God of Creation: Every Man a Miracle

Your next “miracle” might not be something you see on a stage, it might be your next heartbeat. Brother James takes a hard look at the human body and argues that ordinary physiology points to extraordinary intelligence. From the constant labor of the heart to the mind-bending number of blood cells coursing through you, we zoom in on details most of us never think about and ask the question modern life avoids: can unguided forces really account for this kind of ordered life?

We talk about the body’s built-in defense and repair system, especially white blood cells that rush to infection and wounds, and we connect healing to the idea of God’s active care in creation. We also explore temperature regulation, digestion, and energy storage, where the body maintains narrow margins that keep us alive. Chemistry describes the steps, but it does not settle the deeper issue of purpose, wisdom, and the source of life. If you search for Christian teaching on miracles, creation, anatomy, or the evidence for God, this conversation aims straight at the “ultimate cause” question.

Then we draw an important line: being made by God does not make us God. The episode turns toward the nervous system, habits, reflexes, and how people learn by doing, building patterns that shape character over time. That becomes a challenge about righteousness, the will, and the need to be born again through Jesus Christ, with good works following grace rather than earning it.

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Context

SPEAKER_01 0:57

All right, thank you so much for those very kind words of introduction. I'm Brother James, and this is the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast. We're glad that you tuned in today to hear the eighth in our series of lessons on the God of Creation as we discuss how the world round about us manifests the wisdom, the intelligence, and the glory of Almighty God. We've been talking about uh the birds and the bees, if you will. Well, not the birds yet, but we have talked about the bees and the plant life in some detail. And today on the program, we want to talk about uh miracles a little bit. I know there's a lot of talk nowadays in our religious world about miracles. Some people say they believe in miracles, some people say they don't, some people say that miracles are for this age, some people say that they are not. But I want to set before you the belief today that I have that every single person listening to my voice on the preaching of the cross radio broadcast today, every single person listening to my voice is a miracle. I believe that. I believe that your very life is a miraculous event. You know, many people have wondered at the miracle of the water of the Nile being turned to blood, not knowing that this is a matter of daily occurrence in every human being, to say nothing of lower orders. People know very little about themselves. Men who know how to put together the parts of their automobiles are not at all familiar with the parts of their own bodies. Any study of anatomy or physiology will call forth the admission I am fearfully and wonderfully made, as the psalmist said in Psalm one hundred and thirty nine. The heart is a four chambered organ composed of a single muscle, forcing the flow of two ounces of blood with every beat. It exerts a lifting force of between five and six tons every day. It keeps the blood circulating at a rate of seven miles an hour, it pushes every blood corpuscle in the body to the lung surfaces every twenty minutes. This heart, beating seventy times a minute for seventy years, will reach a total of two and a half billion pulsations. This is kept up day and night, and yet the period of rest between beats is longer than the period of work. Blood appears red. But the cells, when viewed separately, are straw colored. There are a hundred and forty billion of these red cells in one fluid ounce. The average amount of blood in the body is two gallons. The total number of cells may be taken as twenty five trillion, if you can get any idea of that number. If laid side by side, there are enough blood cells in your body to reach around planet Earth six times. Why, if you should try to enumerate twenty five trillion, counting three to the second day and night, it would take three hundred and twenty thousand years to accomplish the task. These cells are manufactured probably in the marrow of the long bones, and the process is going on all the time, regulated by a strange intelligence that resides somewhere in the organism. The red cells are provided with lecathin and cholesterol, which attracts oxygen as the blood passes through the lungs, and thus the whole body is supplied with this freight of life giving gas. There are just enough of these red cells to provide for body needs, but on a high mountain, where the air is light and the oxygen thin, the ordinary number of cells will not carry a sufficient oxygen supply to meet the demand. So God meets the condition with prompt and exact action, so that overnight millions of new cells are thrown into the bloodstream, and no living soul knows how or when it is done. Is there intelligence in the marrow of the long bones that they should recognize the need and furnish the supply at exactly the right time? Or is God working a miracle in the human body? There are