Genesis 1:25
“And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good”.

One of the most peculiar animals in Australia is the echidna – sometimes known popularly as the spiny anteater. There are actually four species of echidna, but they all resemble the anteater of the Americas. However, they have a number of unique features, the most famous of which is the fact that they lay eggs. For that reason, they are classed along with the platypus in the group monotremes. In fact, Wikipedia – that “fount of all knowledge” – suggests that they “evidently evolved between 20 and 50 million years ago, descending from a platypus-like monotreme”. Yet, their behavior is entirely different from the platypus. If the platypus and echidna were both species of bird, no evolutionist would suggest that one evolved from the other.

Platypuses lay a group of eggs in a burrow and then sit on them. Echidnas, in contrast, lay a single egg, which the female then places in a pouch. In this respect, they are showing a behavior similar to marsupials. We also don’t need to point out the obvious differences in appearance between the animals and their habitats. Are they really suggesting that the echidna just lost its beak over a period of time?

More to the point is the fact that the oldest known fossils of both platypuses and echidnas – old by evolutionary dating methods, that is to say – show no difference from the modern animals. It makes far more sense to say that these animals were designed by God.

creationmoments.com/sermons/strange-and-spiny

“A little over one week ago, Apple approved LifeSiteNews’ application to publish our news on their Apple News platform. Today, without warning, Apple News abruptly reversed course, telling LifeSite that they had deleted our channel and all of our content from their platform. Apple claimed that LifeSite’s channel ‘didn’t comply with our Apple News guidelines.’ Specifically, they stated that LifeSite’s ‘channel content shows intolerance towards a specific group.’ ‘We don’t yet know the reason for Apple’s decision to delete our channel,’ said LifeSiteNews Editor-in-Chief John-Henry Westen. ‘However, at a time when there is growing evidence that tech juggernauts are engaging in concerted censorship against even mainstream conservative viewpoints, Apple’s decision--made unilaterally, and without opportunity to appeal--is frightening. It goes without saying that LifeSite would never promote intolerance or hatred against any group. However, in our current divisive political climate, even mild expressions of common conservative viewpoints are often written off as de facto hatred and intolerance. We certainly hope that this is not what Apple is doing. However, we urge our readers to contact Apple and to respectfully demand that they reinstate LifeSite’s channel.’”

“Apple News Bans LifeSite,” Lifesitenews.com, July 31, 2019

Genesis 1:24
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”

Australia has more than its fair share of unusual animals. Probably the most unusual of all is the platypus. Indeed, when scientists in Britain were first shown platypus skins in 1799, they believed it to be a fake, having been made of several animal parts sewn together!

Of course, it is a genuine species, but, even so, it contains some parts that are not usually expected together. It has a bill like a duck (hence its popular name, the duck-billed platypus), its body is furry, like a mammal, but it can deliver a reptilian-like venom. And, famously, it lays eggs like a bird.

The eggs are more like those of a bird than a reptile. Reptile eggs have a larger yolk than birds, but the platypus egg yolk is small and does not contain as much nutrition as that of a reptile. The reason for this seems clear. Baby platypuses are nourished by their mother with milk.

The platypus is classed as a mammal, but is classified into a separate group of mammals, called monotremes. The other creature in this group is the echidna, which looks and behaves nothing like the platypus, apart from the fact that it lays eggs. Evolutionists believe that this group of mammals is left over from the early evolution of mammals from reptiles. In fact, the platypus appears to be uniquely designed by God, filling a niche in the ecology of Australia that belongs to no other creature.

