5 points to conception. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. So he traces his bent towards sin back to conception. You have to be a person to have any sin. tissue blobs are not sinful or righteous, only persons. When Mary first got pregnant and went to see Elizabeth in Luke 1.41 it says, when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby inside her womb leaped. So Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy and what's inside her womb is called the baby. It's the normal Greek word for a child. And the fact that John responded to the presence of Jesus points not only to the fact that John was a human being, but also the fact that Jesus was a human being. Just in the initial days of his conception. And then look at how Mary is described in verse 43. Look at her title. Instead of being called the Virgin, what is she called? Why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Did you know even in the first few days that you're pregnant, you are a mother? Sometimes I hear, you know, a child will be born, a first child will be born, and the guy, the dad says, oh, I became a father today. No, you didn't. You've been a father for nine months. When Carolyn Nicole was born, the hospital where she was born gave me a t-shirt that said, I became a father at Hinsdale Hospital. I never wanted to wear that shirt because I don't know for sure where I was when I became a father, but I'm quite certain it was not in a hospital. And if none of that convinces you, and you're still just not quite sure what's in the womb, if it's a baby, or if it's a human being, or if it's not, what should we do if we're not sure? I mean, if you're not sure if something's human, and you're confronted with a decision of whether or not to kill it, what should you do? Imagine yourself, you're working in your garage, and you're working on something, and your little seven-year-old comes up behind you and says, hey, Dad, can I kill this? What would you say? If you would just keep doing what you're doing without even turning around and say, yeah, yeah, go ahead. I think you're a little overboard on permissive parenting. Any responsible parent, before answering that, one way or the other, is going to turn around and ask the question, what is it? What is it? If it's a mosquito or a roach or a weed, then yeah, kill it. If it's the neighbor's dog, probably say no. Although, some of you might be tempted, I don't know. If it's your neighbor's son or daughter, if it's your neighbor, you'd say no, right? See, it's not enough for the abortionists to say, we don't know for sure if an embryo is human or not. We don't know exactly when If that's the case, the burden of proof is on them to prove conclusively that it's not human before they should be allowed to kill it. You know, if I'm out hunting and I hear some rustling in the bushes and so I just start firing away at the sound and it turns out it's another hunter and I kill him, I'm going to jail. Why? I didn't know it was a human. I still go to jail. Why? Because it's against the law to kill something if you don't know what it is. And the reality is, when it comes to what's in the womb, we do know what it is. It's a human being, and to kill it is to commit murder. You say, what if I've already done that? What if I've had an abortion? Well, if you've had an abortion, confess it to God as sin. ask him to forgive you and if your faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ he will forgive you and he will separate that sin the guilt of that sin as far from you as the East is from the West and he will never remember it against you again ever which means you never have to remember it against yourself ever again. So the fact that God created you means he knows everything there is to know about what you're like and the fact that God created you for a purpose means that he had this all planned out ahead of time and that's the next place David goes. Look at verse 16. All the days, this is really breathtaking, all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Now, I read that first question I have, what does ordained mean? Every day is ordained? Does that mean that he just knows how many days? He actually planned out the days. I mean, what does that mean? The word there literally means to shape something. Your Bible might have the translation formed or planned. Isaiah 29 16, shall the potter be regarded as the clay or the thing formed? Say to him who formed it, he has no understanding. That word formed is the same word. Before you were born, God sat down at his potter's wheel and formed your whole life every one of your days. He formed it. He planned out every single day and wrote it in his book. Did you know your day timer is not a first edition? It's a second edition. The first edition was written before you existed. Every day, written out, everything planned, everything that would take place. And this isn't just talking about generalities, you know, who you would marry and where you would go to school or whatever. It's talking about every detail, every single step along the way that you take. Proverbs 20, 24, a man's steps are directed by the Lord. How then can anyone understand his way? How can you possibly understand how you ended up here and all the steps you took? It was because God directed those steps. And so we worship God and stand in awe not just because of his exquisite craftsmanship on our souls and our bodies, but also because of the brilliant master architect that he is in formulating our days. Jeremiah 10.23, I know, O Lord, that a man's life is not his own. It is not for man to direct his steps. Proverbs 16.1, to man belong the plans of the heart, but from