also white cells in the blood. Their office is to pick up foreign matter from the bloodstream, notably microbes and ingest or devour them. A few days after a man cuts his hand he finds it in flames, swollen, mattered. What happens is that the wound has become infected, and white cells from every part of the body, together with a multitude of new ones created for the struggle against the invaders, meet in battle against the foe, and the pus is an aggregation of white cells that have given up their lives to repel the destructive inroads of the foreigners and save the life of the infected one who but for the ministry of these little devoted friends would ultimately die. Every time you scratch or cut yourself, God performs a miracle. Or there may be no outside evidence of such microbes, but there is a fever and the doctor is sent for. He makes a blood count. He finds that there is an extraordinary number of white cells. He knows that there would be nothing like so many in the regular standing army, and he knows that this number would not be present if there were not something unusual to call them out. He reasons that some internal organ is affected, and he pronounces his verdict, perhaps appendicitis. What intelligence is it that presides over these little living things in the blood? And what further intelligence resident in the body creates these creatures for the preservation of life just at the time they are needed, and then reduces their number when they are no longer called for? How can you deny that God works a miracle every time you're ill? You say, Brother James, do you believe in healers? Oh yes, thousands and millions of them created in your bloodstream by almighty God, who regulates the temperature of our bodies. About seven degrees above the normal ninety-eight and two fifths, or three degrees below it is fatal. The mechanism that preserves the exact physiological necessity is the peripheral nerves. When the blood is likely to become overheated, these nerves open the pores of the skin and pour out moisture, thus cooling the body. When the outside air is cold, these same nerves close the pores so to keep in the heat. So in the tropics or Arctics, the same temperature is maintained and the body kept in functioning order. This is an admirable process. No automatic device used in large buildings is nearly so accurate or dependable as the peripheral nerves. They are always on the job and their operations are called for many times every day. To say that this is chemical adaptation is merely to say that we know that it is done or even how it is done, but it does not explain how protoplasm can be so sensitized as to act intelligently. The fact of mechanism does not dismiss mind, even though the act is not conscious, but where is this mind? Is it in the nerves? Is it in a part of the organized body? Or is it another intelligence working in and through the protoplasmic cells of your body? Now you can ask this of your biology teacher and they'll give you some kind of glib answer, and you can ask a learned professor and he'll be silent as to the ultimate cause, because having rejected the word of God, being wise in their own conceits, they're left without an answer. It seems that you have to admit some superhuman power. You have to declare not only that God is, but that he works within us. And this idea of God in us carries with it a conviction and warmth. The God with whom we have to do is not only in yonder skies, but he is bearing testimony to his power in Godhead in every blood vessel, every nerve, every organ, every function of our human body. His glory is present in a very real sense, though you may never have received him in person as your Lord and Savior. There's more to be said about the miracle of the body. Most of the food demanded for chemical purposes is in the form of carbohydrates, and these keep up the physical strength by providing for wear and tear. Most carbohydrates are taken in the form of starches, and the starches must be converted into sugar. The process begins in the mouth with the petalin of the saliva, and it is finished in the intestines. The sugar thus formed must be in the form of dextrose in order to become assimilated, but the blood would be overcharged if too much were poured into it. Nature takes care of this necessity by storing the sweet in the liver and muscles in the form of animal starch or glycogen G-L-Y C O G E N, which is quickly converted to dextrose when the occasion requires. This chemical process of changing starch to sugar, sugar into the specific form of glycogen, and glycogen back into dextrose is continually going on with the most careful precision. Either underproduction or overproduction would cause a sufficient irregularity to result in disease and ultimate death, and yet so scrupulously does nature attend to the task that the average man is kept quite regular in health and ease. To be sure, this is a matter of chemistry, and the easiest way to dismiss the subject is with that and just leave out all mystery and all wisdom, which is to say of these marvelous functionings, it is because it is. Now that may answer the question of the laboratory, but it will not satisfy the soul and you know it. The laboratory tells us that the more simple an element or compound is, the more stable it is as hydrogen, but highly complex elements like radium