Christmas: Part 2 - When Eternity Touches Time

Well, here we are again. Part two of the word becomes flesh in stories to make sense of it all, and this is the big story. So I've just teed up Ruth playing away in the manger in the background there, and I want to introduce you to another friend to talk about this subject. This friend has a lot of history with human beings. At the most intimate level, he is a family practice physician. He's a graduate, he's a Wisconsin boy, graduate of the Air Force Academy, went on to MIT in Boston for physics, but changed his mind in the middle of that, ended up going to medical school in Wisconsin, and became a family practice physician. His name is Dr. Robert Humber. He lives here in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is so thorough, so complete. He happens to be my personal doctor, and I have just enjoyed over these years getting to know him and listening to his scientific mind at work. So we've talked about humans and human body a lot. God inhabits a human body. The designer, if you will, chooses to live in the design. I do not get that. I cannot comprehend that. I love it, but I want to talk briefly about what it means to be human, fully alive, and face it. Humans are quirky. I mean, we do goofy things. We make good judgments and terrible judgments. We are unique creations. There is no other human being exactly like you on this planet populated by approximately 7.7 billion of us. You are one of a kind. I was chatting with Bob, my friend, and he told me of an experience he had while working up in Alaska with an Alaska missions doctor, and they had somebody come in who it had a unique experience to say the least. Here it is. We had a man writing his dog sled and a dog sled flipped over and he fractured his leg, and he expected he was going to freeze to death because there would be nobody that would be finding them until he was dead. But fortunately, his neighbor came by within earshot. All of his dogs have piled on top of him to keep him warm, really. Anyways, they brought him into our hospital, and this guy had not had his t-shirt off for five years, and he absolutely refused to take his t-shirt off. So the visionary doctor that I was working with said, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll cut everything completely off, but we'll let him keep the ring of the collar around him. We brought him in and cleaned him up, but we left him keep his collar on. He hadn't had it off for five years. Only here folks, you'll never hear this on another butt. So going from something that's very quirky to something that's very serious, let's make that transition. We talk about how humans act and choices we make, but how are we composed? That is, what are the parts of us? And there is no part of us that probably captures the idea of life better than the blood. Old Testament Scripture says, the life is in the blood. If you run out of blood, you're done. That's how it is. So I wanted to query Dr. Hamburg about that, and this section, I warn you, is scientific. If you if you got a D in biology or a C in chemistry like I did at Cal Berkeley, so many years ago, it may lose you. It loses me, but I keep listening and I'm trying to learn, but it's fascinating. Here it is. So when I was in your office while back, we were talking about blood, and you, you said, you know, we have billions of red blood cells, I guess, that in your given time, is that right? Trillions, that's true. Yeah, trillions, trillions, trillions. Anybody knows that? So after I got control of myself, Bob went on to give me a mini tutorial on how blood works. The bone marrow of the human body is just absolutely incredible in itself. There are three cell lines that come out of the bone marrow. The white blood cells are your defender cells. The rise up in the face of infection or... So if I cut myself, they go to that place. The immune system remembers your defense system, and it heralds the tools that it needs to deliver the treatment that's required. And remember that this is not under the direction of a physician. This is all autonomously done, okay, with the control mechanisms. The white blood cells are your defender cells. The red blood cells are the oxygen transport system of the blood, and the key component of the red blood cell is this molecule called hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is made up of 10,000 atoms, but there are only four atoms of iron that are the key elements of the molecule. The iron is what binds oxygen in the lung and releases it in the tissue. And the iron is in ionic state, which means that it's potentially an oxidative threat to the tissues around it. So it has to be guarded or kept away from the other tissues, and it's done so with a very intricate plaque-like molecular structure that's created around the iron. And it's made just so that an oxygen atom can get at the iron, but the surrounding water molecules, which are not much different in configuration than an oxygen molecule, the water can't get at the iron because of course, of water got at the iron, it would rust up, right, and so it would be completed. So this structure is designed to re-sell. Every red blood cell has packed full of these hemoglobin molecules. And then the third element that comes out of the bone marrow is called the platelet, and that's the most fascinating object. It's really a particle. It's not a cell because it doesn't have a nucleus, so it doesn't have a control system. And the human body, believe it or not, an adult human has got somewhere between 60 and 100,000 miles of blood vessel. So there are 40 feet to 100,000 miles. Because remember, you've got 40 trillion cells, and every one of those cells has to get oxygen, and has to get glucose. So the piping into that system, that's right, every day, every minute, right. And so the piping system is incredibly complex, and they are just estimate somewhere between 60 and 100,000 miles. There are 40,000 miles of interstate in the United States, so it gives you some idea how much you have. So the platelets are basically the pot hole repair crew for the blood vessels of the body. And the platelets are the pot hole repair crew for the vessels, right. So because it has somewhere between 60 and 100,000 miles to do work on every day, it takes around 100 billion platelets a day to repair all the pot holes, 100 billion. And your heart is pumping about 100,000 times at its 100,000 feet, this three quarter pound pump, and it's sending out those platelets to do repair work. That's exactly on the county roads, and by the way, that's a good hand. Folks, this is why I like him being my doc. So the