God comes the reply of the tongue. You make a decision. What actually happens, God determines. Proverbs 16.9, in his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps. Proverbs 16.33, the lot is cast into the lap, every decision is from the Lord. Proverbs 21.1, king's heart is like a water course, the Lord turns it however he pleases. God controls it all. He controls it all. Now, I know for some of you, you hear that, it gives you no joy at all. In fact, it fills you with anxiety. You hear this and it bugs you. because it brings up some difficult questions. Like, what about free will? And more importantly, what about evil? I mean, how do we explain that? If God pre-plans everything, for one thing, that makes it sound like I'm just a puppet and my decisions don't really determine what happens. Everything's already gonna happen no matter what I decide, and so my decisions don't matter. That's what it seems like it would imply. And then what about sin? If God pre-planned every single one of my days, what about my sinful days? Is God guilty of causing moral evil? Well, the answer is no, God is not guilty of causing moral evil. And yes, your free will is still intact. God is never guilty of generating evil, even indirectly. James 1.13, He's not tempted, nor does He tempt anyone. God never forces anyone to sin. entices anyone towards sin, he never nudges anyone towards sin, he never shoves anyone towards sin. All the energy exerted by God on your soul is never towards evil, always towards righteousness. And so, no, God is absolutely not guilty in any sense of creating evil, generating evil, causing evil. He's not guilty of that. And is our free will still intact? Absolutely. Yes, that's why scripture gives commands and then gives reasons to obey those commands persuasive reasons trying to persuade us do this and countless times things are said to have happened in scripture because of what human beings decided even to the point where in some cases the Bible says if human beings would have decided differently then different things would have happened. 2 Samuel 12 8 is an example of that. So free will is very much a reality. You say, but I don't understand how all three of those things can be true. God pre-planned everything, and yet we still have free will, and God's not guilty of generating any kind of evil. How can all three of those be true at the same time? Well, my answer to that is very simple. Don't worry about it. You don't understand it? Fine. Don't worry about it. There's all kinds of things I don't understand that I don't worry about. Right? For example, scientists, have you ever taken physics and studied light? Scientists have no idea how light can function the way it does, because you can show some things, experiments that show that light is a wave and not a particle, and other things that show that it's a particle and not a wave, and there are characteristics that seem contradictory, but you just observe it and there they are, light does that, and scientists have no explanation for how that can be. What is the explanation? How can light be that way? And the answer is, I don't have any idea, but I can tell you this, I lose zero sleep over it, I don't worry about it. Time for me to go to sleep, I just turn the light off. And so, if there are some things in the creation and just in the natural world that are over my head, should I be so shocked to discover that there's something about God that's a little over my head? I mean, I can't even understand everything about my wife or myself. Or you, people that are on my own level, is it so unbelievable that I wouldn't be able to fully understand God? See, it's actually not that hard to just believe each thing the Bible says. If you can't see how they all fit together, you don't have to. All you have to do is just believe each one of them. Are these complicated? First, God pre-planned and informed every one of my days before I was born. That's not hard. I can believe that. Nevertheless, I'm still responsible for my decisions. My decisions matter. I need to decide the right way, not the wrong way. I can understand that. I can believe that. And number three, God's not guilty of evil. I can believe that. I'm there. I got it. It's all you need. None of those three things are complicated or hard to understand. If you can't see how they go together, then just don't worry about it. Just sit back and enjoy the fact that God orchestrated your life. It's so sad to me when people miss the wonder of doctrines like this because they just don't want to have to deal with the paradox in their belief system. They think they have to deny this doctrine in order to protect other doctrines. And so they miss out on the joy of knowing that God pre-planned every day of their life before they were ever conceived. Think back to when you were born. Think back a couple years before that. Imagine a couple years before you were born. Go up into heaven, open up God's book, And before your parents even started thinking about names for a baby, there's your name in the book! And under your name, you go down a few lines, you go down all the way down, there's an entry for September 22nd, 2013, today's date. And you might have to blow a little dust off of it, because it's been written there since the creation of the world, You get the dust off and you look at the entry and there it all is. The clothes that you put on this morning, what you had for breakfast, how you felt all morning until now, what thoughts will go through your mind later on today, how it would strike you exactly when we sang Fairest Lord Jesus and whether your mind would be wandering when we got to verse 3. Everything. It's all