creationmoments.com/sermons/the-amazing-platypus

“Adorned with bright smiles and clothed in colorful garb, Uighur Muslims held in political reeducation camps flash across the screen as they sing and dance triumphantly to the words that President Xi Jinping wrote just for them. These sights, captured by the BBC, are what the Chinese government wants journalists and the outside world to see. No amount of colorful displays of political allegiance, however, can hide the reality: Not one of these people is in a political reeducation facility of their own accord. One interchange in the video is especially telling. The BBC reporter asks one of the men whether it was his choice to be in a political reeducation facility. ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘A policeman at my village told me to get enrolled in the school and transform my thoughts.’ The reporter also speaks to Chinese officials. Nearly every one alludes to the notion that the roughly 800,000 to 1 million people interned in Xinjiang are affected by religious extremism and in need of reeducation so that their thinking aligns with the Chinese Communist Party. The conflation of religion with extremism took shape in new regulations instituted in February of last year. These regulations continue the government’s practice of ‘Sinicizing’--or secularizing--religion, so that it conforms to the core tenets of the Communist Party. In addition to ‘thought transformation,’ people in these facilities must undergo Mandarin lessons, self-criticism sessions, forced labor, and even torture. Occasionally, there are deaths. The BBC reporter notes up front that the facilities they were permitted to visit were cleaned up for journalists’ prying eyes. Satellite images showed that prior to the BBC’s visit, watchtowers and barbed wire were removed from the premises and barren outdoor spaces were transformed into sports facilities. Documentaries like this one are incredibly important to building a human rights case against the Chinese government. They provide additional evidence, especially of what the Chinese government wants the outside world to see. Such evidence augments the troves of satellite imagery collected over the last several years and eye-witness testimony of former prisoners, who can testify that these facilities are far from benign. The existence of these facilities and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people arbitrarily detained within their walls is now irrefutable.”

“BBC Report Shows Disturbing Nature,” The Stream, July 1, 2019

Genesis 1:1-2
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

We have commented before on what is often called Fermi’s Paradox. This well-known scientific paradox concerns the lack of intelligent life in the universe. It has been suggested that one way to phrase the paradox is simply to ask the question: “Where is everybody?” If there are intelligent life forms out there, shouldn’t we have come into contact with some of them by now?

Douglas Adams, in his hilarious book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, calculated the population density of the universe thus: There must be a finite number of intelligent life forms, but space is infinite, so the population density is a finite number divided by infinity. Any number divided by infinity is zero. Therefore, the intelligent population of the universe is zero, and any that you might meet are just the products of a deranged imagination.

A new idea, mentioned in New Scientist, is that we haven’t been looking long enough yet! Other suggestions that they quote are: “There’s also a chance aliens are hiding from us. They may live in parts of the galaxy we struggle to see, such as deep in the galactic center around the supermassive black hole.”

It is worth reminding ourselves that God made the Earth unique. He made the Earth on the first day of creation, whereas other planets and stars were made on day four. The uniqueness of Earth is part of God’s plan. The paradox of empty space is not a paradox after all.

creationmoments.com/sermons/the-paradox-of-empty-space

Genesis 1:28
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

One movie that I might like to see shortly would be First Man. The first man to which it refers is Neil Armstrong – the first man to step on the Moon. The reason for the movie is clear. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of that historic mission. I remember, even growing up in England, the excitement of that event. I particularly remember the canceling of lessons in our primary school and this large black and white TV being wheeled into the school hall so that we could watch the BBC’s broadcast of the events.

New Scientist magazine has a video interview about the movie, but this also links to a 2009 article, from the 40th anniversary, which asked a question that I have often asked myself – why was Armstrong not the first man of many on the Moon?

Watching the BBC coverage, despite my young age, and despite the lack of access to videotape, I vividly remember the BBC’s astronomer, Patrick Moore, opining that “there will certainly be colonies on the Moon by the end of the Century.”

I do not know if there is a major theological point to make about the possible exploration of God’s Lesser Light, yet the desire to explore and subdue the Lunar surface seems to me to be part of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28. On the other hand, my late mother thought they had spoiled the Moon by putting footprints on it without wiping them away!