amazing thing about this, remember, is, and so when you say 100 billion a day, that's a million a second. That means every second of every day of your life, your bone marrow had pumped out a million platelets. So Dr. Hamburg is about to explain to us about platelets, but I just want to insert this. If you're like me, sometimes you see doctors as God, okay. And he is quick. And I love this about him. He's quick to say that doctors are not God. And in this little description of platelets, he alludes to that. Now inside that platelet, there's no nucleus, right? But what there are are 300 different proteins that are armed and ready to be released, depending on what that platelet interacts with. So there are certain triggers that are on the surface of the platelet that determine what protein gets released to solve that particular problem. And there are 300 of those, and we only know what 10 of the 300 do. So the other 290 where still is active research as to what they actually accomplish. But you can bet that God didn't bring along for the right. They are there for some specific purpose. So we've been talking now for about almost 30 minutes. And millions of things have been going on just in my blood system, just in the structure inside this finely chiseled body of mine. Exactly. That is amazing. So you might just tell, you know, you talked about the 139th Psalm and you did the second hand. But the first half says it, and God weaves us together in the womb of our mothers. And that weaving process, believe it or not, is this process in which DNA is converted to what's called messenger RNA. And messenger RNA leaves the nucleus of the cell and goes out and finds this workbench for the production of proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of your body, basically the Legos that make the body. So both pauses once again right there with proteins being the Legos, the building blocks of the body. Because I have to confess my brain is fried. I am so overwhelmed by the complexity of just one tiny thing you can't even see with the human eye that makes our bodies function. And God comes to inhabit that body like that. So I'm just going to change directions for a moment here. We're going away from the blood system. And we're going to just talk about a gland. I just made this statement. Talk to me, Dr. Humberg about the pituitary gland. What's that about? The pituitary is the master gland of the body. It's really what directs all the other glandular organs in your body to release the hormones that basically run the show. So we go from blood that is the life giver that provides oxygen to every cell, the trillions of cells in our bodies every minute of every day. The pituitary, this little tiny gland inside the brain that is Dr. Humberg says runs the whole show. And we could go on and on talking about all the systems. We have 43 podcasts just on the human body. But what I'd like to do is just take this moment and look at during this Christmas season at miracles because the whole word became flesh as a miracle thing, isn't it? So I just asked my friend Bob about miracles. What I think that the way that I make sense of miracles is this. A miracle is basically the occurrence of an event that is so unusual that is outside of our realm of experience. And that is what we consider a miraculous event. So we talk about miracles and I think what we have to realize is that who controls the probability? What is the chance of a rare event occurring? So if you took cards and shuffle them, it would be possible to get A through King, Hearts Diamonds, Clubs and Spades that would be possible. But the chance of it ever happening in the history of mankind would be zero. It just doesn't happen. But could it happen? And the answer is yes, it could happen if there was somebody directing the shuffling. And the thing about God is that God controls those rare probability events and he can make those happen. And when we look at just the creation of the DNA molecule that we talked about before, those atoms were formed in the centers of stars. And they were blasted out into space just as random atoms. And these atoms fell together, 200 some billion atoms fell together in such a way that it has the instructions on building the human body and doing some amazing things we've talked about. So the ability to perform a miracle is clearly in God's playbook. And the question is, why doesn't he play those cards more often? And you're going to have to get to heaven and ask him that question. At the risk of ping ponging, I want to go back to the conversation that I had with my friend John Ashcroft and Missouri when he talked about not wanting to limit God. His thoughts to me were important. I'm not interested in cramming God into and limiting God. But the first insight that I at least I thought it was an insight. And then if the the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, this signals that there is a capacity for interchange and for the exhibit exhibition of Godly values in humanity. The desire to exhibit Godly values as a possibility. It's interesting because when I asked Dr. Humberg, what a favorite scripture might be, he ended up talking about just that. I think it's the like a 68 and where it says, and what does God require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly. And I think that those are just such important step by step aspirations that I think that if we could buy by, we would be closer to God's heart. So there you have it. Two podcasts starting with church bells and Venice, kids singing, go tell it on the mountain. And then having participants like Dr. Baustred speaking of the conception of Jesus by Mary, Dr. Humberg being so articulate about what it means to be human. And my friend John Ashcroft giving his 30,000 foot view of what he thinks happens and should happen in that kind of investment of God in man. I think the natural place to go is that we know what God looked like in Jesus. And the question I have to ask myself is, well, what does he look like in you? How does that work? Not that just Jesus came to be with us, but he wants to be in us when we open our lives to him. Years ago, there was a felony, Robert Munger who wrote a little booklet called My Heart, Christ's Home. And he described our hearts as the residents of God that he wanted to live in and be in and work through and clean up and all that sort of thing. Wouldn't it be interesting if the Almighty God in thinking about the phrase, I'll be home for Christmas was thinking of us and our hearts. That's it. I'm out for 2019. I'll see you in 2020. God bless you. Have a great Christmas and a happy new year. See you.