The Unrivaled Power of God - Part B

David is saying God knew me in advance. He knew my development in advance as if it were written or pre-programmed.

And I thought, you know, that sounds a lot like DNA. Many times we don't understand why God has done and allowed certain things, but it's important to remember that His wisdom is matchless. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip shares how God's strength and wisdom can influence your life for the better. But before we begin, here's a great resource that will help take your prayer life to a new level. Recent research has found that Google searches for the word prayer have surged worldwide alongside the spread of the novel coronavirus. In fact, Google Trends data shows that the search intensity for prayer doubles for every 8,000 COVID-19 cases. But is there a right way or a more effective way to pray?

Here's best-selling author Kay Arthur. Where the battles raging were to be on the front lines, on the front lines on our knees, on the front line standing in the full armor of God. Kay's book, Lord, Teach Me to Pray in 28 Days offers simple but powerful instruction on how and what to pray and what to expect when you do. And it's our way to say thank you when you give a gift of $25 or more today to help keep this ministry on the air.

Give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, we're in Psalm 139 today as we get into the teaching with Skip Heitzig. Darwin knew when he came up with this theory many years ago in the 1800s, Darwin knew that when he came up with this and he believed it was true, but he knew there was one glaring lack of evidence and that was the field of paleontology, the fossil record. He believed that time would eventually vindicate him but he knew that there was not enough factual support in the fossil record to support his hypothesis, his theory of evolution. But he believed that given enough time the fossil record would vindicate him.

The only problem is it has not. This is according to David Raup who is the curator of the Field Museum of National History in Chicago and I quote, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, that's when he made the statement, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. We have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time, end quote.

So rather than having a multiplicity of transmutation or transitional forms that should abound, if the theory was accurate, he says actually we have far fewer. So David just sort of cuts to the chase and he goes look, here's one thing I know, you made me, you formed me, I'm a product, my origin comes from a loving God who is all-powerful. Now let's dig a little deeper than that, not just creation but gestation in particular, the formation of a child in its mother's womb. Verse 13, you formed me in my, you formed my inward parts, you covered me in my mother's womb.

Now we're dealing with embryonic and fetal stages. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you and I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Lowest parts of the earth is a Hebrew poetic way of talking about the uterus, the womb. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed and in your book they are all written the days fashioned for me when as yet there were none of them.

Now I want to unpack that. He's talking about the marvels of the human body, the marvels of human development. You know I've noticed over the years as I've met people, I don't think I've ever met somebody who is totally pleased with their body, their body type, their body shape, their body size, maybe a hair color, it's evident because people are coloring their hair all the time, the size of their nose or lips or whatever, there's some feature right. There are a few people who just seem to be beautiful and they like their bodies today.

I give it a while, they won't, but we're not happy with our bodies, that's just kind of who we are. Well I just want you to consider this psalm because David says you are marvelous. You are marvelous, whatever body type or shape you have. Notice in verse 15, my frame was not hidden from you. What does the frame refer to?

Skeletal system, it's your infrastructure, it's the scaffolding upon which muscles and sinews and fascia, tendons are placed. My frame was not hidden from you. And then he says when I was made in secret and I like this, skillfully wrought. Now I was listening to a cardiologist this week who explained skillfully wrought, it means literally to be knitted or embroidered together in Hebrew. And he believes, as do many who interpret this text, this suggests the formation of the veins and arteries in the uterus of a mother as the child is developing, the matrix of the vascular system of the womb, like a weaving together or an embroidering together.

Then in verse 16, your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed. Now that word means rolled up, being rolled up or wrapped together or scrunched together. Ever look at ultrasound? And when you look in the early stages of pregnancy and you start seeing development, just looks like it's just layered and squished and compacted together, rolled up together, and then you eventually over time begin to see distinct proportions of the anatomical layout of the child.

He's speaking about growth. We all start out as a microscopic speck. You were once a zygote. Hope you don't take offense to that, but you were a zygote.

I didn't say you were a goat, you were a zygote. You were just a tiny little couple-celled creature. But then you developed into an embryo. Then you developed into a fetus.

Then there was a live birth and you became a baby, then a toddler. And here you are today, all 100 trillion cells of your human body. 100 trillion cells. You have 100,000 miles of nerve fiber in your marvelous body. You have 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your marvelous body. You have 206 bones. You have joints. You have muscles.

You have all these other systems that feed that and help control that. He does all that poetically in a few verses. Now tie this together with verse one. You have searched me and known me. Now he's describing all of this. You supervise my, you know me so well that you supervise my development from those early stages of human development.

God really knows me. Now we can't just brush over this fact really. We have to just dwell on it for a moment.