creationmoments.com/sermons/first-man-of-many

“Vincent Lambert died today, at age 42. He became a quadriplegic in a ‘vegetative state’ in 2008. France’s highest court ruled that his food and water should be removed. Make no mistake, the French government is guilty here. It could and should have intervened to protect this citizen. But the bad actor here seems to be the person with legal power over Vincent’s fate: his wife. Mr. Lambert was not in excruciating pain. He seemed to live comfortably on simple food and water support. He responded to stimuli. Vincent’s mother reported: ‘He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,’ she said, according to Reuters. ‘He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have shown that this is not necessary.’ She also emphasized that he has reacted to their voices, stating, ‘In May, when learning about his planned death, he cried.’ We have no room to throw stones. Too few of us recall the horrors of Terri Schiavo’s death in 2005. As I wrote at the time: Here’s a woman who was not in a coma, was not brain dead, and didn’t require elaborate machines to stay alive—just a nutrition drip in the stomach, of the sort any one of us might need after, say, a tonsillectomy. And yet American courts decided that her adulterous husband had the right to impose her death by starvation and thirst. As St. Louis neurologist William Burke told author Wesley Smith, as he was researching his book on euthanasia Forced Exit. ‘Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death.’ We should prepare ourselves. Throughout the West, collapsed birth rates and huge cohorts of retirees will exert enormous pressure on health systems. Countries with few babies, and few workers paying in, will have a very strong motive to accept active euthanasia. As in a poison pill, or a needle in the arm. It’s quicker, cheaper, and in one sense more ‘merciful’ than the ‘passive’ method of letting people like Mr. Lambert die of thirst. That’s in our future. And I think judges and policymakers in places like France are purposely authorizing the slow, agonizing deaths by thirst of patients such as Mr. Lambert. Why? Precisely because they’re so horrible. The public, sentimental and easy to manipulate via almost unanimous media, will respond not by demanding that sick people like Mr. Lambert be saved. But instead, that we kill them more quickly and painlessly. Like the animals that Darwinism tells us we really are.”

​“France Let a Wife,” The Stream, July 11, 2019

Job 40:15
“Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.”

New dinosaur discoveries are always interesting. So, in the week that I write this script, another new dinosaur has been discovered, this time in South Africa. Ledumahadi mafube probably weighed about 12 tons, which would make it about twice the size of an elephant, and was discovered in Free State Province. Discoverers have suggested that it is an ancestor of the sauropod dinosaurs. It is a lot smaller than the sauropod giants, such as brachiosaurus – thought to have been 32 tons.

The ScienceDaily article, announcing this find, has some interesting use of language. The discoverers date this creature at 200 million years ago, whereas brachiosaurus has an evolutionary date of 154 million years. Therefore, ledumahadi is considered older than other sauropods, and the relative shortness and width of its legs led the ScienceDaily writers to suggest that it was “evolutionary ‘experiment’ with giant body size”.

This idea of an evolutionary experiment is interesting because evolutionists insist that evolution proceeds by the natural selection of favorable mutations, which include new genetic information. This reification of a supposed random event underscores the paucity of evolutionary evidence. One researcher commented, “The way that these animals solved the usual problems of life, such as eating and moving, was much more dynamic within the group than previously thought.” Such a statement suggests a purpose behind the alleged evolutionary changes in dinosaurs, even though they believe in a random purposeless process. But God had His purpose for everything that He had made.

creationmoments.com/sermons/a-south-african-giant

“A Christian doctor lost his job in a government department after he refused to refer to ‘a six-foot-tall bearded man’ as ‘madam’, a tribunal heard. Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs. The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: ‘If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as she and Mrs, would you do that?’ Dr Mackereth, an evangelist who now works as an emergency doctor in Shropshire, claims his contract was then terminated over his refusal to use transgendered pronouns. He argues that he was dismissed ‘not because of any realistic concerns over the rights and sensitivities of transgender individuals, but because of my refusal to make an abstract ideological pledge’. The doctor is now suing the government at an employment tribunal for discrimination on the grounds of his religious belief. A hearing in Birmingham was told how Dr Mackereth believes transgenderism is a ‘delusional belief’ and an ideology ‘which I disbelieve and detest’. In a statement admitted into evidence, he told the court: ‘If you believe in gender fluidity, gender is no more than one’s own fantasy about oneself.’ In a statement put before the court, Dr Mackereth said: ‘I appreciate that in the present political climate, some people, including some of those who believe they are transgender, may find my beliefs to be offensive. However, in a free society, this is not a good enough reason to censor my beliefs and coerce me to act contrary to my conscience. Moreover, as a doctor, my responsibility is always to act in good conscience in the best interest of the patients--not to adopt various fancies, prejudices, or delusions, to avoid offence at all cost.’ Dr Mackereth added that his inherent belief is that transgenderism is a ‘rebellion against God, which is both pointless and sinful’. He said: ‘I am, of course, aware that there are men or women who believe they have been trapped in a wrong body, and I do not question the sincerity of their convictions. A small number of such people have always existed.  Up until recently, such a belief was considered by medics to be delusional and a symptom of a medical disorder. It is only recently that transgenderism has been recognized as normal and such delusional beliefs accepted at face value. What is responsible for that change is political pressure, not scientific evidence.’”

