The Waters, Hills and Forest

Bible Reading:  Psalm 104: 10-18

Key Verse: Verse 14 – “He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;” 

Key Words: He causeth the grass to grow

In verses 10-13 the psalmist looks at running waters.  The psalmist pauses long enough to consider both the source and course of the rivers, and in verses 16-17 he see forests.  But notice verses 14-17 the words, "He causeth the grass to grow."

A soldier writes, "I shall never forget the time when, as a young man in the British army, I was posted from Egypt to Palestine.  I boarded a train in Egypt late one night and watched as the train rolled away across the desolate sands.  When I awoke the next morning the train had crossed into Palestine.  Instead of flat endless deserts there were rolling hills, and instead of sand there was grass.  It was a beautiful scene."

All of God's creation is!!!  We do serve a wonderful God!!!

  

                                                                                                        Dr. Mike Rouse

What to do: 

✞ Serve the Lord with gladness; come before His presence with singing.

The Heaven And The Sea

Bible Reading: Psalm 104:1-9

Key Verse: Verse 2 - “Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:” 

Key Words: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain

Psalm 104 is in a sweeping description of God's creation, not written by scientists or historians but by the psalmist who could look and see God in all of creation.  He speaks of the heavens in verses 1 - 4, and in verses 5 - 9 he speaks of the seas.

In the heavens, he sees the asteroid heaven in verse 2 "coverest thyself with light."  In verse 3, he sees the atmospheric heaven "who maketh the clouds his chariot," and then he sees the angelic heaven in verse 4.

He then moves on to the seas in verses 5 - 9.  He sees their boundary in verses 5 - 8, and in verse 9 he sees the rage of the seas and the control of God against their rage.

As one looks at the seas and the heavens and their majestic glory, how can one deny that there is a Creator?  The only answer I have comes from Scripture, Romans 1:20-21, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened."  What a  shame!

                                                                                                            Dr. Mike Rouse

What to do:  

✞ The joy of life comes from seeing God in His creation.

He Created You And Me

Bible Reading:  Psalm 139: 13-24

Key Verse: Verse 13 - “For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.”

Key Words: For Thou hast possessed my reins

"For Thou hast possessed my reins: Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.  I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.  My substance was not hid from Thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought [the word suggests embroidery] in the lowest parts of the earth.  Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."  David knew nothing of the modern science of embryology, nothing of the mysterious process by which a baby grows in the womb.  He had only the haziest of ideas about these things, but he knew enough to be awed at the process.

"If David knew enough to be awed, what about us?  We know that every living creature is made up of microscopic cells so small that the letter O on this page would contain between 30,000 to 40,000 of them.  Each microscopic cell is a world in itself, containing an estimated two hundred trillion tiny molecules of atoms.  Each cell, in other words, is a micro-universe of almost unbelievable complexity.  All these cells put together make up a living creature.

"Each cell has its own specialized function and each works to an intricate time table which tells it when to grow, when to divide, when to make hormones, when to die.  Every minute of every day, some three billion cells in the body die and the same number are created to take their place.  During any given moment in the life of any one of these cells, thousands of events are taking place, each one being precisely coordinated at the molecular level by countless triggers.  The human body has more than a million million of them - a million in each square inch of skin, thirty billion in the brain, billions of red cells in the veins.

"Obviously, such a complicated and unerring development of cells cannot possibly be the result of chance. 'He created me!' David exclaimed."    ~ John Phillips

                                                                                                        Dr. Mike Rouse 

What to do:  

✞  How can one not believe in a Creator when one studies all of creation?  This is what everyone should do.

A Fixed Center

Bible Reading:  Psalm 128

Key Verse: Verse 1 - “Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD; that walketh in his ways.”

Key Words: Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD

    Barbara Hutton whose death on May 21, 1979, made the obituary column of Time magazine, died at the age of 66, a celebrity. She was the granddaughter of F. W. Woolworth, and at the age of twelve she inherited $25 million, a fabulous fortune in those days. But her money did not make her happy, nor did her marriages. She married seven husbands, among them a Laotian prince, a Lithuanian prince, a Russian prince, a Prussian count, and a Hollywood film star. She was plagued with sickness. Her illnesses ranged from kidney disease to cataracts. She died of a heart attack. The last years of her life found her a recluse, often bedridden, weighing only eighty pounds. The newspapers used to call her a “poor little rich girl.” Happiness is not to be found in marriage or in money.

Something else is needed: True happiness cannot be divorced from God. Peace, harmony, and order have their center in God.

In the world of nature, God, the Author of creation, shows us the importance of order and a proper center.  If we take our telescopes and explore the world of the infinitely large, everywhere we find order.  We find that we belong to a solar system which revolves around the sun.  The solar system is populated by a single star, the sun, and by nine planets, thirty-two moons, some 100,000 asteroids, and about 100 billion comets.  The word planet comes from the Greek word planetai, which means "wanderers," so called by the Greeks because the planets seemed to drift among the fixed stars.  The Greeks were wrong.  The planets do not wander; they obey fixed laws.  On the outer fringes of the solar system is the planet we once knew as Pluto, which orbits around the sun on an eccentric path which takes it to within 2.7 billion miles of the sun to as far away as 4.6 billion miles.  Roaming the icy fringes of the system are the comets.  The sun, however, has the power to exert its gravitational sway far, far beyond the comets, to a distance of some thousand times beyond the distance of the planet we once knew as Pluto.  The solar system exists solely because it has a center.  Without that center it would disappear.  But the sun itself is not the center of everything.  It, too, has a center.

