I remember the first time I read Exodus 3, verses 13 and 14. The text reads: 13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” It’s one of those verses that stop you and make you read it over again.

Charles John Ellicott was an English Christian theologian who died in 1905. In his commentary on Exodus 3:13-14, he writes this: It is generally assumed that this is given to Moses as the full name of God. But perhaps it is rather a deep and mysterious statement of His nature. “I am that which I am.” My nature, i.e., cannot be declared in words, cannot be conceived of by human thought. I exist in such sort that my whole inscrutable nature is implied in my existence. I exist, as nothing else does—necessarily, eternally, really. If I am to give myself a name expressive of my nature, so far as language can be, let me be called “I AM.”

I’m not nearly as eloquent as Charles Ellicott so my first thought about the name “I AM,” was how magnificent and humbling! If you read the blog I wrote about God being the Creator of life, it focused on man being created in God’s image and dealt with microscopic evidence. This blog will focus telescopically on God’s creation of the universe as detailed in the first chapter of Genesis, especially in verses 14-19. It’s day four in His creation and marks the creation of the moon, sun and other heavenly bodies. It takes someone called “I AM” to create stars, galaxies and a universe.

There is so much man has learned about the expanse of the universe and yet we have only learned a small fraction of what God created when He spoke it into existence (Genesis 1:3, Psalm 33:6 and 148:5, Hebrews 11:3). Science has learned, without a doubt, that “I AM” is a God of precision both on a microscopic and telescopic level. One example of the latter is the distance from Earth to the moon, 238,900 miles. If that distance was closer, the moon’s gravitational forces would cause extreme ocean tides and would flood much of the surface of the earth every day. If the distance was much further, the gravitational forces would be so minimal that the oceans would stagnate and have little or no tidal action. The result would be the end of life as we know it. The oceans contribute about half of the oxygen we breathe. Without that oxygen, virtually every living thing (e.g., fish, algae, plankton reefs) in the oceans and mankind could no longer live. So, God has precisely placed the Earth and its moon to sustain life on planet Earth. Psalm 19:1-2 states: 1The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

“I AM” is big! God created our galaxy and that’s really big, but big is relative. Planet Earth and our moon and sun all reside in the Milky Way galaxy. When science describes the Milky Way galaxy, light years is the unit of measurement. One light year is the distance light travels at 186,000 miles every second. In one year light travels 5.88 trillion miles. Light can go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second. Our Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years across and is composed of billions of stars. Look at a picture of the Milky Way galaxy and you can’t even see planet Earth. The way I think about that is to take a needle and make a tiny prick on the largest wall in your home. The needle prick is still too big to show the relative size of planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy!

Our schools and news media are obsessed by manmade global warming. Can I ask you to consider this? As believers we agree that God is in control. Earth, which God formed, is a tiny spec in our galaxy and its climate is influenced by galactic forces whereon man has zero control. Our sun has a surface temperature of 10 million degrees and is 91-94.5 million miles from Earth depending on Earth’s orbit. Now factor in the temperature of the atmosphere at 5 miles above Earth where airplanes fly. It’s 60 F degrees below zero. Somehow the great “I AM” has precisely calculated those temperatures and distances so that mankind can exist. Our wonderful planet is where “I AM” chose to create man in His image and where He sent His Son. Would God in all His Creator magnificence allow mankind to destroy His creation? I emphatically say no!

Naturally we ask, just how many galaxies are in the “known” universe to which the answer is about 100 billion. That’s just how big “I AM’ is! To further emphasize that fact, the Hubble telescope, the most powerful man has made, cannot see all the galaxies God has created. Think about that. Hubble can’t see a galaxy that is thousands of light years in size! Isaiah 40:26 states: Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.

We were created by “I AM” as was the universe. That’s how magnificent our God is. He alone is worthy of our praise. Psalm 145:3 says “Great is the LORD, and highly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable”. Psalm 90:1-4 states: 1LORD, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. 2Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. 3You turn people back to dust, saying, "Return to dust, you mortals." 4A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.

Thank you, God for your creation and for your mighty power and love that sustains all life. Thank you for sending your only Son, Jesus who came to Earth to set an example of perfection and died on the cross for my sins and the sins of the world. Thank you that He arose from the grave after three days, conquering sin and death so that we may have eternal life with You.

Additional reference material can be found at: The Fine Tuning of the Universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE76nwimuT0 Louie Giglio: Our God is Indescribable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVsqCLyoU3o

Do you have a family member, friend or acquaintance who just can’t accept the existence of a Holy God who creates life? Is that a wall preventing them from understanding and accepting God’s saving grace? Let’s explore the Bible and some science that should enable them to see the Light.

