God is Powerful! And knows All!

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Let me just tell you how you can see God in creation. Do you know that some birds navigate by the stars when they migrate? And do you know that if you raise birds, these kinds of birds, from eggs inside a building – they’ve never been out of the building – and if you show them an artificial sky – and this has been done in scientific experiment – representing a place their species have never been, they will immediately orient themselves to the proper place to which to migrate. Now you tell me how they know that.

There is a special fish that I’ve enjoyed reading about called the archerfish. It gets its food like all other fish. It just swims around, and opens its mouth, and takes its food. But they have the amazing ability to fire drops of water with great accuracy and knock insects out of the air.

And did you know that there is a little thing called the bombardier beetle who produces chemicals which mix perfectly and at the right moment explode in the face of his enemy, but the explosion never occurs prematurely and never blows him up?

Think about the hydrological cycle of water, which just absolutely staggers my mind. Water is lifted against gravity from the sea thousands of feet into the air, and there it is suspended, just suspended, collected in clouds, and then the clouds are floated over the land and they’re dropped.

Now we can’t invent a machine to do that, so God has one and it’s the sun, and it does it all an it’s only 93 million miles away. No wonder the Psalmist says, “Power belongs to God.” No wonder he says, “The greatness of his power.” No wonder Nahum says, “The Lord is great in power.” And Isaiah says, “The Lord God is everlasting strength.” And no wonder the Psalmist in chapter 65 says, “Who by his power establishes the mountains.”

You know scientists have always tried to say it’s all evolution and it’s all explained by certain circumstances, and so forth apart from God, but they’re really running out of the ability to say that. They’re fast losing their case.

Robert Jastrow, for example, who is an astrophysicist and currently the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for space study says this. “Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. It wasn’t evolution at all,” says Jastrow. “It asks what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer.”

He goes on, “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, and as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who’ve been there for centuries.”

Great statement. In other words, when you study science the conclusion is God created the world. And today with the 200 inch telescope at Mount Palomar, astronomers can look into space for 4 billion light years. If you don’t understand that, try 25 sextillion miles. Do you know how much space that alone would make, as far as they can see? Seven times ten to the sixty-seventh power cubic inches of space.

If someone had been examining this large of volume at the rate of one million billion cubic miles a day since the universe began, he’d be just a little shy of halfway done. And the universe that we see with that telescope is a small piece of actual space. Can you imagine the power? Then some pea brain comes along and says, “Well, once there was a one-celled thing, said to itself, ‘Let’s be two.’ ” And away they went.

A press bulletin from the University of Alberta in Canada said, “It may be surprising to people in a temperate climate to hear that there are on the average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and the energy expended in these storms amounts to the almost inconceivable figure of 1,300,000,000 horsepower. A large Caterpillar machine has 420 horsepower requiring 100 gallons of fuel a day. How much fuel does God have to operate storms with a horsepower of one 1,300,000,000 everyday?”

A Canadian physicist wrote, “A rain of 4 inches over an area of 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain. And to cool again the vapors thus produced, and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working night and day for 100 days.”

Agricultural specialists, for example, have found the average farmer in Minnesota, free of charge, gets 407,510 gallons of water per acre per year. That’s what the Lord gives him, nearly half a million gallons of water a year for his farm, no charge.

Where does God get all the power to be moving this stuff around? Missouri has 70,000 square miles, and 38 inches average rainfall. That amount of water is equal to a lake 22 feet deep, 250 miles long and 60 miles wide. And God moves that water around just in that one state alone.

The U.S. Natural Museum says insect species now number 10 million. And I know, and they were all at your last picnic, right? Do you realize there are 2,500 kinds of ants? And one colony alone can have 100 million ants. Do you know there are 5 billion birds in America? Some can fly 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Did you know that mallards can fly 60 miles an hours, eagles 100 miles an hour and a falcon can dive at a 180? I know you didn’t know that codfish can lay 9 million eggs, but they can.

The earth is 25,000 miles in circumference. It weighs 6 septillion 588 sextillion tons, and hangs in empty space, and spins at 1,000 miles an hour with perfect precision so that time is kept to the split second, and at the same time careens through space around the sun in an orbit of 580 million miles at 1,000 miles a minute.

Did you know that the head of a comet may be from 10,000 to 1 million miles long and the tail as long as 100 million miles and travel at 350 miles per second? Now where is the force for all of this? Halley’s Comet, by the way, has traveled without stopping for gas for 76 years.

Consider the human heart. It’s the size of your fist, weighs less than half a pound. Your heart pumps 1800 gallons of blood a day. Your heart does enough work in 12 hours to lift 65 tons 1 inch off the ground.

Consider the sun. The sun burns up 4 million tons of matter a second. If you could convert the energy the sun gives off to horsepower, you’d wind up with 500 million million billion horsepower. If that’s too big to handle, that’s the same as one and a half million million billion Corvettes.

Think of the distance from the sun. The distance from the earth to the sun is 93 million miles, as I said. It takes the light from the sun traveling at 186,000 miles a second, 8 and a half minutes to get here. The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second, and if you take that speed of 186,000 miles a second going 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, that light travels over 6 trillion miles in one year. And yet, if you were to go across our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, where our star system is, going at 186,000 per second, 6 trillion miles a year, it would take you 125,000 years to get across our galaxy, and ours is one of millions. Now if you’re screaming “mercy,” I’ll quit.

Now consider how small we are. Atoms are not visible. We know they exist, but to this day no one has ever seen an atom. They’re so small it takes 3 atoms to make up 1 water molecule, and if you were to take every water molecule in 1 drop of water and blow them up so each molecule was the size of a grain of sand you’d have enough grains of sand to make a road 1 foot thick, half mile wide, and the road would go from Los Angeles to New York.

But did you know the atom is mostly empty space? The actual material – and this fascinates me – in an atom takes up one trillionth of the atom’s volume. And what you really have is a lot of little orbits. Everything is mostly empty space. For example, if the average person had all the space squeezed out of him, how much volume do you think he’d occupy? Take a person who is 6 feet tall and all the actual mass that’s in him, when all the space is squeezed out, he would fit on the head of a pin for he would occupy one one hundred millionth of a cubic inch. So don’t argue when somebody says you’re nothing.

But you want to hear something amazing? That one, one hundred millionth of a cubic inch would be so heavy that a full cubic inch of that would weigh a billion or more pounds. Incredible.

Listen, if God says He’s visible in His creation, then He’s visible in His creation. You can see the eternal power. You can see the divine nature of God. You can look at creation, and so can a Canaanite, or a Philistine, or an Egyptian, or anybody living in any period of history up until today, and he’s going to see that God is. There has to be a cause for all this effect. There has to be a designer for all this design.

I mean when somebody tells me it just happened, that makes no more sense than saying take your watch apart, put all the pieces in your pocket, and see how long you have to shake your pants before you hear a tick. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Design speaks of a designer. And so you know God is. And if you know God is, you know God is powerful, and you know God is divine.

—John MacArthur
Reasons for the Wrath of God, Part 1
Romans 1:19–20 | Jun 14, 1981