and uranium show a tendency to degenerate, which accounts for what we call radioactivity. The same is true in living organisms. They say that dinosaurs of the Triassic period were highly organized specimens of life but long since perished from the face of the earth. Whole species of genera have developed only to fail and become extinct. They were not necessary to the highest aims of universal unfoldment, the Darwinists would say. But whatever life form you might point to, man remains far more complex and seemingly far more necessary to the world. There would inferentially be a tendency to disintegrate, and yet human life goes on, and the length of it increases. And Charlie Darwin is proved wrong, and the evolutionary theory is laughed at and ridiculed by every human being and every generation of human beings. Man is not going to pieces physically, and yet he ought to, on the basis of the greater instability and greater complexity to show signs of decay. Certain facts may indicate decay of some parts. They say man has all but lost his sense of smell because he doesn't smell like a dog anymore, or his eye is dim because it's not like the eagles anymore. Ah, you say his hair is going back and his teeth are decaying, but these changes have been going on through the ages. And man is nowhere nearer extinction today than he was when he stepped off the ark. The mystery of it all is that with one chemical action on top of the other to the nth degree, making a series so complex that one grows dizzy to contemplate it, still as this far removed place from Eden's garden? What is easily comprehended by us is this precise, unfailing chemical activity still goes on in a multiplicity of processes so refined that many of them are still unexplained in the laboratory, much less possible of duplication, and yet in spite of all explanations the fact of life remains a mystery to the scientist. How can unguided forces act and react one on another in continuous construction? Why is there no limit? The action is chemical, to be sure, but it is wise and it is good and it is not degenerating. When do the atoms become wise and good? When do the molecules become educated? You can pile three bricks one on top of another and they'll remain piled up. You can't do that with a hundred bricks. Yet nature piles a hundred or a thousand chemical reactions one on another where it might be expected that the aggregation would topple and the heap is stable as stable as the first few. The multiplicity of interactions shows nothing more than an almighty creator holding the creation together. Can unknowing atoms unaided be responsible for all this? The chemist takes us just so far and then he has to leave us groping in the dark because he's rejected his confidence in God. Now if I'm able to produce a machine by my wisdom and skill, I'm the originator of it, but I'm not necessarily in it. The machine goes automatically when started and can continue while it's fed and cared for. The maker may control it, but that doesn't mean he's a part of it. It is perhaps more truly a part of him or the product of his hands. Thus we are the product of God, we are made by God, we're a marvelous creation of God. But to say that God is therefore our physical being and our physical being is God is a terrible mistake that the deists once made. You are no more God, and God is no more you than you are a a machine that you made and that that machine is you. That machine may be a testimony of your wisdom and your power and your might, but the machine is not you, and you are not the machine. Now, don't make the mistake of thinking that because you are a miraculous creation of God, that you are God, and that that means that that you belong to God and that God dwells within you, because such is not the case. You must be born again, you must receive the Lord Jesus Christ, and then and only then will the eternal, almighty, everlasting life of God come to dwell within you. You know, one of the common popular errors that men have is that a habit is a bad thing, whereas habits are among the most valuable of all physical possessions. Ninety percent of habits are good, a few negative, and still fewer are bad. Ninety percent of all human behavior is habitual. Without it, uh life would be so handicapped that it'd scarcely be worth living. Habit is invaluable. It's a wise provision of God, by which the strain of behavior is taken off the thought centers and referred to the lower nerve centers, making most of our actions automatic and leaving the mind free to concentrate on new choices and less familiar movements. The machinery of the human body is a thing of wonder, not alone in pulleys and levers and lenses and valves, but in the automatic supervision of its own movements. People sometimes refer to modern automatons as acting almost intelligently, without knowing that human beings usually act like an automaton and greatly to their own advantage. Consider the nerves. Physiologists describe for us two grand divisions, the voluntary and the involuntary nervous systems, and divide the functions of the former into two kinds sensory and motor, these two cooperating in behalf of physical and mental welfare so as to make movements, practice, and general behavior very exact, dependable, mechanical, and yet intelligent. When the physician is to examine a patient where he suspects