Consider this. It's pretty evident from reading this and reading in other portions of scripture that the Bible defines personhood from the moment of conception, not just birth. It's not like, well, it's just a fetus, but not a person. It's just an embryo, not a human. And when there's a viability issue, that is a live birth and it can live, then it's a human being. The Bible acknowledges humanity from conception onward.

That's evident here. It's evident in Isaiah chapter 44. Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the one who formed you from the womb. God told the prophet Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart.

My plan for you began as you were developing in your mother's uterus. Tragedy of our country, our mistaken country, is the fetus is now regarded as a nuisance. Get rid of it. If it doesn't suit your lifestyle or your economy or your feelings, because after all, your feelings are the most important part. So it's sort of like a ruptured appendix.

If you don't like it, get rid of it. And that all happened in 1973 with that landmark decision, Roe versus Wade in the Supreme Court. You know, everybody's worried about the coronavirus killing people. Think of how many people we've killed, the medical profession has killed, and the legal profession in the history of that landmark decision. Beginning in 1973 until now, there have been 61 million abortions. 61 million abortions. I know that's just a number.

So let me break it down. That's 926,000 a year. That's 3,000 every day. That's 137 every hour. That's 2.3 babies every minute. That is one little baby killed every 26 seconds. I'll give it to you in a different perspective. That's like completely decimating the entire population of the UK. All of England, all of Wales, all of Scotland, part of Ireland. Or it's like decimating the entire population of Canada and Australia.

61 million. We have failed to believe we are marvelous. We have failed to believe we are special creation. We have failed to believe that we are formed by a loving God. We have failed to believe that we are skillfully wrought, skillfully wrought in our mother's wombs. I don't know if you caught this a couple weeks ago when Kanye West announced that he was running for President of the United States.

I don't know what you want to do with that or how you want to deal with that. But there was in his speech something very tender and emotional and striking. And he talked about abortion.

And he's definitely against abortion. And he says, you know, when my wife, Kim Kardashian, was pregnant, I wanted an abortion. And he started tearing up. He said, I almost killed my own daughter. And then he started talking about when he was in his mother's womb and his dad wanted him aborted. And he said also emotionally, my mother saved my life.

Saved my life. There was an ethics professor teaching his college class the course of ethics. And he presented a problem for the class to figure out. He said, we have a man who has syphilis and his wife has tuberculosis. They have had four children. One died and the other three have what is considered a terminal illness. But now the mother is pregnant again.

What do you recommend? They discussed, it was a very spirited discussion in the class. And finally, the majority of the class voted that the mother should get an abortion.

Professor stood up after their ruling and said, okay, congratulations. You just killed Ludwig von Beethoven. And went on to tell them of the history of Beethoven's family, which was that history. So David says, I'm a special creation of God and God superintended my development in my mother's womb. That's his power. There's something else. I'm calling it preparation. There's something I noticed. I just want to draw your attention to it. In verse 16, where he says, you saw my substance being yet unformed.

Now watch this. And in your book, they all were written. In your book, they all were written. The word written means recorded or better translation pre-recorded. Now when I read that, something just sort of got my attention because David is saying, God knew me in advance.

He knew my development in advance as if it were written or pre-programmed. And I thought, you know, that sounds a lot like DNA. You know about DNA. Dioxiribonucleic acid, every cell in your body has it.

Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, said it's three billion letters long and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code. Now you have, as I mentioned, 100 trillion cells in your body. Each of those cells has 46 segments of DNA, 23 that come from mom, 23 that come from dad.

You remember that from school. The DNA is densely coded information that dictates, tells every cell how to function from conception to demise, from conception to death. From the moment you are conceived to the moment you die, it'll determine what you look like, how you age, and all of that is in the cell, every single cell. Now if you could take that information from one cell in your human body and translate it into written information in normal-sized font, one cell would produce 4,000 books, 4,000 volumes, would fill this platform to the ceiling. 4,000 volumes, one cell. Again, according to Collins, a live reading of that code at the rate of three letters per second would take 31 years. Now you have 100 trillion cells in your body. If the DNA of every cell was translated into book form at normal font, you'd have so many books now, it would fill the Grand Canyon 78 times.

78 times. So when I look at that in verse 16, and in your book, they were all written. God has sort of like written in us this code, this DNA. So I call this preparation.

That's how minute he's getting. So a couple of observations about the God who is all-powerful. His work is marvelous. His workmanship is meticulous.

There's a third, and I'm going to close with this. God's wisdom is matchless. Look at verse 17 and 18. David says, How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!

If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. Throughout the psalm, David has been musing about God. It's been his devotions. He's been thinking. He's been meditating on God who knows everything, who is everywhere, who can do anything. But what stirs David most now in these two verses are not so much his thoughts about God as much as God's thoughts about him. It just dawns on him.

