And when a great multitude had gathered, and they had come to Him from every city, He spoke by a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trampled down, and the birds of the air devoured it. Some fell on rock; and as soon as it sprang up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up with it and choked it. But others fell on good ground, sprang up, and yielded a crop a hundredfold.” When He had said these things He cried, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Then His disciples asked Him, saying, “What does this parable mean?” And He said, “To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is given in parables, that ‘Seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’ Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Those by the wayside are the ones who hear; then the devil comes and takes away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved. But the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, who believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away. Now the ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity. But the ones that fell on the good ground are those who, having heard the word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience.” Luke 8:4-15
In verse 8, Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” As I was reading this passage, I thought about why Jesus kept referring to “hearing” Of course, in Old Testament times and in the days when they passed into New Testament times, individuals would not have had their own personal Bible to carry around and read as we do today. This is why we find in the Bible that king would gather the Israelites together and have them listen to the five books of Moses being read aloud (see 2 Kings 23:2).
I think it was very important for them to listen to the Bible being read aloud by the prophet and king.
Let’s consider our bodies. Right now you are hearing sounds through your ears. The process by which the sounds are delivered through the ears to the brain is quite unique. I am told that the sounds go through three processes as they travel from their remote origin to the auditory nerves and then on to the brain.
First the sounds move through the air. Then they enter the ear and lightly agitate the eardrum. Beyond the eardrum there are three bones. There, in what is called the “middle ear,” there are these very thin bones. The sounds that have traveled through the air, agitate these bones. The sounds that have traveled through the air, agitate the solid bone, and then they come to the three semicircular canals, the cochlea, and the Eustachian tube of the inner ear. The sounds that have traveled along the bones then pass through the liquid called perilymph inside the cochlea and then on to the brain. The cochlea is full of liquid. The vibrations cause waves in this liquid, and from there the sounds are transmitted to the brain.
God gave us these auditory organs so that we might understand His word, and I wonder if it was just by chance that they are formed in this way. They have been made with such great precision that we cannot say this just happened by chance. The sounds are transmitted through the air, and then bones, and then waves of liquid, and God also exists in this world in this way. The Bible says that since the creation of the world, God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead (see Romans 1:20). Our ears also are one of God’s creations.
In autumn the leaves change color and fall from the trees. In winter it snows, and in spring buds sprout from the trees that had seemed to be dead. When we see this power of life in the natural world, we may think, “Does that all happen by chance? Isn’t it possible because there is a Creator?” If we read the book of Job carefully, we find it says that there is hope for a tree. Even though a tree may appear to be dead, later it will be revived, but man only lives once and when he dies, it is over (see Job 14:7-10). Through facts such as these we can sense something of the nature of God.
At some point in the past, I began to take an interest in the human body, and as I studied it, it seemed to me that a person need only study the details of the human body in order to see that it could not possibly have come about by chance. The human body is the house or the shell inside of which each one of us lives. No matter how deeply man studies medical science, he cannot know by what power things happen within the cells of the body. Of course, he has a rough idea of what happens within the cells. But it is not possible to discover medically the power that enables all this activity within the cells. There is no way man can discover this without looking in the Bible.
Let’s go back to talking about the ear. We live our lives not paying much attention to our ears. Yet, you do not just hear all the sounds that come to your ears; those sounds go through the process I have just explained. Sound waves move through the air that God has granted us and gather at the ear. Then they agitate the eardrum which in turn agitates the tiny bones in the middle ear. From there the sounds travel to the cochlea in the inner ear where they cause waves in the perilymph, and from there they are carried on to the brain. The system of the brain that receives the sounds is also very complex.
I wonder why God made it this way. With His power, He could have made it a simple process. Why did God make it so that the sounds would have to pass through the air, then through something solid, and then through a liquid within my body in order for them to reach my brain where they can be deciphered so that I can understand them. It is the same when it comes to our sight. The light passes through the pupils and on to the retina and optic nerves at the back of the eye.
Yet, when we read the Bible, we find that God appears to man in a similar way. Sometimes He uses His voice and speaks to man; sometimes He sends angels and speaks through them; and sometimes He appears in person. The passage we have just read contains the words that God spoke when He came to this world in the flesh just like ours. Then He promised that after He had been crucified He would send the Holy Spirit.
God Who Exists in the Eternal Present
The era of the church, in which we are now living, is an age in which we have the tremendous privilege of being able to be saved through believing the words of the Bible in our hearts. Would it be possible for us to enjoy such a privilege if God had not created man, or man had come into existence by chance? Even if we just study the human body, we can see that it is very precise and mysterious and could not have just come about by chance.
This could not have come about by itself. Would an automobile company just set out a roll of sheet metal, put a bottle of oil beside it, and then wait for it to become a car? They may leave the metal there for millions of years, but it will never become a car, and yet since the Creator is invisible, people say this world came about by itself.
God said, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). The process of creation is revealed in the verse that says, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:3-5). At the end of the process, man was formed in the image of God. Metabolism takes place within the human body, and the nerves transmit information. When we examine this carefully, we can see that everything is too perfect to have come about by itself.
Nevertheless, people tend to ignore God because they do not know about their own bodies. They a
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