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"What Is Man?"
Not long ago an event took place that riveted the attention of the entire world. In fact, I don’t suppose that anywhere in the civilized world there could hardly have been found a person who was not aware of the destruction of Flight 007. Everyone was vitally concerned. After it was discovered that this plane had been shot down by the Soviets, and after other similar atrocities had been catalogued by the news media, questions were raised in the minds of people that might not have asked them before.

I recall my daughter saying to me in some astonishment after hearing of some similar types of things that were done by the Soviets, “How could they do these sorts of things to human beings?”

And I said to her, “Jennifer, what is a human being?”

I would like to ask you the same question today: what is a human being? The psalmist asked that very question in the Eighth Psalm, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

And in all of the discussion that surrounded the downing of Flight 007, I never once heard any discussion of this particular matter which I think is vital to our understanding of how anyone can treat human beings like that. What is man? Is he, as the scriptures say, a little lower than the angels created by God, or is he a little higher than the anthropoids having evolved from the slime? Is he a special creation endowed with purpose, and significance, and value, who has a glorious destiny ahead of him, or is he simply the chance concatenation of atoms, and amino acids, who crawled up out of some primeval ocean to wiggle his way up into the trees and back down again, standing on all fours, and finally becoming man?

If he is just an animal, distantly related to guinea pigs and mice, then we might well remember what we do, even in this country, to guinea pigs and mice in our laboratories. And we might begin to think also of the fact that when others come to conclude that men are essentially no different than that, they will do the very same things to human beings.

We have all cringed in horror at the stories of Auschwitz and Dachau and the Nazi atrocities. Hitler had first become convinced that man was simply the chance result of evolution, that man had no ultimate destiny and was essentially related to the animals.

And now the Communists have come with the very same idea. Man is simply a highly-evolved primate, and therefore he may be slaughtered by the thousands, by the millions, by the tens of millions.

Mao Tse-tung was convinced of that and it enabled him to kill (as the Senate of the United States concluded from an investigation) up to sixty-three million Chinese.

Over one hundred million people have been killed by the Communists, because I believe that at the basis of all of that treatment of human beings, there is a view that man is simply an animal.

I recently read a report by one of America’s leading atheists. He said, “And what is a man anyway but simply one of the primates.”

My friends, the history of what happens to animals in this world has not been too pretty and if that is extended to human beings, I believe that our future might be bleak indeed. But if on the other hand, man is a creature created by God who has a magnificent origin in the mind of the Almighty, that he is created with purpose and significance and value, that he has a glorious destiny, then that makes quite a different story.

You see, purpose is only placed in something by a creator. I said to someone just the other day — it had been raining and the wind had been blowing rather furiously and there was a pile of debris outside the door: dust, and dirt, and grass, and leaves that had been swirled about and blown up into the corner. And I said to this lady, “Suppose I were to take a handful of that debris and ask this question, ‘what is the purpose of this?’”

She looked somewhat amazed and said, “Well, of course, it has no purpose at all.”

On the other hand this watch that I have has a purpose, and the purpose was given to it by a creator. So it is with man. Unless he is created, he has no purpose. This is why evolutionists agree that purpose is a word that must not be uttered: purpose or teleology. The idea that there is an ultimate meaning and purpose to life is anathema to their whole system. Man has no such purpose.

If he has no purpose, then he also has no ultimate meaning to his life. And if his life is not related to an eternal God, it has no ultimate significance or value.

And I believe it is time that Americans should begin to think about these things what may have been considered seemingly harmless theories taught to children in school may result in Dachaus, Auschwitzes, and Gulag Archipelagoes. Yes, my friend, it makes a tremendous difference what man is. Is he that which is created by the finger of God, or is he the chance happening of amino acids and proteins?

What is your thought? What is man? Is he something created by God or did he just happen?

Well, some of you say, “Is it not scientifically true that life just evolved naturally out of the slime, out of the primordial ooze?” Well it's interesting that all sorts of scientific information has been coming to light of late, most of which has been repressed from the general public which points just in the other direction.