Wait a minute. This God, who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, knows I exist? Not only does he know I exist, he cares that I exist. He's not just cognizant.

He's caring. Precious are your thoughts. Have you ever had somebody tell you, Man, I've been thinking about you lately. You've just been on my heart. You've been on my mind. You came into my mind yesterday, and I just sort of carried you in my mind and my thoughts through the day.

Have you ever had somebody tell you that? You're flattered by that, especially if they go, And I prayed for you. But now imagine God saying, You know, you've been on my mind a lot lately. You've been on my heart a lot. I've been thinking a lot about you. You know, you might be tempted to say, Well, how much have you been thinking about me, God?

That's that's really nice. How much have you been thinking? Okay, I'm glad you asked.

David said, If I should count those thoughts, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. When I awake, I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked.

When I awake, I'm still with you. I couldn't resist this. If you were to calculate the number of grains of sand in a single teaspoon and multiply it by all the beaches and deserts in the world.

Yes, this has been done. There are people with way too much time on their hands. So if you were to calculate the number of grains of sand in a single teaspoon, multiply it by all the beaches and all the deserts in the world, roughly, it would be very roughly, it would be 7.5 times 10 to the 18th power grains of sand. Or 7 quintillion 500,000 quadrillion grains of sand.

So you math heads can figure out how many zeros will be strung around the building how many times. Now, speaking of God's thoughts being more unnumbered than the sand, I'm going to close with this story. There was a little boy playing in a sandbox. It's what he wanted to do on Saturdays. His dad took him to the local park. There was a beautiful sandbox encased in a frame of wood and the little boy brought his tractor and his little trucks and he's playing in the sandbox having fun. But there was a problem for in the middle of the sandbox was a rather large rock and it was so big and it was so annoying to this little boy who wanted to make tunnels with his tractor and trucks. He decided he had to move it so he dug around the rock and he moved it a couple inches and then dug around it some more moved it a little bit and kept doing this process all the way till he got the rock to the very edge of the sandbox.

And he thought I got to get it out. So he got outside and he bent down he tried to lift the rock up and he managed to move it an inch or two up and then plop it went down he tried it again plop it went down failure failure failure finally got on his back in the sandbox pushed with his feet tried to get it up and out couldn't get it out. Now his dad is watching the whole thing and so the little boy keeps trying keeps trying keeps trying keeps trying fails and finally he does what little boys are want to do when they can't do it right and that is he just stopped broke down and cried. He was so frustrated just then dad shows up who's been watching the whole thing he says son why didn't you use all the strength available? Little boy with his ears said I did daddy I did I tried with all my strength I tried everything I could the father said no son you didn't use all the strength you had available you didn't ask me.

Dad stooped down stooped down with one hand picked up the rock got it out of the sandbox you get the corollary. We are in our little sandboxes but the one who made us the one who loves us the one who thinks about us has all power. He is unlimited in what he can do. So your God made everything in the universe. Your God made it from nothing. Your God does not have the word impossible in his vocabulary. Your God can do exceedingly abundantly above all you ask or think. Your God knows you. Your God formed you. Your God has plans for you that are written in the code of your body. I suggest that you turn your thoughts to the one who has turned his thoughts toward you and specifically I'm referring to those of you who have never said yes to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Oh you've considered him you've come to church even but you haven't surrendered to him or maybe you've walked away from him and this season of weirdness in our world has gotten your attention. Good. Good.

I'm glad it has. Now turn your thoughts to him. Now release your life if he made you.

Give your life back to the one who gave you life to begin with. Ask him to superintend by his power and his knowledge your affairs. Turn your life over to him. Ask him to forgive your sins. You'll become not just his creation you'll become his child, his son, his daughter. I'm going to give you that opportunity whether you're watching online or you're here in the auditorium or outside or you're in the hub next door you can say yes to him and he can and will change your life. If you'd like to I want you to say this prayer right where you're at.

Say, Lord I give you my life. I know that I'm a sinner. I failed. I have fallen. I'm sorry for my sin.

I believe that Jesus died on a cross for me and rose again from the grave and I believe he's here right now. I turn from my sins. I repent of my sins. I turn to Jesus Christ as Savior, as Lord. Fill me with your Holy Spirit and empower me to live a life that is pleasing to you. Superintend my life. In Jesus' name.

Amen. That wraps up Skip Heiseck's message from the series 2020. If you prayed that prayer, we'd love to talk with you. Just give us a call 800-922-1888.

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That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888. Again, that's 800-922-1888. Coming up tomorrow, Skip shares why God's holiness is vital to your life and spiritual life. There's other characteristics that are far more attractive like his love, his mercy, his compassion, his presence, his power. His holiness is a little daunting to us and for some it even bothers. However, holiness is God's most noted attribute. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.