“How precious are thy thoughts unto me O God! How great is the sum of them!” Capturing in eloquent simplicity the wonder and worship of David’s heart, these words sung before the ark of God in Jerusalem, bore tender witness to the grace of God. As the wind separates the minuscule chaff from the wheat falling to the threshing floor, the God of all grace, whose knowledge is bounded by neither time nor space, had winnowed the path of David’s life. God knew David intimately: each of his days had been detailed in the book of God … before his “unformed substance-made in secret” became Jesse’s youngest son.
Now that is information acquisition and management on a grand scale. Millennia must pass before man could aspire to such a feat, yet our omniscient and sovereign God did what, of course, man may never do, create the data. Once an obscure shepherd, but now “exalted to be ruler over his people Israel”, the king was reflecting on “the times that went over him.” God, who knew all and is everywhere, had graciously ordered those “times”. Little wonder, then, that David’s heart was charged with an overwhelming sense of awe: “such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.”
But allow, if you will, a moment’s speculation. Imagine you could impose a time warp to suddenly sweep David from those reflections into your home with the intention of bringing him “up to speed” on our great strides in information acquisition and management. With restrained pride you explain your new personal computer Pentium microprocessor, quad CD ROM, and peripherals. “On line” and an assortment of CD’s provide an astounding world of information at your fingertips. A subdued David, catapulted over centuries, begins to comprehend the enormity of twentieth century knowledge. The seemingly infinite gap between man’s knowledge and God’s suddenly appeared to narrow. Could man “attain to it?” Has David’s consummate faith in the uniquely “all knowing” God momentarily begun to falter?
Tragically, for many today, it has not only faltered but been destroyed. A twentieth century path of logic to unbelief is at once subtle, simple and Satanic. The burgeoning growth of information and information management is forcing “God” into technological obsolescence. The grossest of sins, once in the domain of personal responsibility and accountability to God, may now be dismissed as aberrant behavior resulting from an abnormal genetic sequence. Life’s molecular building blocks didn’t appear from the supreme God who said, “Let there be…” but from bubbles on the surface of the sea. The daunting complexity of the cell and cellular systems is not attributed to the God of transcendent wisdom, but to interactions of evolved macromolecules. Recombinant DNA research is blazing the path to correcting defects in genetic codes. Untold millions of transactions, whether stocks, charges, or calls that occur daily over the globe are recorded, but so does man.
God, supplanted by man’s acquisition, interpretation and management of information, God, supplanted by man’s technology. May we abridge that even further? God, supplanted by man! As a Christian, does this disturb you? It should DEEPLY. Are you thinking we are coming full circle to Satan’s opening salvo in Eden: “Ye shall be as gods”? or that another generation has exchanged “the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever”? Man as god: “while men slept”, Satan has been busy preparing the stage for his masterpiece, “the man of sin … who … exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped … showing himself that he is God.” Satan’s plot to deify his man is quite on target, “the mystery of iniquity doth already work.”
Wholesale unbelief fueling the ascendancy of man — the man, “after the working of Satan”; that is the deeply disturbing legacy of an otherwise vital and beneficial information age. A moment’s reflection before God whose “way is in the sanctuary” will help us to understand that this legacy is affecting each of us daily in dampening our commitment to Christ and intimidating us in our witness to a perishing world. “The wise shall understand”. May the Lord impart to each of our hearts a sense of burden and urgency for “the night cometh when no man can work.”
Now please excuse an abrupt digression. Imagine, if you will, a geographic area the size of the continental United States carpeted and with ten thousand trees per square mile, each tree containing fifty thousand leaves. Now, of course, that’s a lot of leaves, about a thousand million million. But if you were to “wire” the human brain, that’s also about the number of connections you’d need to make among the ten thousand million nerve cells present. Now those connections could be no random tangle but, rather, a communication grid more complex than the entire global communications network. And that incredibly complex human brain communicates with other human brains to make computers and the Internet. And certainly we are impressed with computers and the Internet, but how about being impressed with ULTIMATE TECHNOLOGY displayed by the God who created man in His own image?
And that’s just the beginning, for in each one of those brain cells is sufficient information embedded in the genetic code, the metabolic pathways, and the remaining biological chemistry which, if printed, would fill about ten million pages. Are we impressed with a 680 Meg compact disc held by Microsoft’s Bill Gates seated on a stack of paper fifty five feet high to depict the amount of information which that disc stores? How about a stack the height of the world trade center for EACH cell! And the capacity of DNA in that cell to store information on a molecular level is staggering: all those ten million pages of information are ultimately encoded in the DNA sequence which, if printed in a condensed form using just the “nucleotide bases”, would produce a stack of paper forty five stories high! Yet all that encoded information stored in the cell weighs less than a billionth of gram (or less than one-hundred-billionth of a pound)! In fact, all the information necessary to specify every species of organism that has ever existed on this planet could be contained in a teaspoon with room left for every book ever written! Then too, each one of those indescribably complex cells can reproduce itself in a matter of hours by a process called meiosis. And this reproduction occurring, would be somewhat akin in complexity to a major city spontaneously reproducing itself! This is technological obsolescence?
Ultimate technology; how else could the Divine handiwork be described? Now, after explaining all this to David, would he have somehow slipped into unbelief? The mere suggestion is repugnant and preposterous isn’t it? “I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalm 139:14). That’s ultimate technology. “It is high, I cannot attain to it”; our information age has abundantly confirmed David’s words. But that shouldn’t surprise us. You see, David knew “right well” because he knew his God, who so intimately knew him.
Reference:
Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler, Inc.
Bethesda, Md 1986, Chapter 14: “The Puzzle of Perfection.”
“The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of Webster’s unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing plant” (Dr. Edwin Conklin, Princeton).