there. And just as detailed an entry for tomorrow's date. And this is not just God looking into a crystal ball and observing what would happen. He's the architect of it. He formed it all. Before your parents even knew each other, before Adam knew Eve, it was all written in God's marvelous novel of the ages. And is this novel based on a true story? No. The true story is based on the novel. God did not write what he wrote because it was going to happen. It happened because God wrote it. Some people want to say they want to alleviate the tension and the difficulty of this paradox. And so they say, oh no, all that happened was God looked into a crystal ball. He just looked in the future, observed what sovereign man would decide, and then dutifully wrote it down. So we are the prime ultimate determiners of reality, and God only comes along behind us and responds to our decrees. What a terrifying world that would be. That's full-blown Arminianism, and that would be terrifying. The reality is God is the first cause. He is primary. His determination is first. And the things that happened, happened because they were ordained by Him. And what grace that we might be characters in the marvelous novel of the ages. And not just characters, but amazingly, characters that have the dignity of causation. We actually determine how the novel goes. and yet the novel's free written. Mind-blowing. And so not only did God create us, He's the author and architect of our lives. We were comforted in the first 12 verses of this psalm where God observes everything we think, everything we do. He examines us. But here, He not only knows us from observation, but He knows us from creation. He knows us from observation, He knows us from creation, and He knows us from foreknowledge. and predestination. He knows everything that will happen to you and He planned it all out. Even taking into consideration your point of view. You know that was part of the planning. God didn't just plan that things would happen a certain way. He planned it so that everything would take place in a certain way from your perspective. So He didn't just plan that today it would start out cool and end up being a sunny day. He took into consideration what impact a sunny day would have on your mood and the clothes that you put on this morning and he took that into consideration what impact your mood and dress that you ended up with would have on your family members mood and and the people around you and all their thoughts and decisions ad infinitum. What vastness of wisdom our God has and what wonderful condescending mercy and grace that he would care about how something would affect me. So, God is the exquisite craftsman who made me and the omniscient architect of my life. Great information. This is helpful. But what, what's the so what of that? I mean, how should we therefore live? What's the application? How do you put a sermon like this into practice? Well, that's easy. The answer's in verse 14. All we have to do is take our cues from David. Here's the application. Verse 14, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. That's the application. The way to respond to a truth like this is praise. Mark it. All great theology results in great doxology. Doxology means worship, glorifying God. All true theology moves to doxology. Everything that you learn about God should result in praise. If you ever study theology and it doesn't result in worship, your theology is bad. Your theology is bad. No matter how much information you know about various doctrines, if it doesn't bring exuberant praise out of your heart and move you towards righteousness, you're a poor theologian. I see people who, you know, they'll come out of Bible school or seminary and they've read every book there is on the end times, or they've got all the doctrines of grace all figured out, but their pride is through the roof and they have more anger than joy. All they want to do is argue. Those people are ignorant about end times and doctrines of grace. They've missed the point. They need to go back to the drawing board. If your study of theology does not result in doxology, you're missing the point. Apart from Christ himself, I believe there's no greater theologian ever than David. I mean, no one teaches us more about God than David. He was a consummate theologian and probably one of the greatest worshipers of all time. true theology always leads to joyful doxology. And so how do we put this sermon into practice? Praise Him. Praise Him. And a key part of praising Him is thanksgiving. One of the chief ways that we praise God is by expressing gratitude to Him. In verse 14, some of your Bibles say, I praise you because I'm fearfully wonderful. Others say, I thank you That's because that same word can mean either thank or praise. And honestly, I've studied this word a lot and I've looked up every use of it and I've never been able to figure out when it should be translated praise and when thanks. It's like the two meanings are so close that I think probably this word just carries both meanings every time it's used. You cannot separate thanksgiving from praise. And so one of the chief ways that we praise God is about the way he created us is through gratitude. Every time you look in the mirror, you should thank God. Now, that could go wrong, right? There's some wrong ways to do that. You don't want to be consumed with yourself. You don't want to get prideful where you're looking in the mirror and you're like, oh wow, this is absolutely fabulous. Thank you God that I'm so much better than everyone. You don't want to do that. You don't want to be like the guy in Luke 18 and 11 who says, I'm not like other men." That's