Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
(Psalm 139:14 NIV)
One of the current fads is to research your ancestry and discover your lineage. The internet is littered with sites offering DNA tests, and television is awash in Ancestry.com and 23andMe advertisements. You may find out who your ancestors are, but the tests will not call attention to the most important fact about your DNA.
There is only one you. Only one person in the billions walking the earth with your DNA. No one else has the same genetic makeup or the same fingerprints. You are unique. Your DNA is a miracle of God.
If you have any doubt you are not “fearfully and wonderfully” made, just stop and ponder that DNA. Starting with just four nucleotides (characters) your three billion-character DNA is formed. If stretched out, the DNA from one single cell would be six feet long. If you wanted to read your DNA, reading one character per second, night and day, it would take you ninety-six years.
As if that isn’t enough to prove your body is a miracle of creation, think about this. One hundred thousand miles of blood vessels link every living cell in your body. The average adult human brain has around 100 billion neurons and 100,000 miles of blood vessels. The distance around the world at the equator is 24,900 miles.
There are 107,000,000 cells inside your eye alone. It is difficult to calculate the total number of cells in the human body, but the latest calculation comes in at around 37.2 trillion. Written out that is 37,200,000,000,000!
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10 NKJV).
The Greek work for workmanship is poiema. We get our English words poem and poetry from it. We are God’s poem—His work of art. C.S Lewis in The Problem of Pain wrote, “We are, not metaphorically, but in very truth, a divine work of art.”
Timothy Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and best-selling author, wrote:
“Do you know what it means that you are God’s workmanship? What is art? Art is beautiful, art is valuable, and art is an expression of the inner being of the maker, of the artist. Imagine what that means. You’re beautiful, you’re valuable, and you’re an expression of the very inner being of the Artist, the divine Artist, God Himself. Jesus is an Artist! And you are His crowning achievement, His masterpiece!”
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth (Psalm 139:15 NRSV).
You are not a cosmic accident. You are not a random collision of particles. You did not crawl out of the primordial sludge. Don’t ever let feelings of inferiority overpower you. You are woven together like the finest silk tapestry. You are a walking miracle, designed by God Himself.
