“Sowing and Reaping.”
Dr. Richard A. Swenson, a Christian physician, describes in amazing detail the great care God has taken in creating the universe and even the human body. The human body is composed of ten thousand trillion-trillion atoms, a number greater than the stars of the universe. In all of us more than a trillion of these are replaced every one millionth of a second. In a normal lifetime, our hearts beat more than two billion times and pump sixty million gallons of blood through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels. A healthy body manufactures more than two million red blood cells every second. If we could somehow place these cells side by side, they would stretch for one hundred thousand miles. The eyes you are now using to read this page contain more than one hundred million rods and cones in the retina, cones that take continuous pictures under light conditions that can vary by a factor of ten billion. If by chance you might be reading aloud, it may be worth remembering that your ear has a million moving parts, which vibrate twenty thousand times per second and can distinguish among two thousand pitches. But that is merely the complexity of one finite human body. The universe apparently measures between ten and twenty billion light years across and may be populated by many galaxies of which our Milky Way is just one. Some astronomers believe it contains at least one hundred billion other galaxies, each one peppered with about one hundred billion stars. That’s the God Jacob served, the God who gave his blessing to Abraham and Isaac and now protected Jacob as he wandered to the land of the eastern peoples. If Swenson’s analysis is right (and I have offered only the smallest sample), the amazing and awesome wonder of God’s majesty and power provide all the strength we need to live effectively in any age, whether the desert nomad life of Jacob or the fast and furious suburban life in Detroit. Certainly Jacob fell in love immediately with Rachel.; however, God was about to teach Jacob about sowing and reaping. Laban became God’s tool for disciplining the deceitful and sometimes frivolous Jacob. Jacob’s errors in judgment were far from over, but he had fourteen years to think about what the future might hold. Jacob offered an Old Testament picture of a New Testament principle: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Gal. 6:7) We serve an amazing and awesome God who is both powerful and personal. He has an amazing plan for our lives in which He wants to demonstrate His grace, love, justice, and holiness. We must ask ourselves the question, “Are we showing people how magnificent God is?” This chapter teaches us that God is involved with our lives and He does not miss any details. Our bodies remind us that He is a God of details and that He has a purpose for every part of the detail.
Personal Prayer Requests:
- Lord, please help me never forget that you are a God of incredible detail. You certainly are involved in every part of my life.
- Lord, please help me to not forget that the sowing and reaping principle is a timeless truth that applies to today.
- Lord, thank you for the way you made my body and for how it reminds me of your attention to detail.