not real gratitude. That's just such pride and arrogance that it proved the guy wasn't even saved. See, the point of all this, the point of this whole sermon, the point of this passage, is not to boost your self-esteem. That's actually the last thing I want to do, is boost anybody's self-esteem. The purpose isn't to increase how much esteem you have for yourself. The purpose is to increase the amount of esteem you have for God. That's gratitude, right? Isn't gratitude focused on the giver? It's not focused on how you compare to other people or why you get the gift. If you get the gift... I mean, if you give me a gift and I'm truly thankful for the gift, my gratitude isn't focused on me or anyone else. It's focused on you, the giver. If you give me a gift that I don't deserve, that doesn't increase my opinion of myself. It increases my love for you. And that's what happened in David's heart when he looked into the mirror. when he looked at his body, he saw the good things that God had given him and done in him, and instead of making him think about himself more, it made him think about God more. The problem with either having a puffed up attitude about yourself or a negative attitude, either way, it's still an attitude about self. People who put themselves down all the time and they're into self-deprecation, oh I'm stupid, I'm dumb, I'm ugly, I'm this, I'm that, and they're always putting themselves down, that is a failure of gratitude. It's not humility, it's a failure of gratitude. We should be constantly thanking God for the genius and beauty of what he did in creating our souls and bodies and forming all the days of our lives on his potter's wheel. And for us, that gratitude, and this is really amazing, goes into the future. For most people, Thanksgiving only has to do with the past or present, right? They're thankful for what's happened. But God is so good and so reliably trustworthy that we can be grateful not only for what he's done but what he's going to do tomorrow even though we don't know what it is. We can't imagine what it's going to be but we know it's going to be good so much so that we're thankful already. That's why the cure for worry in Philippians 4 is, in everything, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. That's the cure for worry, right? You think about the future and you say, God, I don't know what's this looming, this scary situation that's looming on the horizon. I don't know how you're planning on handling it, but whatever it is, I'm thanking you for it because I know it's going to be good. Because I know you. People ask me all the time about my vision. What is your vision for Agape Bible Church? out into the future, what do you see in the year 2020? And my answer is always the same, nothing. I don't have a vision, I can't see into the future at all. I don't have a vision, but I can tell you this, I bless the glorious name of the grand architect of our lives for whatever he has planned for that year, because I know it's gonna be good. And that goes for year 2020, it goes for the year 2050, when I will likely already be home with him or in the process of dying. I don't know what's going to happen that year. Whatever it is, it's going to be good. And so I thank him for it. Anytime you find yourself wondering about what the future holds, let that wondering remind you that whatever the future holds it's something God wrote down in his book and he wrote it because he was pleased to write it and he had the full freedom to write anything else and he didn't he wrote that. Anytime you're tempted to complain anytime you're tempted to grumble or worry or anything remember you're about to worry or grumble or complain about something that God intentionally wrote in his book and he could have written anything else and he chose to wrote Write that. So what's the application for our lives for this text? Praise and thanksgiving. And then one more. Verse 14. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well. Now the word translated fearfully literally means that which creates fear. And typically that word is translated awesome. Most places in the Bible it's translated awesome. Wonderfully means that which creates wonder. So what David is saying here is I was created in a way that creates fear and awe and wonder in my heart. That's the other application. Again, you don't have to travel to the Redwoods or Niagara Falls or Swiss Alps to experience awe. It doesn't hurt, but you don't have to go there to experience awe. All you have to do is look at your fingernail. and learn a little biology. Every cell in the human body, the more you learn about it the more awesome God becomes in your sight. That's why evolutionists are so militant about cramming their belief system down everybody's throat in this culture. They have to. Because you see the unmistakable thumbprint of creation of the human body points so clearly to God. I mean it's such a flashing neon sign pointing to God that if a person wants to deny God or even live in a way that ignores God, they have got to adopt some kind of belief system that can explain the existence of the human body in some other way. And so the purpose of that belief system of evolution is to create a way that a person can ignore God and still pretend to have some degree of intelligence. I mean, you think, how can an intelligent adult, I mean somebody who otherwise is an intelligent adult, believe, actually believe? that if you start with nothing but a swirl of helium and hydrogen, if you wait long enough, pretty soon you have human beings. It'll turn into human beings with consciences and the ability to do all the things that we do. I mean, without any intelligent