“Christian Doctor,” The Telegraph, July 10, 2019

Psalm 8:3-4
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”

What do we do when brilliant experimental research is interpreted according to evolutionary worldviews, which are clearly impossible? Just such a dilemma occurred to me recently as I read a scientific paper that asked the question: “Did key building blocks for life come from deep space?”

The building blocks to which they refer are phosphates. Phosphates do indeed occur widely in biochemistry. A team of experimenters found a synthetic path for a group of phosphate compounds in an artificial environment that they claimed mimicked the conditions found in that period, when they think the Sun’s planets were forming. The experiments that they carried out were done with remarkable care and ingenuity, and they did indeed find a way of making fairly complex phosphates. In my opinion, their experimental innovations were, by themselves, worthy of great credit, and it is their evolutionary application and interpretation that rather detracts from their brilliance.

The compounds were formed in a vacuum chamber cooled to 5K (-450°F). This chamber included ice grains, coated with carbon dioxide and water. The chamber also included phosphine. This mixture was bombarded with high energy electrons to simulate cosmic rays. Eventually, the chamber was found to include compounds such as phosphoric acid, diphosphoric acid and phosphorus oxoacids.

We have, however, already discussed how the standard model of planetary formation by gravitational accretion simply cannot work. We know God created the Solar System on Day Four and the chemicals of life on days three, five and six.

creationmoments.com/sermons/did-the-building-blocks-of-life-begin-in-space

“The engineer, Greg Coppola, a senior software engineer in the Google Assistant division, told Project Veritas that he was going public with his warning in an attempt to encourage increased transparency in Big Tech amid what he described as an increasingly politically biased atmosphere. Claiming there’s no bias in Google’s algorithms is ‘ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’ve been coding since I was ten years old. I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are,’ said Coppola (partial transcript via Project Veritas). ‘They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.’ ‘I think we’re just at a really important point in human history,’ he said in explanation for why he is coming forward. ‘I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all, is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous. And I think more generally we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people. It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?’ Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifying in front of Congress last December that there’s no bias in his company's searches, Coppola said that while he respects Pichai a great deal, the claim is ‘ridiculous.’ ‘I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.’ The problem of political bias in Big Tech has gotten worse in recent years, he argued. After about a decade of relative neutrality, people began to trust companies like Google to provide them unbiased means of finding information. ‘We haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda,’ he said. The turning point in Big Tech from relatively neutral to increasingly partisan, he suggested, was Donald Trump’s presidential run. ‘I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist’ he said. ‘And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.’"

“Google Engineer,” DailyWire, July 24, 2019

Psalm 104:31-32
“The glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.”

I live in a subduction zone. The small Juan de Fuca tectonic plate lies off the coast of Oregon and Washington state. This plate is being pushed underneath the North American plate. It is the friction of this subduction that melts rock miles underground and a hundred miles in from the coast. This molten rock or magma can sometimes emerge, forming new layers on the volcanoes that facilitate the emergence of the magma. This subduction is occurring at painfully slow speeds of just a fraction of an inch per year. Evolutionists make the mistake of assuming that what is slow today must always have been slow.

In the 1980s, geologist Dr. John Baumgardner realized that, in its initial phase, subduction could have happened very rapidly indeed. He called this “runaway subduction” and showed that in fact that cold, solid plate material could have sunk into the semi-molten mantle of the Earth. In 1987, he predicted that such material could probably be detected.

In 2005, a report was published, showing the existence of a large solid lump in the mantle, which was named as the Farallon Plate. It soon became apparent that the current Juan de Fuca plate is a remaining piece, following the subduction of most of the Farallon plate.

