If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.
- Walt Whitman
Psalms of Delight...
Most of the Bible's Psalms give thanks to God on one or more levels. Commanded to do so, Christians aught to make the time to praise God for His glorious nature, creative genius and many gifts to mankind.
Psalms of Delight are written in concert with Psalms in the Night. Both series contain Modern Psalms meant to comfort and inspire those seeking the Omni-God revealed in Scripture.
Fearfully And Wonderfully Made Summary
There's a great line from Animal Farm, "all animals are created equal but some are more equal than others." The same might be said of Scripture. While all verses are "God breathed" some really pack a punch. David's Psalm 139 has a few zingers, including perhaps one of the greatest understatements in the Bible.
Fearfully And Wonderfully Made
Modern Psalm of Delight 10
You inspired David to really hit the nail on the head in Psalm 139:
"I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." Psalm 139:14
- We are “as a mist, here in the morning and burnt off by mid morning.” Thinking, feeling, often sinful reeds to whom a little water added or withheld can mean life or death. Soulish spirits in bloody meatcycles on skeletal sticks. Most “fearfully and wonderfully made.” In a fearful and wonderful place. Living fearful and/or wonderful lives. Facing fearful and/or wonderful futures. And a most fearful or wonderful eternity. Yet with little or no concern over the true demands placed on us by our Maker to be obedient, productive and thankful. And this, even though for the most part we’re born between urine and feces and for all our pomp will die as dogs. Never really knowing where we come from, who, where and when we are or where we are going. Being as it were twisted sideways, backwards and upside down. Nevertheless, it is written that even we might become beloved stardust. Heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
▪ During the first month of life, the number of brain connections or synapses, dramatically increases from 50 trillion to 1 quadrillion.
▪ Your heart beats about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
▪ If all arteries, veins, and capillaries of the human circulatory system were laid end to end, the total length would be 60,000 miles, or 100,000 km. That's nearly two and a half times around the Earth.
▪ The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime. That’s enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.
▪ We’re made up of 37 trillion cells. More or less.
▪ The human brain has over 100 billion neurons.
▪ In one square inch of skin there are 625 sweat glands and 90 oil glands. There are also 19 million cells, 19 feet of blood vessels, 19,000 sensory cells.
▪ 50 million of the cells in your body will have died and been replaced with others while reading this fact.
▪ The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.
▪ We have over 600 muscles.
▪ Our lungs breathe in between 2,100 and 2,400 gallons (8,000 and 9,000 liters) of air each day.
▪ We breathe 23,000 times a day. About 600 million breaths during our lifetime.
The fantastic fine tuning necessary for such statistics, and hundreds more like them, present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for intelligent design. And thus a Designer. Even bypassing the impossibility of nothing plus nothing equaling everything, it’s been estimated the odds of natural selection alone producing advanced life on Earth is 1024,000,000. In layman's terms, it's like an individual winning the California lottery over 3 million times playing a single ticket in each drawing.
Again, fearfully and wonderfully made is right. And beauty is only skin deep! Seriously, millennia before X-rays and MRI's, David was on to something. And not just about biology:
- "Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, High God—you're breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, The days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day." Psalm 139:13-16 MSG
The famous 17th Century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler explained, "I am merely thinking God's thoughts after Him." And what thought's You've had! Consider the mysteries of consciousness. In a TED Talk, Anil K. Seth, a British professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience addressed the interplay between our senses and brain. Lacking eyes and ears, a sense of smell and tase, as well as touch receptors of its own, the brain is a prediction engine. By combining sensory input with past experience, our brains generate a best guess scenario by hallucinating a conscious reality of the world and personal awareness. Through electrochemical impulses, the human mind extrapolates what is real, what is true, what is important.
A Crowd Science podcast, "Was I born Clumsy?" points out our simplest movements are vastly complex. Instant and seamless motor plans choreograph a myriad of sequences and instructions communicated by the brain to instruct our joints to change their positions relative to each other in 3D space. Sense position creates a mental map via microscopic proprioceptors within tendons communicating with our brain's prediction engine how and where to stand, move or catch a ball. Cognitive resources engineer our thoughts into actions with hardly a notice. Instantly our motor cortex sends messages to our spinal cords. Our cerebellum coordinates standing. Our parietal lobe helps to continually and accurately hallucinate were we and other objects are in space.
More impressive still, You've orchestrated biochemical and physiological process to give rise to intellectual and emotional, social and spiritual pursuits. Via our senses and situation, once clean slates begin to fill with information demanding interpretation. As more stimuli is stored, by necessity its assimilation and consideration produces our individual sense of self or plot. Over time and interaction with the cares of life, the story we are telling ourselves mingle with the internal narratives and actions of others. Augmenting and amending our own.
All this and far more, just getting out of bed…
You really do amazing work. And if You put this kind of effort into our mortal lives, which from an eternal perspective began yesterday and end tomorrow, how much more glorious resurrected heavenly lives must be!
Which of course raises the question where we'll be spending eternity? Show us how desperately we need to obey You as Savior and Lord. Help us to get just how "fearfully" we are made. Help us understand how precarious our existence is so we'll "number our days." Help us comprehend eternal realities and all that's at stake. In time and eternity. For ourselves and those we love.
More information
In the Red Dropdown Icon you'll find resources that we hope will both stimulate and facilitate your pursuit of and understanding of the God of the Bible. To get started simply place your cursor on a category of interest and see where it leads. You can also join the discussion in a variety of ways including posting comments to God Blogs as well as making comments or asking questions by email or text.
Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved