A Wrist Watch and a Paper Bag
Can I borrow your wrist watch for a moment? Or, perhaps, a friends watch?
Imagine, if you will, we take your watch and disassemble it – separating all the intricate and tiny pieces. Maybe we lay out those pieces on a paper towel.
The dial. The tiny springs. The internal working pieces, and the wristband – all laid out on a paper towel.
Now imagine we take those pieces and put them into a paper bag. And, we fold down the top of the bag – carefully sealing all the disassembled parts inside the bag.
Then, we shake the bag for … A few billion years.
When we stopped shaking it, and opened the top of the bag, what would be the chances we would pull out a perfectly reassembled watch that was ticking, and right on time? Down to the seconds?
Not very likely to happen, is it?
The first chapter of Genesis teaches us about the creation of the world.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” –Genesis 1:1-2 NKJV.
In the beginning, like pieces of a watch in a paper bag, the earth was “without form and void”. That word, “form”, comes from the Hebrew word, “Tohu”, which means, among other things, emptiness, desolate, full of chaos.
The world was full of chaos.
And, according to Genesis, what did God do? God “created”. God took the chaos and He created the heavens and the earth – and, ultimately, everything within it.
Science is great. By and through science, we can look at the many different, intricate, parts of our world. For starters, consider the intricate details of your own body – the blood cells and veins, your lungs, your digestive and reproductive systems. Your heart that starts beating on the first day of your life and doesn’t stop until the last day.
Take a tree leaf and look at the intricate details. The fish of the sea. The birds of the air. The beasts of the field.
When you seriously consider all aspects, all parts, of this world – even the stars, the planets, the sun that shines by day and the moon that shines by night, all in perfect rotation – one has to admit, it didn’t “just happen” this way.
Something, or better yet, someone, had to “create” it this way.
We could not pull that watch out of the paper bag, fully assembled, ticking and on time unless someone put it back together, fixed it and made it that way.
That “someone” we refer to is God.
He created the heavens, the earth and all that is in them. He took chaos and created order. He put into motion the stars, the planets, the moon, the sun and even created what we know as “time”.
Thanks be to God.
Ch Doug