design or power or just a series of random, purposeless, meaningless changes produced creatures that can create something like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Or phones that you can ask them directions and they can answer your questions. Or they can pen this. The reason so many people are willing to believe that theory of evolution is because the only alternative is to acknowledge there's a creator. and not just any creator, but an awesome creator, a creator whose power is so massive that he cannot be safely ignored. They don't want to face the fact that there's a God that made them and owns them, to whom they are someday going to have to give an account, and so they opt to believe in a theory that explains God away. Beloved, if that's you, if there's anyone here, if that's you, I just want to urge you, open your eyes to reality. Bend your knee before your awesome creator and instead of denying him or ignoring him or explaining him away with theories, worship him. Worship him. It's why you were created. It's what you exist to do. And for those of us who already do worship him, let's look deeper. Take a deeper look. into the wonders of what he's done and his unmistakable thumbprint on your body and the magnificent brush strokes that he left all over your soul and his infinite power and wisdom informing all the days of your life. Let's pray. We bless your name, Lord. We are in awe of what you've done. Next time someone in this room is a little depressed or down or discouraged or whatever, I pray, Lord, that they would just think, to just look down at their hands and just be swept up with the wonder of what you've done and be in awe. I pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. All right, we've got about five minutes left here. Any questions about the sermon? No, I'm trying to be dismissive. No, I'm just kidding. The question is, when you say don't worry about it, you're not trying to be dismissive. I'm not trying to dismiss the fact that it's difficult, but I am trying to dismiss the consternation that so many people seem to feel that if I can't figure it out in a way that is easy to grasp, then I'm going to... it's going to create anxiety in me, or I'm going to have to reject one of the doctrines. That's what I'm saying. Don't worry about it. There's no reason for us to stress about the things that are beyond our comprehension. Because it's not like it's too horrible to understand. David says it's too wonderful to understand. Does that make sense? Yeah, there's no question that trusting God is easier for some people in some areas and harder for other people in those same areas and vice versa. So yeah, I recognize that it's not easy for everybody to trust God in this particular area. What translation is that? The Holman? I am remarkably and wonderfully made. You know, they make judgment calls on how to... That's a very... It's a little bit of a tricky word to translate because it's not supposed to... It's not normally an adverb. It's normally an adjective. And so, usually it would come out awesome. And so, the way David uses it there is a little unusual. They're trying to convey... There are aspects of that word. So many different aspects of that word. Those scholars latched on to certain ones that they think, I think this is the main idea David has in mind here, and they want to communicate that. And other translations, they want to communicate the fear part, you know. And you just can't communicate it all. There's no one word that'll communicate it all. And so I think fearfully is actually much better based on my study of the word. I think that's a little more accurate translation. But those guys know what they're doing. They translate it that way, and there's an aspect of that remarkable, you know, that's there. But I just wouldn't agree with it. Okay, so if you have a psychopath that starts from a very, very young age torturing animals or whatever, and is that a mental disease, and how do we explain that? I would say anything that involves sin is a spiritual issue. It might also be a physiological issue, but it's definitely a spiritual issue. and we sin because we respond the wrong way to certain things. And that, for different people, there are different circumstances and it's harder and easier for some and others and so on. But everybody is culpable for sinful responses. Now where there's an inability to think clearly and there's a level of dementia or insanity, where a person's mind is not working and their brain isn't functioning either the right way, you know, could that reduce the level of culpability? Yeah, I think so. I don't think they're as culpable as somebody who's in their right mind. Is there still some level of culpability? God knows that. God, you know, He's the judge of that. But why would it happen? I would just say it's just part of the curse. It's part of the fall. It's the same reason why we have physical problems, you know. It's part of what's going to be redeemed. Okay, so the question is, if all true theology results in praise, then how do we explain it when you have praise but you don't have the good theology? My answer to that would be, in the particular example you gave, I'm not convinced that there's much of that praise that's actually praise. It looks like praise. They're happy about something. But I don't think it's God they're happy about. I think they're happy about wealth. In those prosperity churches, like Joel Osteen's, the sermon is all about, here's how you can use God to get wealth and make your life easy. And they're like, amen, hallelujah. What are they worshiping? They're worshiping wealth and prosperity. And they're glad that God can help