For example, it has been discovered recently with the sciences of probability that there is just no chance at all that life is going to spontaneously arise. The Center for Probability Studies in Evolution in California has made this conclusion: that the possibilities of one single usable protein molecule ever having evolved by chance in an entire world of a primordial ocean is 10 to the 254th power years. Now that is a figure that is so large that truly it boggles our minds. Now that is the time that it would take to produce a single protein. To produce thousands of proteins and the vast complexity of a human cell would take a period infinitely longer than that.

By the way, the scripture says, “When I consider the moon and the stars, the work of thy hands which thou hast ordained, what is man?”

As we look out at the Milky Way or our nearest neighbor of the Andromeda Galaxy, and we consider — what is man? — well, my friend, I would like to tell you this: that every cell in your body is vastly more complex than the Milky Way. In fact, the smallest organic substance known to man, a single cell, is more complex than the most complex inorganic thing now known to man. The most complex substance in the entire universe lies between your two ears, the human brain. Indeed it didn’t just happen by chance.

10 to the 254th power — they tried to explain to us what that really means, how long it would take to produce such a molecule. Let me give you an idea. They said that suppose we take the entire universe, all of the hundreds of billions of galaxies, with all of their hundreds of billions of stars, and suppose we decide to move the entire galaxy over one galaxy’s width, some thirty billion light years. How long would it take? Well, we’re going to hire the smallest moving company we know, the Amoeba Moving Company, one single amoeba. And he’s going to do it one atom at a time, and he’s going to do it at the slowest possible pace. What is the slowest pace imaginable: the shortest space in the longest time. An angstrom unit, the measure of the smallest atom, the hydrogen atom, is the smallest space known to man. The longest time would be the supposed length of the entire universe, fifteen billion years.

So our amoeba is going to take one atom at a time, moving one angstrom unit every fifteen billion years, and it’s going to take that atom all of the way across the whole width of the galaxy and set it down somewhere else. Suppose he starts with the hangnail on your little finger. Of course, he will not have moved one atom even any appreciable distance during your lifetime or during the entire existence of the universe, fifteen billion years, because he will only have moved it one angstrom unit by that time.

But suppose that he finally manages to get it there and comes back at the same space, takes another atom — finally moves your whole hangnail, your little finger, your whole body, and everybody else in the world, the entire planet, the solar systems, the sun, the Milky Way, and all of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies over there — when he has finished, there will not have been time to produce a single usable protein. In fact, if every human being on the face of the earth started counting today and counted night and day for the next five thousand years and then totaled up the numbers they had counted, that amoeba would move that many universes before a single protein molecule would be formed. That is 10 to the 254th power. That’s for one protein.

To produce a cell — it would take 10 to the 119,000th power years. There is no conceivable way of telling you what that is.

But there are those who would suppose to have us believe that you just take a cup of any sort of something and set it down for a little while and something is going to form, come together, crawl out and wiggle around. And wherever the ingredients of life may be found, life is surely to pop up.

My friends, the facts of science say “no”. So much so that it is interesting that Dr. Francis Crick who was one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule has come to realize that this DNA molecule is vastly more complex than any protein molecule, that it never could have formed on this earth, and so he has devised a view which he calls directed panspermia, which says that some intelligent creature somewhere else in the universe sent these cells to the earth and that’s where life came from, directed cells into the earth.

But that simply lengthens the shadow and stretches out the question — where did those intelligent beings come from that sent these cells to the earth? And that question still remains to be asked.