the nerves are involved, he looks into the state of the patella reflex and makes important deductions. Now what is a reflex? Well, the patient crosses his legs, the doctor gently strikes below the patella or knee bone, and thus starts a series of activities. The sensory nerve at the point of contact receives an impression which it carries to the spinal cord in the area of the lower lumbar, as far down as the third or fourth sacral vertebrae. Here the impression is transferred to the motor nerve over which is it is carried to the quadriceps muscle, and this muscle, contracting in consequence, pulls the leg bones and the foot flies up. All this is involved in what physiologists call a simple reflex. Each action is involuntary, and the mechanism remains unchanged through life until disease or decay breaks the continuity. It will always act the same way, the whole series being involuntary and with no place for control by the will. But the psychologist has another reflex for us. He calls this a conditional reflex. And in this conditioned reflex we account for all our habits and inhibitions, and learn how experience and education have their part in contributing to mechanism and behavior. The conditioned reflex is very much like the other, except that at the point where the sensory impression is changed to a motor activity or thought, something has happened to modify the latter and make it respond differently from what it would if it had not been modified. It is this modification that determines the course of habit and the mode of conduct, and we call the modifying element by such names as education or experience. The importance of this is apparent and must be taken into account in every appraisal of human conduct. To illustrate, let's take the case of a burnt child who dreads the fire. Now before he was burned, he had no dread. What could be prettier or more alluring in a baby's eyes than the glow or flicker of firelight? He does not know what fire will do, and in ignorance, which is bliss he reaches for the pretty thing. He reaches, touches, and well as has been said, the burnt child dreads the fire. After that he lets it alone. Why? Because experience has set up something that modifies conduct. When he looks at a flame it sets up an association with pain. He is educated to that degree, for ever after the sense of the sight of fire reacts on motor nerves that hold him back and the reflex can be dependent upon. All our conditioned reflex are formed in some such way, and because the reaction is fairly stable, we call it habit. This is the difference between instinct and human conduct. Instinct is unlearned behavior. Why a spider knows more at birth than a baby, but it will never more any know any more than it does then. The baby has everything to learn, but he has the capacity for it. Instinct is behavior conferred by God at birth. Habit is behavior acquired by setting up of new reflexes. How much is a baby more than a spider or a man better than a sheep? The first seven years of life are fundamental to all the rest. The little animal, as it will, is making the machinery by which it is afterward to live. Walking is a habit, and a baby must learn it. It takes a long time to get the proper balance, but after about a year the little bundle of pink flesh puts one foot before the other and walks. After that it becomes a fixed part of his nature. Not something to be learned over and over, but a part of the machinery of the body. It takes a long time to get sounds that mean anything, but eventually the goose and baz become intelligible and the habit of speech is formed. It takes baby a long time to learn to put his finger where he wants it. Sometimes he sticks it in his own eye while he practices, but after a while he learns to coordinate his muscles and eventually can operate a typewriter at the rate of a thousand exact movements a minute, or perhaps a piano with twelve or fifteen hundred movements a minute. The more man reduces his actions to habitual, that is mechanical, the more effective he becomes. He does not have to pick out slowly the key of C or F, for he reads the notes on the page and translates whole chords into movements in the fraction of a second. Having acquired this ability, his mind is free to investigate new problems. He is not hampered with detail because he executes most of what he does by purely mechanical methods. Instead of stumbling over the idea of mechanical behavior and becoming involved in argument as to whether it accords with ideas of the Bible, uh let's accept for a fact that God, by his wisdom, has given us a mechanism of the nervous system that leaves men free to think, to enjoy, and to move on. Now, if this is true, and it is, there is such a thing then as a physiological basis of righteousness. Listen carefully, if you will. Man can so train his nervous system that it could become good by force of habit. This is no reflection on the value of right conduct that is registered in the reflexes. It ought to register there. It ought to become easier to do right and harder to do wrong, because one has allied his nervous mechanism with his highest ideals and profits by its working automatically in subjection to the will and word of God. The Bible says, Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee, meaning what? Meaning I have so indoctrinated my mind with the