them get there. So I don't think that is real worship. The second part of my question is, So how do you counsel somebody that they're convinced it is good fruit coming from bad theology? And my answer is, we can't judge fruit apart from truth. We can't just look, observe at what happens and say, this must be true because this thing is happening. It has to be the other way around. We have to have a standard to assess it. Otherwise, you can prove anything's true. Any system, there are people that are happy in it. And they're happy atheists, you know, that get excited about stuff. And so, by that logic, you could just say, well, you know, the key to everything is the Denver Broncos. You know, because people get awfully excited. I mean, it's just not a sound way to live life. And they probably don't live the rest of their life that way. The rest of their life, they probably start with certain standards and assess things according to those standards. But in that case, they probably, it's the other way around, because they want to, you know, have that experience. Sure. Yeah, and there's some people in those churches that are saved and their worship really is true worship. Not because of the bad theology, but in spite of the bad theology. Yeah, I think so because the question is when you have these questions that doubt what Scripture says because it just doesn't compute, then can that be sinful? And I think yeah, it can be. I think very often it's connected with a lack of faith And it's just saying, okay, God is saying this, but I don't feel it. It doesn't strike me as plausible. And so at that point, I got a choice. Who am I gonna trust? My own conception of what's plausible or what God has said? And it just boils down to faith. Who do I believe? And I think God puts hard things in here on purpose. You know, he's not up there saying, I wish I would have thought that through better the way I wrote the Bible. It made it more clear. No, I mean, He did it on purpose. He revealed the hard things on purpose because He wants us to have occasion to trust Him. Okay, so how can God create people and desire that they be saved? It's God's will, His desire that they all be saved and yet not plan for them to be saved. If He's in sovereign control of everything, He could have caused every single one of them to be saved. And that gets, even you could back off on the question and expand it and say, why does God, why is there anything that goes wrong, ever, if God is in control? Why does anything go bad? He says He does not desire anyone to murder anybody and yet people murder people. And so how is it that God has desires that don't come to be? How is it that he plans some things that he doesn't desire? I can't give you a comprehensive answer to that just because the mind of God is beyond my mind, but I can tell you a few things. I mean there's some comparisons we can draw to what we do. Sometimes we do We plan things that we don't desire. We carry out things that we don't desire. For example, disciplining our kids, right? When a child does something wrong, I say, you do that again and you're going to lose this privilege. And, you know, I was going to take you out for a milkshake tonight. If you do that one more time, I'm not going to, we're staying home. And he does it again. I was like, man, I was looking forward to taking him out and having this nice evening together. I don't want to follow through on this discipline. I have nothing in me wants to follow through on this discipline, except I know it's best for him. I know it would be unloving for me to not follow through. The best thing I can do for him is to follow through, so I gotta decide to do something that I don't want to do. Why? Because it's ultimately best. And so there are times when we decide to do things that we don't want And God uses the same language to describe him. When he says, I don't desire anybody to go to hell or to be punished for their sin, I think that's the heart of a loving creator who says, it's not like I get any thrill out of this. It's not like I enjoy seeing anyone go to hell. It pains me to have to punish people that I love. But he decides to do it anyway for the same reason we decide to discipline our children, because ultimately it's best. Ultimately, whatever God ends up deciding is best. And how that could be, we don't know. Why it's best, I mean, we don't have minds that can comprehend everything He can comprehend. But if the best possible thing would have been for sin to never enter in the world or for every single person to go to heaven, then that's what God would have done, because He's perfectly free to do whatever's best. And He didn't. So we just have to trust Him. God, whatever you do, I can't see it as good, If you say it's best, it's best. But he wants us to at the same time know it's not, it's nothing I enjoy and I don't want, I don't desire people to go to hell so that, because otherwise if we don't understand, also understand that truth you know what's going to happen to us? Is we'll become like certain extreme Calvinists who say well God everything's pre-planned therefore whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and therefore I don't have any urgency to go share the gospel with somebody because his fate's, you know, already determined. And the Bible says, no, you need to have a heart that says, oh, I can't stand the thought of you possibly going to hell. I'm going to share the gospel with you. I'm going to try to persuade you to be saved so that you will be in heaven and not in hell. And we need to have that mentality. Scripture is very clear. God wants us to think about our decision-making mattering. What we decide does