What are some key points they can be referenced in God’s word? Genesis 1:26-27 says 26 “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Notice the word “our” is used in these verses. This refers to and includes the image of Jesus, the Son of God, who walked and lived on the Earth for some 33 years. Jesus looked like we look and He was seen by thousands of people so we can prove it’s a fact that we are made/created in the image of God. The scripture says that mankind rules over birds, livestock, fish, wild animals and all creatures that move along the ground. Is there any doubt that man is superior to all the animals? No, so it’s a fact that we rule over them either in strength, intellect or both. We can logically conclude then that the Bible is correct when it says we are made in God’s image and have dominion over animals.

Let’s discuss some science. Does someone you know think that God could not have created man but instead mankind was made when a bolt of lightning struck the sea and subsequently man evolved into the humans we are today? I wonder, did the lightning create two people, a man and a woman? Consider that the First Law of Thermodynamics states that “neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. The amount of energy in the universe is constant – energy can be changed, moved, controlled, stored, or dissipated. However, this energy cannot be created from nothing or reduced to nothing. Every natural process transforms energy and moves energy, but cannot create or eliminate it.” Given this universally accepted law, a logical person would agree that mankind wasn’t created from primordial soup. Stop here and ask yourself who made the soup! A fellow brother in Christ, Jerry Lawrence, once said “The odds on the spontaneous formation of life are the same as that of a living organism emerging from a prebiotic soup after a tornado swept through a junkyard and assembled a Boeing 747 from materials therein.”

Ken Ham is a well-known Christian apologist and creationist. He was born in 1951 in Australia where he earned a BS degree and now lives in the United States. He is the president of Answers in Genesis (AIG), an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. AIG operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Mr. Ham says: “The evidence is strong that the Genesis genealogies are closed. God created Adam on Day Six, approximately 4,000 years before Christ. There does not seem to be any support for the notion that there are gaps in the Genesis genealogies.” Mr. Ham is saying that his studies, and others, show the first man was Adam and that all of us are descended from him. Christ was born on planet Earth 4000 years later and since then 2019 years have elapsed. When you add 2019 years to the 4000 years, then mankind has been on Earth for about 6000 years. An individual who believes in the theory of evolution will readily admit that for evolution to occur, it would take millions, not thousands of years. Note that whenever the word evolution is mentioned it’s almost always associated with the word theory. Merriam-Webster defines a theory as “an unproved assumption.” A question we can ask ourselves and especially any non-believers is: If you believe in God and that He made man in his own image, how could you possibly believe man is evolving into something that isn’t the image of God? Put another way, a sovereign God wouldn’t say one thing (made in His own image) and then allow Himself to be proven a liar should man evolve into something different.

So far, we have considered our image from a macroscopic view so now let’s consider the science of our image from the microscopic viewpoint. It’s easy to see a person’s image, or is it? Here are just a few facts about the human eye. It’s about one-inch in diameter and weighs about ¼ ounce. That’s small but think about this. Each eye has about 120 million rods used for seeing objects in dim light and six million cones used to see objects in color. All 126 million rods and cones are located on the retina, itself just a small part of the eye. Ask yourself, or your friend, could something this tiny and yet so complex and amazing have been created by anybody other than our God, the great I AM? Smaller yet than rods and cones is one of the most studied components of life—DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is genetic material found in humans, animals and plants. It is unique to every human ever created, even in identical twins. It’s like a reference library that contains all the necessary information on how to create you, and only you. There are thousands of books written on DNA and what it does. DNA is located within each human cell and there are some 100 trillion cells in a human body. How small, significant, powerful and amazing is DNA? Four grams of DNA (less than a teaspoon) could hold all the information ever known to mankind (1)!

There are many more microscopic components of man, plants and animals that can be studied and are truly mind blowing; i.e., how our brain functions, our life sustaining blood, how food is broken down by enzymes to become fuel for our bodies and so on. It’s true that the more you know, the more you don’t know. How many times have we been told that a scientific study shows that such and so is true and then ten years later it’s all wrong? That’s the difference between our mind and God’s. One of my favorite Bible verses is Isaiah 55:8-9: 8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

We serve a mighty Creator.

Psalm 139:13-18 13For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! 18Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand- when I awake, I am still with you.

For reference please consider:

(1) Scientists say all the world’s data can fit on a DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon. By Mike Murphy February 17, 2015. https://qz.com/345640/scientists-say-all-the-worlds-data-can-fit-on-a-dna-hard-drive-the-size-of-a-teaspoon/

“The Human Eye Genius of God” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHUjnfig5N8

What is DNA and how does it work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwibgNGe4aY

The Six Days of Creation” by Ken Ham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjccbg0gq8M