Dear Imagine Church Family and Friends,
Some of you may remember the name of Robert Ingersoll. A hundred years ago, he created a great sensation in this country while making lecture tours. Robert Ingersoll proclaimed a sort of arrogant atheism, or at best agnosticism. His father was a modest Congregational minister, but Ingersoll took the other side of the road. I’ve often wondered if it were altogether for reasons of conscience, because he was paid $35,000 a night for a single lecture (and I can promise you that’s a lot more profitable than preaching).
During that time, he once visited Henry Ward Beecher, one of the great Christians of his century. Beecher took Ingersoll into his personal study, and showed him a globe which resembled the earth in incredible detail. Ingersoll looked at the globe and said, “That’s marvelous. Who made it for you?” Beecher’s answer was simple and to the point. “No one,” he said. “It just happened.”
Beecher made his point, I believe. Can a rational person conceive of Creation without a Creator? A journal I subscribe to had a cartoon of a little boy standing near an escalator, and he was steadily watching the moving handrail. A store employee, wondering what he was up to, asked him if anything was wrong. The little boy said, “No, I’m just waiting for my chewing gum to come back.”
That little boy was onto something! This is not a haphazard world. It is dependable. Even a star moves with predictability. Our sun, for instance (a small star, really) pulls nine huge planets and thousands of minor planets, comets, debris, scattered across eight billion miles through space at twelve miles a second. The sun has been doing this for a long time, and it has never spent a moment at a fuel station or run out of energy.
It doesn’t require much of a brain to see that you can’t account for this without some recourse to a “prime source” or “prior intelligence.” That would be as convoluted as imagining a church building just happening without a builder. To assume someone planned and built it is a fairly safe assumption.
When I walk along a beach at sunset, or drive the Blue Ridge Parkway, or look out across the lake on a clear blue morning, I always come away convinced that this world has a builder, and the earth’s loveliness has something to do with us and our pleasure. Only human beings, in our Creation, pause to watch a sunset or to reflect upon the beauty of a rose.
When I reflect on the precision, the predictability. the beauty, and the outstanding features of the earth, I am left with the sense of a debt which I will never be able to repay. There are many ways that God’s love for us is revealed, but one that we often take for granted is simply the gift of our beautiful environment, the green earth. All I can say sometimes is, “Thank you, God.”
In the name of our loving Creator,
Bruce Jones, Pastor Imagine Church
