Making Something Original

I recently noticed a Bible verse that is momentous and yet so simply put.

“The sea is his, for he made it; for his hands formed the dry land.”[1]

God made the sea.

It’s that simple. No drum roll, no Bruno Mars halftime show.

How do you or I make something that has never been? We get the raw materials, like a pencil and paper, and we begin to “make” a picture. What we draw, even if it’s just a scribble, has been done before. It will be based on what already exists. When God made the sea, it was something that didn’t exist previously. There was no picture or blueprint.

The sea was an original. God conceived it in His mind and made it. He saw it, thought it, or whatever, but the sea in all its massive systems, complex chemical makeup, and enormous volume, he made.

The Bible records, “And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.”[2] What was water? What was dry land? There had never been such a thing. God invented something original.

Try to picture a new color.

Do you have that in your mind?

We can’t! There is a fixed range and we cannot conceive of anything not on the spectrum. I cannot draw something that has never been known by man. Everything I came up with would be based on something already made. We live in that reality.

But in the beginning, God made stuff that was original and had no precedent.

“His hands formed the dry land.” I can see his hands scooping out the sea beds and pulling the earth into piles that became continents. I can see him pulling up the Andes and the Himalayas with his fingers, and pressing a thumb to make the Great Lakes. It’s almost as if he had fun with it? Imagine that, God having fun? God smiling. God being nice. Hmmm, there’s a thought for you.

He first made the stuff, then he formed it. Most of the earth is ocean. That was okay with God. Even the land he made is not all habitable. Why are there desolate, uninhabitable stretches? Because that’s what his mind conceived. That is what He did. “And God saw that it was good.”[3]

Apollo Astronaut Eugene Cernan, viewing the Earth from space, said, “… there you are, the earth, dynamic, overwhelming, and I felt that there was just too much purpose, too much logic, it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be someone bigger than you and bigger than me, and I mean this in a spiritual sense, I’m not religious, but there has to be a Creator of the universe…” [4]

A God that can create like that, - wow!

 I think He can envision and create a positive path for your life.

Look to the Son!

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[1] Psalm 95:5 Revised Standard Bible

[2] Genesis 1:9 Revised Standard Bible

[3] Genesis 1:10 (RSV)

[4] “In the Shadow of the Moon,” 2007, a film by Ron Howard

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head

"The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.”[1]

This is the Biblical account of the origin of water on earth. First water is made, then within that canvas, God creates.

“God … separated the waters which were below the expanse (the oceans) from the waters which were above the expanse…” The expanse was “heaven.” The Hebrew word means the “visible arch of the sky.”[2] Some have called ‘the waters’ a vapor canopy… eerily almost like a womb, in which God created.

“Evidence of water ice on 24 Themis asteroid’s surface” read the headline in the Chennai, India newspaper a few days ago. Two scientific teams have found evidence for “a thin film of ice”[3] on the surface of this 120-mile wide asteroid. Measuring the spectrum of infrared light reflected by the asteroid revealed this ice. For the first time water ice was discovered on an asteroid. This is an exciting breakthrough.

The article continued,“This evidence supports the idea that asteroids could be responsible for bringing water and organic material to Earth.”[4] Scientists had previously classified asteroids as cold lifeless rocks. Comets were credited with bringing water. Comets are now ruled out because the isotopes for hydrogen in the comet's water do not match up with Earth’s.[5]

How did we get water on the Earth? Have asteroids continued to hit the Earth forming oceans? Seventy percent of our planet is water. If it was a random process, why wasn’t the entire earth covered with water? Or just 10% covered? Scientists Ward and Brownlee recognize our good fortune in having just the right balance of land and sea. “The critical question is why, on Earth, the volume of water was sufficiently large to buffer global temperatures, but small enough so that shallow seas could be formed by the uplifting of continents.”[6] The existence of some shallow seas, essential for marine life, provide the perfect environmental balance.

Filling the seas must have taken a lot of asteroids. A lot of big, big asteroids… almost like intergalactic water tankers. We only count the ones that hit us. Could 329 million cubic miles of water have been delivered from asteroids like 24 Themis? It puts a whole new meaning to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head." A blogger commenting on this theory said, “It's certainly very likely that some water and organics arrived via asteroids, frankly the ridiculous improbability that ALL of it arrived via asteroids is too stupid for words.”[7]

If we take God out of the picture, we have to stretch to find a reasonable cause for Earth's abundant water. The Biblical version states, "You alone are the LORD. You have made …the seas and all that is in them.”[8] Friends, God did it. It wasn’t by asteroids pelting the Earth over billions of years.

[1] Genesis 1:2, 6,7 (NAS)
[2] Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Book House, 1985)
[3] “Evidence of water ice on 24 Themis asteroid’s surface,” The Hindu, Thursday, April 29, 2010
[4] Ibid.
[5] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17970-asteroid-isnt-just-a-dry-heap-of-rubble.html
[6] Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth (New York: Copernicus Books, 2000) 264
[7] http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/0459228/Lifes-Building-Blocks-Found-On-Asteroid-
[8] Nehemiah 9:6 (NAS)