This circulation of cold material in the mantle cannot have happened millions of years ago. In a biblical timescale, we can see that this runaway subduction must have taken place at the beginning of the Flood, which was about 4,500 years ago.

creationmoments.com/sermons/runaway-subduction

America’s Hubble Space Telescope has been capturing stunning photos of God’s amazing universe for nearly 30 years. Last week, Hubble captured a photo of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 2985. It is said to be 70 million light-years away, located in the constellation Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear. “The galaxy is at a perfect orientation for astronomers on Earth to see its incredible structure, with wide arms spreading out into space. The intricate, near-perfect symmetry on display here reveals the incredible complexity of NGC 2985. Multiple tightly wound spiral arms widen as they whirl outward from the galaxy’s bright core, slowly fading and dissipating until these majestic structures disappear into the emptiness of intergalactic space, bringing a beautiful end to their starry splendor” (“Hubble Captured Gorgeous Snapshot,” MSN, July 26, 2019). Earlier in July, Hubble captured an image of NGC 972, a spiral galaxy “that shows vibrant star formation pockets that look like red flowers” (“Hubble Snaps ‘In Bloom’ Spiral Galaxy,” Geek.com, July 1, 2019). If these astronomers didn’t have willful blinders on their eyes, they would all cry out with the Psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). In 1999, observations by NASA astronomers, using the Hubble, suggested that there are 125 BILLION GALAXIES in the universe. The most up-to-date star count was announced in July 2003 as 70 sextillion observable stars (70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Of course, that is probably only a small part of the actual number, and God knows their names. “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4).

(Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143)

Genesis 1:24
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”

According to evolutionary theories, the onward progress of organisms from the simplest single cell to the highest forms of life is achieved by mutations. Evolutionists refer to natural selection as the driving force that causes evolution. Natural selection does appear to occur, but the selection of traits is only possible from those represented by the existing genetic information. The idea behind evolution is that new information is provided by mutations, and this new information, if it assists survival better than what already exists, could be duly selected, thereby causing the onward march of evolution. Karin Viet describes this as evolution appearing to behave “like a white-haired tinkerer, fiddling around with components in his shop until a workable innovation is rolled out. This personification imagines mutations having a creative power that they do not possess, even with the pixie dust of millions of years.”

Viet goes on to show that mutations are usually either harmful or neutral. She shows that beneficial mutations only occur in very restrictive environments where normal conditions do not apply and that such mutations still involve losing or corrupting information. One famous example is that of eyeless fish in caves with no light, where eyes are of no advantage to the fish and can be a disadvantage if the fish injures them. Fish with no eyes cannot get such injuries. God designed the creatures, their genetics and the environments in which they must live back in Genesis 1.

creationmoments.com/sermons/magical-mutations

2 Timothy 3:16-17
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”

The gastornis – a large, extinct, flightless bird – was prowling the forest. Some little creatures called propalaeotheria were behaving like little horses and eating grapes in the afternoon sun. The juice made them somewhat tipsy. Suddenly, the gastornis sprang, running, catching a little propalaeotherium in its beak, shaking it dead, then eating it. That was how one evolution documentary began. Yet, no propalaeuotheria were hurt in the making of the film. That is because the film was an animation. It was all made up by the producers of the BBC series Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.

But was there any real science involved? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. In the Messel Pit in Germany – a well-known fossil graveyard – there was found a fossil gastornis, six fossil propalaeotheria and one fossil bunch of grapes. Using this actual discovery, the filmmakers wove a fiction, lasting about 20 minutes.

A great deal of evolutionary science is like this. Scientists become storytellers, with a clear idea of what their conclusions will be. The evidence is lined up in such a way that it leads to that conclusion, whether it wants to or not.

