As I write this, right now our church is reading through the book of Exodus. Exodus has some of the most exciting stories in the entire Bible – Moses’ birth, and his mother’s desperate, ultimately successful attempt to save him from Pharaoh’s monstrous edict to destroy all Hebrew baby boys (Moses’s name means “drawn out,” as in, “drawn out of the water,” in Hebrew); his growing up in Pharaoh’s house – and killing an Egyptian man; running away as a fugitive, spending 40 years roaming around the wilderness of Midian as a shepherd – quite the fall from grace, as it were; encountering God at a burning bush; returning to Egypt to deliver his people from slavery and bondage; the ten plagues on Egypt, culminating in the night of Passover and the death of the first-born throughout the land; and finally, the deliverance of the people of Israel from Egypt; the parting of the Red Sea; the wilderness wanderings of the entire nation of Israel; the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai; an act of national disobedience against God, and resultant punishment.

Anybody seen my tape measure and level?

And now we’re in the section where God tells Moses in extremely precise, some might even say excruciating, detail how the tabernacle (a large, portable tent of meeting where the Israelites were to worship the Lord during their wilderness years) is to be built. He gives Moses instructions on everything from the dimensions of the building to the specs on the bronze altar, the amount of oil for the lamp, the kind and color of fabric for the curtains and the priests’ robes – and of course, instructions on how the ark of the covenant is to be made (so Indiana Jones will know what to look for a few centuries later), and much, much more.

I admit: as I read these chapters there are times I think, “Really, God? Was it really so important that the curtains were that many cubits long and the tent covering made of tanned rams' skins and goatskins and the priests’ robes were made to those precise specifications, etc. etc. … that you spend most of 15 chapters describing it and preserving that record for us? Really?”  

And then I think about what we read in Psalm 139:13-14: 



13  For you created my inmost being;
    
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    
your works are wonderful,
    
I know that full well.

And suddenly I am very glad he is a God of details, details.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

Speaking of details, I recently attended (online) a conference in Dallas put on by the Discovery Institute. The theme of the conference was: “Endowed by Our Creator – The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul.” One of the highlights was listening to Dr. Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon, who was the youngest head of pediatric neurosurgery in the history of Johns Hopkins Hospital. (I’ve been there – it’s an amazing place.) I’ve been a big fan of Dr. Carson’s since I first learned of him, heard about his incredible, inspirational rise from a very troubled inner city kid being raised by an illiterate single mother … to become one of the most brilliant pediatric neurosurgeons in the world.

Dr. Carson asked the participants at the conference in Dallas if they remembered what they had for breakfast, and to raise their hands if they did. Pretty much everyone did. He then described what happened when he spoke, the audience heard and understood the words he said and then responded by raising their hands. He said, in rapid fire, something like this:

“First of all, the sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air, enter into your external auditory meatus, travel down to your tympanic membrane and set up a vibratory force which traveled across the tiny bones in the middle ear called the ossicles, which mechanically distorted the micro cilia, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, travel across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus and the medullary junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending bilaterally up the brain stem to the inferior colliculus and the mediate genicular nuclei, and across the thalamic radius to the posterior temporal lobe to begin the alterative process from there to the frontal lobe, swing down the track to the (something I could not understand no matter how many times I replayed it), retrieving the memory from the medial hippocampus memory bodies back to the frontal lobe to start the motor responses at the beta cell level coming down the cortical spinal track, across to the internal capsule into the cerebral (something else I could not understand), descending to the cervical medullary desiccation to the spinal cord gray matter, synapsing there going out to the neuromuscular junction, stimulating the nerve and the muscle ….” He paused, caught his breath, laughed and said, ‘I could go on …’ so you could raise your hand.”

(My brain just about melted down trying to understand and transcribe what he said. If I got any of that wrong, sue me. He’s the neurosurgeon, not me. I skipped “Anatomy, Physiology and the Complex Auditory Process of Turning Sound Waves into Words” in seminary.)

Endowed by our Creator

Dr. Carson said all that, describing the complex auditory process, without looking at any notes – he is, or was, after all, a brain surgeon – in less than 60 seconds. But the actual transmission of the sound of his voice, the comprehension of the request on the part the people, and their responding by raising their hands, took less than one-fifth of a second. Incredible. And every bit of that had to be in operation at the beginning of the human race, and in the lives of individual persons, for us to be able to hear, understand and respond to one another. Remove any link in that chain and we lose that ability.  

Details, details. Fearfully and wonderfully made, indeed. Endowed by our Creator with … an unimaginably complex, complicated, marvelously capable brain, and body, and the ability to know the One who gave it all to us, and his Son who came to redeem us … or to reject that and believe this all came about randomly, by accident. 



Which seems more likely to you:
•   That all of this, and the billions, even trillions of other intricate details that have to be lined up and linked together just so, with such precise calibrations, or human life would not exist – is a result of intelligent design; or –
•    It’s all one big, happy accident?

I know which one makes more sense to me.*

I thought you might appreciate knowing those details, and have a new appreciation for the God who pays such careful attention to them – and us.

Kent

*For more information and evidence of the intelligent design of life on this planet, please see:

https://christchurchmiami.org/blog/2026/03/14/earth-in-the-balance 

https://christchurchmiami.org/blog/2025/12/18/winter-solstice