When all is said and done, the fact remains that God is the ultimate center of everything.  He must also be the center of our lives.  There can be no happiness for those who forget this. 

                                                                                                        Dr. Mike Rouse

What to do: 

✞ Let Christ be the center of your life.

Science

Bible Reading:  I Timothy 6:12-21

Key Verse: Verse 20 - “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:

Key Words: science falsely so called

The word science in the Greek means knowledge.  Paul warns Timothy that there is a false science (knowledge).  In today's world we call that evolution, which is not a science but a false teaching, a false doctrine.

Note what some of the great scholars of the past have said in regard to creation.
Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. -Michael Denton, molecular biologist and medical doctor.

     It is becoming increasingly apparent that evolutionism is not even a good scientific theory. -Dr. Willem J. Ouweneel, Research Associate in Developmental Genetics, Ultrech, Netherlands.

      What I have learned in the past ten years of review of recent scientific knowledge of cellular morphology and physiology, the code of life (DNA), and the lack of supporting evidence for evolution in the light of recent scientific evidence is a shocking rebuttal to the theory of evolution. -Dr. Isaac Manly of Harvard Medical School.

     The human fossil record is strongly supportive of the concept of Special Creation. On the other hand, the fossil evidence is so contrary to human evolution as to effectively falsify the idea that humans evolved. -Professor Marvin L. Lubenow, in his book Bones of Contention.

      For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. -Robert Jastrow, Ph.D. Chief of the Theoretical Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1958-61) and Founder/Director of NASA's Goddard Institute; Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University; Professor of Space Studies-Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College, in his book God and the Astronomers.^.

Can all of life be fit into Darwin's theory of evolution?. . .  If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines - the basis of life-developed, you find an eerie and complete silence.  The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. . . I do not think [Darwin's mechanism] explains molecular life. -Michael Behe, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University.

Some food for thought!!

What to do: 
✞ We certainly need not believe evolution.  We don’t even need the support of scientists.  All we need is God’s Word to believe in God’s creation.

This is no Monkey Business

Bible Reading:  II Timothy 3:1-11

Key Verse: Verse  7 - “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Key Words: Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth

In our secular schools and universities, evolution is not taught as a theory but a fact.  Today we have more people with college degrees than any other time in history, and yet never have we had a more spiritually ignorant society.  I came across the following which is humorous yet reveals much truth.

The monkeys one day had a big jamboree.
Their leader sat up in the tallest palm tree
And said with a chuckle, ‘My good fellow monks,
If you want a good laugh, just hear this junk.’

‘The teachers of men in a place they call ‘school’
Are training each youngster to grow up a fool.
The kids all run wild and never get spanked.
If our babies did that, their tails would be yanked!

‘No well-mannered monkey dictates to his teacher,
Beats up on policeman or shoots at the preacher,
Poisons the baby or kills with a gun,
And then laughs and says, ‘We were just having fun.’

‘Monkeys, my friends, have respect for each other;
We hand out no sass to our fathers or mothers.
The picture I’ve painted you’ll agree is quite sad,
But listen, my brothers, I’m boiling mad.

‘For here’s what they’re taught---that miserable flunky,
That creature called man was at one time a monkey---
An ape just like us, and what’s more, if you please,
He claims that at one time he swung through the trees.

‘Fellow monkeys, I think this is going too far.
We don’t envy their home, their wealth or their car;
But when they will spread such a horrible rumor,
It’s time for all monkeys to lose their good humor.

‘So, come, you must help me prepare a big sign
Protesting that man’s no descendant of mine.
If evolution be true, then, boys, we are sunk,
For I’d rather be a father to a weasel or skunk!’

                                                     

                                                                                                    Dr. Mike Rouse

What to do: 

✞ Remember in God’s creation, everyone is under some authority.  Be submissive.

Fowls of the Air

Bible Reading:  Job 12:1-7, Genesis 2:18-25

Key Verse: Verse Job 12:7 & Gen 2:20 - “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:” (vs 7) “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.” (vs 20)

Key Words:  fowls of the air

The more we learn, the more we will be amazed at God's creation and realize that all that is was created by the Divine Creator. Take the hummingbird, for example.

The tiny hummingbird, weighing only about a tenth of an ounce, can perform complicated twists and turns and can fly backward and upside down. 

The flexibility of its shoulder joints allows it to move its wings forward and backward in a horizontal figure eight, beating them as many as 75 times per second, a maneuver that enables the hummingbird to hover near a flower while it drinks the nectar from it.  But the hummingbird doesn't soar or glide as some birds can, and its legs are so weak that it can't hop.  It has to fly even to change positions on a twig.

On the other hand, the ostrich, at 300 pounds, the largest of birds, can't fly.  But its legs are so strong that it can sprint up to 40 mph, taking strides of 12 to 15 feet.

The peregrine falcon, or duck hawk, is about the size of a crow, but it is the fastest creature on earth.  It can dive after prey at more than 175 mph.

 

                                                                                                        Dr. Mike Rouse

What to do: 

✞    Remember that the creation of God is wonderful and so are you!