Of course, it’s also interesting that Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge, one of the world’s two leading astronomers and mathematicians, having done vast calculations in the study of probabilities, concluded in the last several years that not only is there not sufficient time in this world for evolution to take place in a single cell, but furthermore it can never even happen on a cosmic level. Not in all of the time available to us in the cosmos could we ever find time to produce a cell by chance. So therefore, Sir Fred Hoyle, founder of the steady state theory of the origin of the universe, one of the leading scientists in the world, surprised the scientific world when it came out in the London papers that Sir Fred Hoyle said that therefore we must inevitably conclude and are forced to conclude because of the scientific facts that there must be some intelligence somewhere beyond the universe that has created life, and that, he said, you may call if you wish “God”. This from a man who all of his life had been an atheist.

No, man is not a chance happening. He is the purposeful creation of God and he is something that has immense significance and meaning.

I don’t know what you think about your life but you happen to be looking right at the moment and listening to royalty. Yes, royalty. I’m not the son of any mere human king or queen, but my father is the King of Kings and Lord of all Lords. I am a child of God, and I’ve been made to live forever in the palace of the King. I have a great destiny. Indeed when the stars are burnt out, I will have just begun to fulfill my destiny.

And if you belong to Christ, then you know the same thing is true of you. We are not struggling our way unknown in the slime or slithering down from up in the trees. No, we have been placed here by the hand of an infinitely wise and omnipotent God. We have been placed here for a purpose — to glorify him and to make him known to men.

This is what man is. And therefore those who believe that man is of such value and such significance cannot possibly countenance treating human beings in the fashion about which we spoke earlier.

Furthermore, knowing what we are, it makes our sin all the more grievous. I am afraid that the reason that many people do not want to consider the fact of their divine origin is because of the fact that they do not want to be accountable to God. The head of Unesco said on a television program that I heard a few years ago, “The reason, I suppose, that we jumped at the origins, namely Darwin’s origin of species, is because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” That was Sir Julian Huxley, president of Unesco, one of the world’s leading scientists. I must confess that I almost fell out of my chair. When he said that, it almost seemed like it was confession time. The idea of God interfered with our sexual mores — that there is a God to whom we are accountable, and who will call us to give an account of our lives.

Yes, the fact of the significance and dignity of our life makes our sin all the more heinous. But thank God that there is good news there as well. Not only do we come from the hand of a great God and are we on our way to the home of a great God, but that same creator has provided a divine redeemer in Jesus Christ to come into this world, as Officer Pepp said this evening, “to pay a price that we could not afford to pay.” He took upon him the guilt of our sin. Our Father imputed to him all of our iniquity, and he endured in our place a penalty which we cannot imagine.

If we find that it is difficult to conceive the vast ages of time that it would take for a cell to come into existence by chance, my friends, it is equally difficult for us to conceive of what Jesus Christ endured for us. The penalty of sin, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said 500 years ago, “is an infinite penalty.” It cannot be paid by man, or goat, or bull. It must be paid by an infinite person. And yet it is man that has sinned and therefore it must be an infinite man, a God-man, a theanthropus. Such a person only was to be found in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Son of Man, who came into this world and took upon himself an infinite load of guilt. As the hymnwriter said, “We may not know, we cannot tell, what pains he had to bear, but we believe it was for us, he hung and suffered there.”

And so Christ in his own body, and soul, and spirit, endured the penalty of an infinite and outraged God who punished his own son in our place. We can never fully comprehend such love as this that would give up his own son to the cross and to the very pit of hell, and yet the scripture declares it, and every Christian for 2,000 years has found his hope and his rejoicing in that sacrificial love.

If you have never made that discovery, I hope that now you will lift up your heart to the God of creation who formed the heavens and the earth, and then came down here to die, the creator for the creatures' sin and paid the penalty for you. And he says that if you will put your trust in him, if you will invite him into your heart as lord and master and king of your life, that he will transform you. He will make you a new creature in Jesus Christ. He will forgive all of your sins. He will bury them in the depths of the sea, never to be remembered against you anymore.

And then he promises that you will become his heir and that one day he will receive you into mansions of glory.

What is man? He is the creation of the eternal God who is passing through this world for the purpose of glorifying that creator and who is on his way to spend eternity in the palace of the king.     

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