The issue is not one of evidence. As creationists, we have frequently pointed out that genuine scientific evidence is more consistent with a starting point of biblical truth than of an evolutionary starting point.  But evidence makes no sense by itself until it is interpreted against a worldview. It is presupposition of the truth of Scripture that leads to genuine understanding.

creationmoments.com/sermons/wrong-starting-point-wrong-answer

The Daily Wire reports, “Twenty-year-old conservative activist and prominent Trump supporter Kathy Zhu was reportedly stripped of her Miss Michigan crown from the Miss World America Organization over past ‘insensitive’ social media posts and her refusal to try on a hijab at a college event in 2018. Zhu is a Chinese immigrant who moved to the United States at age five; she became popular in conservative circles for her support for Donald Trump during the 2016 election and for fighting off students attempting to get her expelled from the University of Central Florida for refusing to try on a hijab.  Zhu was named as an Indiana and Michigan 2019 national finalist earlier this week in a bid to move on to the Miss Teen World America preliminary and finals set for October. However, the student was soon informed by the organization via email that she would have to turn in her sash and crown and disassociate with the group over past ‘offensive, insensitive, and inappropriate’ social media posts. ‘Miss World America’s State/National/Chief Director accused me of being racist, Islamophobic, and insensitive,’ Zhu wrote in a post via Twitter, captioning screenshots of an email exchange between her and Miss World America. ‘They stripped me of my Miss Michigan title due to my refusal to try on a hijab in 2018, my tweet about black on black gun violence, and ‘insensitive’ statistical tweets.’ Responding to Laurie DeJack, [Miss World America Michigan State Director] Zhu wrote via text, ‘How is that racist? It’s statistics. Didn’t know statistics were racist’” (“Miss World America Strips Trump Supporter of Title,” Daily Wire, July 19, 2019).

POSTSCRIPT: In the midst of the wholesale assault on freedom of religion and speech, we keep our focus on Jesus Christ and His business. While we don’t support modern beauty contests because of the immodest attire, among other things, the Kathy Zhu story reminds us of the All Persia Beauty Contest about 2,500 years ago in one of the largest, most powerful empires of history. In fact, it seemed invincible until Alexander the Great came blazing in from the west. But one hundred thirty years before Alexander’s birth, history’s greatest beauty contest was held. It was the search for the emperor’s new queen. Here was the plan: “Then said the king’s servants that ministered unto him, Let there be fair young virgins sought for the king: And let the king appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom, that they may gather together all the fair young virgins unto Shushan the palace, to the house of the women, unto the custody of Hege the king’s chamberlain, keeper of the women; and let their things for purification be given them: And let the maiden which pleaseth the king be queen instead of Vashti. And the thing pleased the king; and he did so” (Esther 2:2-4). The efficient royal messengers fanned out across the kingdom on horses, donkeys, mules, and camels, from the Indus Valley to Ionia, from the Caucasian Mountains to Egypt and northern Africa. They searched among the Lycians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, the Thracians, the Syrians, the Cilicians, the Phoenicians, the Mesopotamians, the Medians, the Caspians, the Bactrians, the Armenians, the Parthians, the Sogdians, the Ethiopians, and others. The young Jewish woman Esther won the contest and the king’s heart because she was God’s chosen instrument in saving the Jews at that time and place. The same God who was in control of events then, yet is not even mentioned in the book of Esther, is still in control today, and His people are still in His hands.

(Friday Church News Notes, July 26, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143)

Matthew 10:31
“Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

One of the delights of living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States is being able to watch the hummingbirds. As soon as we saw these remarkable little birds for ourselves, my wife and I knew we had to attract them to our yard. So we invested in feeders and kept them topped up with sugar solution through the summer months. Two species seemed to predominate in our garden – the orange-bellied Rufous and the beautiful, iridescent green Anna’s hummingbird.

Of course, nothing previously seen on the TV screen could prepare me for the delight of watching the little creatures fly backwards as they finished feeding. They rarely landed, so we had no view of their wings, which move so fast that they are just a blur.

Normally, when a bird’s wings upstroke, this is simply to get the wings back in position for another downstroke. Hummingbirds are different. Both strokes have power. The amazing way in which hummingbirds beat their wings uses a huge amount of energy for such a tiny bird. In fact, it has been estimated that hummingbirds need an energy input, which, if scaled up to human dimensions, would be the equivalent of us eating 1,300 hamburgers a day! So much energy would be produced that we would actually catch fire!

It should be obvious that the mechanisms required to cope with such energy changes could not have evolved by chance. The little hummingbird is a wonderful example of God’s design.

creationmoments.com/sermons/remarkable-hummingbirds