word of God that my hands, my tongue, my eyes, my feet all act in harmony with the word of God. God by what shall we say, by a habit of righteousness. If it's true that man is a machine, but it is not true that he is nothing than a machine. The former is a physiological fact, the denial of which would be stupid in the ma in the extreme, but to say that he is no more, that there are no centers that can be touched with the will and stamina of decided personality is to cut the tendon of action and lead us into a dead uh Calvinism or fatalism. Any individual act may be taken from the lower nerve centers and referred to the higher, just as a business transaction at the store may be taken out of the hands of the clerk and referred to the head of the department. One might say that a store is a machine because it is operating operated according to a system, which is not saying that the management cannot deviate from set rules and show that something is involved not wholly mechanical. The idea that human conduct is mechanical and only mechanical with no will, with no personality, is to say that well, that God did not create man in his own image, because God is not a robot or an automaton, but God has a will and exercises that will. God has a personality and reigns on the throne in heaven, and he desires that we subject our personality to the rule and reign of his personality upon the throne of our heart. Another important consideration in this matter of habit is that we learn by doing. Popular belief is that man acts as he thinks, that is, if he thinks right, he'll live right. This is the basis of insistence upon a set rule of morality, a set rule of living and conduct, as laid forth in the Holy Bible, the Word of God. Therefore, the importance of the formation of the right kind of thoughts, the right kind of instruction, will determine the right kinds of habits, which will in turn determine the right course of action and the right course of conduct. Now the Bible says, Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return unto the Lord his God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The Bible says, But to him that worketh righteousness shall be a sure reward. A mind accustomed to a righteous life will be more likely to have a worthy system of faith than a mind trained to well, to the wrong thoughts and the wrong ideas. Creed may make deed, but deed also makes creed. Now some people have said, and it's a common school of thought among the mystic thinkers of Christianity, that I will not do right until God wills and moves upon my heart to do right, because I do not want to act in the flesh, I do not want to sin against God by exerting and exercising my own will. Listen. That is the same as to say I do not want to walk until God causes me to walk, therefore I'm going to lie in this crib, I'm going to lie on this sofa, I'm going to be carried about all the days of my life until God suddenly so moves upon my legs as I learn to walk. Now the only time that God is recorded as miraculously moving upon the legs of someone and causing them to walk is if they were crippled. My friend, if you are not mentally, spiritually, and emotionally crippled, God has left it up to you to exercise your will in following his decrees and dictates for righteous living, moving, thinking, and acting. The first of these is you do not sit and wait until you end up in hell for the Holy Spirit of God to drag you to the cross of Jesus Christ. You forsake your sin, you repent, that is, you turn yourself about, and you flee for refuge and mercy at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, and from a sincere and believing heart you call upon the name of the Lord for your soul's salvation. Having done that, you exercise your will by reading, studying, memorizing, trusting, and believing the Word of God, then you exercise your will by acting upon the Word of God in such a way, in such a faithfulness, in such a continual practice, that eventually you become like the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Spirit of God works with your obedience, works with your subjection to the Word of God, and helps you to crucify the flesh, to mortify the deeds of the flesh, to deny the old man and let him die, and to place the new man, the Son of God from heaven, which is come in the person of his Holy Spirit to live within your heart, on the throne of your heart and life, making Jesus Christ the King of kings and Lord of Lords. My friend, as we said some thirty minutes ago, you are a miraculous creation of Almighty God. You have been created to bring honor and praise and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ, and you do that first and foremost by receiving him as your personal Lord and Savior. And then having been born again, God has created you unto good works. Ephesians chapter two and verse ten. You do not do good works to be saved, for you saved by grace through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. But having been born again, Ephesians two, eight and nine, by grace through faith, you are created unto good works. Ephesians chapter two and verse number ten, and it's time that all of God's people got busy cultivating the habits of living righteously before a holy God.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

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