determine outcomes. And so the Bible says, do this, don't do this. If you do this, this will happen. If you do that, that will happen. So do this, and it gives us reasons and tries to persuade. From a temporal point of view, we need to think in terms of our decision making having an impact on what takes place, because it does. But from an eternal standpoint, we can also take comfort in knowing God has everything under control. And how the two fit together, beyond our comprehension. Carol? Yeah, okay, so what about, I said your soul is tethered to your body, wherever your body is, your soul is, and yet people who are into transcendental meditation would dispute that and they would say, no, no, my soul can travel, I can astral project and travel all over the place and leave my body. And my response to that is, in order for me to be persuaded of that, you would have to prove it to me. The fact that you feel like you're away from your body, or you think you're away from your body, isn't adequate proof that you actually are away from your body. There's lots of things that I think and feel that actually aren't really real. And so, in order for me to be convinced that they can actually detach from their body, I'd have to have some proof. If they did provide me with something I regarded as proof, it wouldn't really matter to me because there's nothing in Scripture that tells me that I should try to seek that. Everything in Scripture has body and soul attached. And so, if something becomes detached, that wouldn't be a good thing. That's not something that we should seek. And so, even if it is possible, I would say, don't seek that. The reason Scripture always speaks of them as being attached, it's for a reason. Now, there are some exceptions, some very rare exceptions. Paul says, I went to the third heaven. In the body? Out of the body? Not sure. And he's like, I'm not sure exactly how this worked out. And could God have performed a very unusual miracle and removed his soul from his body and take him to third heaven and put it back? Sure. Was he maybe in the body? That's possible. He says it's possible. And it's in the Bible. It says it's possible. So it's possible. So all that tells me is nothing. It doesn't tell me anything. He doesn't know what happened. I don't know if that answers your question. Question back there? Oh, excellent question. So if I use that argument, I say, well, just because you feel something doesn't necessarily mean it's true, then how do we know the claims of the Bible are true? For example, John says he got a revelation from God. Mohammed says he got a revelation from God. And I say, Mohammed, no, you didn't. And John, yes, you did. How do I arbitrarily decide that? I mean, what's the criteria for knowing for sure if a claim is true? Because some claims, extraordinary claims, might be true, and other ones might not be. And so how do we go about determining? There's a couple of methods. Most people's method is whichever thing they want to believe, that's what they accept as true, and the stuff they don't want to believe, that's what they say is false. And, of course, we wouldn't want to reject that method. That's no good. That doesn't help you discover anything. That's just imposing what you already believe. The proper method for determining that is requiring absolute proof. The more extraordinary the claim, the higher the proof. that's required. So if someone, some Bible writer, makes a claim that God spoke to him infallibly, then in order to prove that, that person is going to have to be able to do miracles. If someone just comes along and says, I'm speaking for God, I'm not going to just automatically assume they're true. Lots of people claim that. They have to be able to prove it with miracles and that's the primary purpose of miracles. That's why in most of the Bible times miracles didn't happen. They happen in three major clusters in history. What are the three times when there's a huge flurry of miracles? The time of Moses, the time of Elijah and Elisha, the time of Jesus and the apostles. Why is that? Well, the Bible is the law, the prophets, and the New Testament. Right? The law written by Moses, prophets represented by Elijah and Elisha, but all the prophets were miraculous in their ability, and especially Jesus and the apostles. Huge flurry of miracles. And the greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. It all boils down to this. That's a big long answer, let me make it short. Jesus rose from the dead. He's trustworthy. He rose from the dead, he's trustworthy. If someone can rise from the dead, they can say, I'm going to die and then I'm going to raise myself from the dead, and they do it, then that person knows what they're talking about. And Jesus said that he was God, that he spoke God's words and that his disciples spoke God's word and he called the entire Old Testament the Word of God. And so he's an authority on the subject. He knows what he's talking about. He proved that and he established that the whole Bible is the Word of God. Now someone might say, wait a second, how do you know that he rose from the dead? Don't you have to believe the Bible is the Word of God first in order to know that he rose from the dead? Answer, no you don't. you can assume the Bible is just a regular human book with mistakes and still prove that Jesus rose from the dead, historically. And so you start out assuming it's a regular human book, you can prove historically that he rose from the dead, and then from there say, okay, therefore what he said is reliable, and he said this is the word of God. Make sense? Okay. So he validated his apostles, one of whom was John, as spokesmen for him.