They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. –Isaiah 11:9
Every now and then the Lord gives us glimpses of what it will be like when He regenerates His whole creation, and casts out sin and death forever.
This is one of those glimpses. Love it.
As reported this week by The Mirror, a poll of 1,000 people in the UK aged 18-34 found that one out of four Brits would be willing to date or “have a relationship” with a robot, as long as it was really good-looking ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/romance-digital-age-one-four-7832164 ).
I think this is where we run screaming to the sidewalk.
Said a person who hopes to make a lot of money out of this, “Our bodies, our identities and our senses are enhancing, thanks to technology and societal shifts.”
Gee, thanks.
Now, why would our leaders and thinkers want to push this?
Because it strikes directly at God’s creation mandate. Because it would establish them–in their own reprobate minds–as gods themselves, un-creating and re-creating God’s natural order of things.
First they sold us “gay,” then transgender, and next it will be something else even more alienating us from God’s creation.
It will stop when our sovereign Lord decides it’s time to break out the sickle and reap the harvest.
Think about this thing that God has done. He has made it possible–in fact, not at all unusual–for members of totally different species to love each other.
Would we have thought of that, if any of us had made the heavens and the earth? No way we would have thought of that!
You have to be in a bad way indeed, if being hugged by a cat (or fussed over by a dog) doesn’t soothe your soul.
God loves us by pouring love on us!
Hi, Mr. Nature here, with our first video of 2016.
Here is an animal which most people, looking at it, would think was a plant. Scientists call it a crinoid. Some people call it a sea lily. These are very commonly found as fossils, but as you can see, they’re still around today.
This footage was taken by a camera on the deep bottom of the sea. Hey, is that the flower’s stalk dragging after it? Yes, that’s what it is. Imagine seeing that in your garden: a tulip crawling along, dragging its stalk behind it. Except, of course, the crinoid is an animal, related to the starfish. And it can detach its stalk from whatever it’s clinging to.
Doesn’t God make cool stuff? I mean, really, if you were creating the world, would you have ever thought of crinoids?
I don’t know about you, but I could use a hymn, right about now. This hymn, in fact–This Is My Father’s World.
It does not belong to the ungodly. It doesn’t even belong to God’s people. It belongs to the Father who created it, who created us, and who sent his Son into the world to save us from our sins and win for us eternal life.
Sit back and listen.
So this time socialists and progressives and the rest are really gonna make us all equal, no shit, this time it’s really gonna work, all we have to do is put them in office and give them tons and tons of power over us, you’ll see, honest, there won’t be any more inequality or poverty…
All right, all right, that’s enough of man’s stuff. What bunk. It’s incredible that anyone can stand to listen to it, let alone believe it.
Let’s turn instead to a bit of God’s stuff, which always works.
Here we have water striders, insects that live on the surface of the water (but they can also fly, if necessary). Yup, they skim around on it like it was a skating rink.
Why don’t they sink? Because God created them with the ability to take advantage of the surface tension of the water. What’s that? Put some water in a clear glass and look closely. You’ll see it sort of curves up around the edges. This is why anything floats. If water didn’t have that property, distinguishing the surface from the rest of it, nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever float.
St. Paul: “[T]hat which may be known of God is manifest in them: for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made…” (Romans 1:19-20)
Yes, even water striders.
The red eft–the only land animal I can think of that has vermilion as its color.
I am not going to write about current events today. Nope, I won’t do it. Our national leaders are going to Hell and no two ways about it, and anyone who wants to follow them will be sorry.
Behold the red eft. Is that gorgeous, or what? I mean, how many times do you see the color vermilion in a land animal?
But won’t that bright color make them kind of easy for predators to see and catch? No way. That color challenges a predator: “Do you feel lucky, punk?” For the red efts skin is full of toxins. The brilliant color is a warning light. “If you eat me, you will die a horrible death.”
Red efts don’t stay red forever. What they are, really, is juvenile newts. They live on land, but they grow up into water-dwelling common newts, which are really quite handsome in their own right: green with red spots on top, yellow with black spots on the bottom.
Red efts and green newts belong to that category known as God’s stuff. That’s the stuff that always works the way it’s supposed to. It works perfectly, and most of it is beautiful.
There is more life to be found in a small bucket of earth, or sea water, than we have been able to detect in all the rest of the universe. Which is not to say there is no life anywhere else in the universe: it’s God’s universe, and He can do what He pleases with it.
But we would be wise to be more thankful for what we have immediately at hand.
Hi, Mr. Nature here with more of God’s stuff that really works, even if our stuff that we invented hardly ever works properly.
Behold the archer fish, a native of Australia and Indonesia. How does he get at the tasty bugs crawling out of reach, out of the water? He folds his tongue into a tube and knocks ’em down with a jet of water. As you can see from the video, he’s very accurate.
I wonder… If you had an archer fish in your aquarium, could you train him to squirt people? But that’s an idle thought.
God’s works are all around us, everywhere we look, all testifying to His glory.
Behold the chuckwalla, a nice big lizard. The one in the video is enjoying a feast of chopped vegetables and cheeses that some thoughtful human provided him.
The chuckwalla lives in North America’s hottest deserts, where it eats bits of cactus. The chuckwalla is edible for human beings, a fact which has occasionally saved a life. When threatened, this lizard ducks into a crack in the rock and inflates himself, making it just about impossible to pull him out.
God creates the darnedest things. He creates them for His own pleasure. There aren’t enough people who get lost in the desert to justify the trouble of creating the chuckwalla. This lizard can be domesticated, but then you have the trouble of keeping him hot enough. Like most members of the iguana family, the chuckwalla is smart enough to adjust to you and become friendly with you.
No scientific committee would have ever conceived of a large, edible lizard whose primary defense is self-inflation. Science fiction writers never thought of it. For really cool ideas that no one else ever had, you have to go to God.
And this is Mr. Nature signing off… Enjoy your Sabbath rest, everybody.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that God created dinosaurs. No one that we know of has ever seen one, and our interpretations of the fossils are subject to never-ending revision–but still, those great big bones had to fit together some way. Maybe someday we’ll figure out what any dinosaur was really like.
The difficulty is that dinosaurs are nowhere specifically mentioned in the Bible. Oh, and another difficulty–they don’t exist anymore.
We are, however, assured that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, so that would include dinosaurs. We are also taught that God pronounced His creation good: therefor dinosaurs, at least in His eyes, are good.
I think you will agree that T. rex and his playmates would be a little much for us to handle. So God removed dinosaurs before the human race multiplied and spread throughout the earth. Again, the Bible doesn’t get into this. That doesn’t mean we can’t prayerfully consider the matter and use our brains for something more than cooking up mischief.
It’s my personal belief that God has put the dinosaurs somewhere else, where they can’t eat people, and where numbskulls can’t try to put them into an amusement park and charge money to see them. God has the entire universe at His disposal. Anything we imagine that limits His use of it is almost certainly wrong.
I look at the re-assembled bones, the paintings, the videos, the vast outpouring of human creativity and human reason and emotion evoked by these creatures, and can only marvel at the work of God’s hands. Dinosaurs also make me reflect on how much fun it must be to be God, and able to do things like this–makes it easy to imagine the pleasure our Lord must take in His creation.
What a blast He must have had with dinosaurs!