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OF MONKEYS AND MEN #5

OWING A DEBT TO THE DESIGNER

It’s a wrenching story of “You owe me.” A young, inexperienced President named Bill Clinton had just moved to Washington from Little Rock, and encountering nothing but BIG rocks instead of the traditional honeymoon. The economy was sputtering along, and he and Al Gore were trying desperately to stitch together a budget that would bring deficits under control. But the August 5 vote in the house looked painfully close. The bean-counters like George Stephanopoulos and James Carville were dying in the West Wing, sweating it out, trying to keep their fingers in the dike. They needed 218 votes, and it looked like even one “yes” ballot going south on them would doom the bill – really, the team’s first major initiative.

And it came down to a lady named Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky. The “3-M Woman” was a freshman representative from Pennylvania, a successful Democrat representing a somewhat Republican district back home. And folks back home didn’t like the Clinton budget plan. They’d told her so. Her office was piled high with faxes and letters and e-mails. If she voted “yes,” there was an excellent chance she’d be defeated after just a single two-year term. But at 8:35 p.m., as she visited with the President of the United States on the phone, the message was clear. Like it or not, they had to have her vote. The President needed that solitary, suicidal “yes.”

As the various representatives went forward, every single Republican in the House voted no. A small group of Democrats, hoping and wishing the vote was lopsided enough that they could vote no too, waited and stalled and dilly-dallied around, looking for some political cover, but finally they had to trudge to the front and cast their own votes. And finally Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky went to the front, almost the last person to do so. She filled in a green card, signifying a yes vote, and the Republicans burst into a chant: “Bye-bye, Marjorie! Bye-bye, Marjorie!” Sure enough, when the 1994 elections rolled around, her constituents back home unceremoniously dumped her. She had voted yes because the President said she owed it, because she had to . . . and now she paid the price.

A story closer to our spiritual home comes from the C. S. Lewis autobiography, Surprised By Joy. This brilliant atheist finally concluded, after years of study, that God did exist. He was there after all, standing in the shadows. And because of that, He was to be worshiped.

“God was to be obeyed simply because He was God,” he writes.

There was no sense that God was good, or kind, or gentle, or loving. Lewis had, then, no concept in his mind that God was the Father of Jesus Christ, Savior of the world. So in giving his allegiance to God, there was no joy for him; in fact, he describes his conversion as an experience of sterile misery.

“In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in,” he confesses, “and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Later on, of course, came the joy – hence this title, SURPRISED By Joy. And C. S. Lewis went on to write some marvelous books about the goodness and loving care of God, that He is the author of all joy and happiness. But in these two disparate examples, we find a sense that sometimes you have an allegiance simply because of who or what that other person is.

And you know, as we continue to study the Bible doctrine of creation, we find something very interesting. Did you know that God’s Word earnestly invites us to worship God precisely because He IS our Creator? Right in the heart of Revelation, which is God’s last-day message for this generation, that mighty first angel of chapter 14 has this invitation:

“Fear [or respect] God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come. Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

Back in chapter four of that same apocalyptic book, we find a mind-boggling scene in heaven where all the great, holy beings who have never sinned just worship constantly, and they say this:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power.” And why? “For You created all things, and by Your will they were created and have their being.”

Yesterday, we kicked over a rock or two and discovered that, all through the world of science and astronomy, we just amazingly encounter the exactly perfect numbers – lots of them, and all huge – to permit and sustain life. The planets are the right size, earth is the right size, the sun is the right size – and distance – from the earth. The tilt of the earth is perfect, the atmosphere, ideal, the universe’s rate of expansion a dead-on fit for there to be life right here. This is called the “Anthropic Principle,” and in their book, How Now Shall We Live?, Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey suggest:

“The Anthropic Principle states that in our own universe, all these seemingly arbitrary and unrelated values in physics have one strange thing in common: they are PRECISELY the values needed to get a universe capable of supporting life.” Then they add the plain kicker: “The most obvious inference is that the universe appears to be designed because it IS designed – powerful evidence for the biblical worldview that a loving God created the world.”

By the way, I’ll let you in on a little secret. This same book by Colson and Pearcey quotes from a physicist named Heinz Pagels, who authored a report entitled A Cozy Cosmology, which appeared in “The Sciences” magazine a few years ago. And this noted scientist makes a similar confession:

“If our universe appears to be tailor-made,” he writes, “the most straightforward conclusion is that is was tailor-made for life, created by a transcendent God.”

And the secret behind the lab door is that, in their hearts, many of today’s scientists know it. They admit it among themselves. But out in public, they find that conclusion “unattractive,” and twist their own logic into pretzels, coming up with things like their “theory of multiple universes” to get around the problem. In Pagels’ own words:

“It is the closest that some atheists can get to God. In other words, atheists are squirming every which way to avoid the obvious.”

The well-known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once calculated that the odds of life just showing up, just sparking itself into existence, would be the same as lining up many, many blind people – in fact, 10 to the 50th power; that’s a lot of blind people in a row, all blind – and giving them each a scrambled-up Rubik’s Cube . . . and having all gazillion of them solve it at the exact same moment.

In fact, another Ph.D. astronomer, Hugh Ross, computes his way through the numbers – you know, where the universe is maybe 16 billion years old, plus-or-minus three billion. That’s actually only 1018 – and even though it’s a lot of birthdays for our little world, it’s just too short a time for evolution to have worked. In their own words:

“. . . Too small or too young to permit life to be assembled by natural processes. Researchers, who are both non-theists and theists and who are in a variety of disciplines, have arrived at this calculation.”

So tell me: would you like to put your faith, your eternal trust, in those visually challenged people with the Rubik’s Cubes, or with a billion monkeys on a billion word processors trying to randomly pound out a Webster’s Dictionary? Or would you like to trust in what it says in Hymn #88 in my church’s official hymnal, where it says:

“I sing the mighty power of God, That made the mountains rise, That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies”?

And again, friend, let’s reiterate that our worship of God, our love for Him, is predicated upon our realization that He is the one who made us. I’m sure many of you could help finish this ancient praise-and-worship bestseller written by King David centuries before they invented synthesizers and PowerPoint:

“I praise You .. . BECAUSE . . . I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful.”

Let me ask you this. Suppose a senator or a President signed a bill specifically giving you citizenship. Or setting up funding for research which saved your life. Or signed an executive order pardoning you in a capital case. Let’s say he personally lay down on the gurney and donated a kidney or bone marrow for your leukemia. Would you say you “owe” that person? Of course. Well, then, how much more HERE . . . where a loving Father, first of all, MAKES YOU? I mean, He fashions you Himself; He creates you. He knits you together, as it says in Job 31. What’s more, when things go wrong here on Planet Earth, He essentially buys you back at Calvary, so that He can RE-create you.

Do you now owe Him your vote? And your life? And your love and your heart and your everything? The heavenly congress is about to take Roll Call, and see which way you cast your ballot.