God has a GREAT Imagination - Beetles
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Tracking God News Looking for the character and personality of
God in His creation. Issue # 1 Editor: Ron McCluskey
mailto:editor@trackinggod.com
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Tracking God's Imagination
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A famous entomologist was once asked what he had learned from
his lifelong study of insects. He replied, "God has an
inordinate fondness for beetles." That would seem to be true,
because at last count, scientists have named over 400,000
species of them. To give you an idea of how many that is, there
are about 15,000 species of birds in the world. In fact, if you
lined up all species of life including bacteria, plants,
animals, worms and insects every fifth one would be a beetle! If
we were to try to come up with designs for different types of
beetles, most of us could come up with 25 different designs.
Some of us could probably figure out a few hundred. But, can you
imagine the type of intelligence that it takes to design over
400,000 variations on a theme? And each of them is perfect. They
have all their parts working. No matter how great our
imagination, we would probably never think about creating a
beetle with a flame thrower in it, but that is what God did!
There is a small group of beetles called bombardier beetles.
They are nothing special to look at, but God put a very special
protective mechanism in them. They have a built in flame thrower
in the back end of these beetles. They can aim it in any
direction and fire it at will. It shoots caustic chemicals at
any attacker that are boiling temperature. It can shoot 20
bursts a second. The mechanism that shoots these hot chemicals
is a marvel of design. There is a small chamber that holds the
chemicals that will eventually explode. When the beetle feels
threatened, that chamber will contract causing a small amount of
these chemicals to enter a second chamber. In that chamber,
there are chemicals which cause an explosion. At the tip of the
abdomen, there is a small turret which can be pointed in any
direction. When the chemicals explode the burst through this
small turret. Once, many years ago, when people still traveled
by wood burning trains, there were two entomologists traveling
in the southern United States. When the train stopped to take on
water, these men went out into a field to collect insects. When
the train whistle blew, one of the men had an insect clutched
tightly in each hand. By the time he got back to the train, it
was moving. With his hands full, he could not grab onto the hand
rail and pull himself onto the train. So, without thinking, he
popped one of the insects into his mouth. It happened to be a
bombardier beetle. He later wrote in his journal that he could
sympathize with any predator that tried to eat this small insect
because he immediately had a very hot burning sensation in his
mouth! It is amazing to me that God would expend the effort and
planning necessary to create these tiny creatures. They are
perfect examples of miniaturization. Their tiny parts all fitted
together to make them not only survive, but thrive. It is
evident that there was a lot of loving attention given to them.
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God's imagination in the Bible
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It has been said that man's extremity is God's opportunity. That
can clearly be seen in the many ways that God delivered people
in the Bible. It is a good exercise to count the ways that God
has saved people. Some examples include parting the Red Sea with
wind, providing a big fish to swallow a drowning prophet, making
3 men fireproof and making a stone altar flammable. Is there
anything that God cannot do? As an exercise today, make a list
of all the things that God did to save His people. This is a
great faith builder. When you have a problem, you can be sure
that God has enough imagination and power to provide the answer.
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