In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of instrumentation in our lives, using the example of sea turtles and their ability to navigate the open sea. He emphasizes that even though machines cannot accurately translate languages, individuals with their own volition and understanding of idioms can do so effectively. The speaker also highlights the incredible design and capabilities of various creatures, such as sea turtles and albatrosses, and how they reflect the Lord's delight in creation. Ultimately, the sermon emphasizes the need to recognize that there is a person, God, behind the universe and to have a personal relationship with Him rather than praising dead law.

Now I want to talk this morning on a subject that I started with you last year, and that was on instrumentation in biology. And I took our friend the sperm whale and took you through a little guided tour through his stomach with Jonah the last time and pointed out what the sign of the prophet Jonah is. It's the sign of death in a man, and that sign, even the king of Nineveh listened to. And the people who don't care about anything, they see the sign that you've died to yourself and now you live in Christ. That is the sign which people will take notice of even today. They don't want cheap signs and wonders, but they want the sign in us that we've been through Jonah's experience of having been in the place of death with his parboiled face you remember I talked about when I was here. Now I'm not going to talk much about that except to add something which I think will interest you all. It's one or two new things that have come to my mind since I spoke to you on the subject. Now the sperm whale likes octopuses, and our diet and things we like and eat too much of are sometimes rather a rope around our neck, aren't they? When the sperm whale dives straight down three kilometers in the ocean, he does it because there's more than ice cream down there. He does it because he's after the giant octopus, and the giant octopus has tentacles often of some 15 yards long, and the diameter of his body is four or more yards too. Now when he goes down, he can't catch them by sight, although he's got eyes, but he's instrumented to catch them by echolocation. He utters a series of clicks with his vocal cords and measures on his computer the time it takes for the echo to come back of each click. He notes the time that he sends out the click and notes the time that the echo comes back, and the computer is programmed to know the speed of sound in water, and he can catch these giant octopuses absolutely infallibly, as though he could see them with his eyes, he can see them with his ears. Now that's the sort of instrumentation we have to do with, and that's all programmed into his genetic code. The concept of a computer which will calculate the distance and what an object looks like by the sound of clicks being echoed back to you, it's like radar, you see, only they don't use clicks for that, they use radio pulses for that, and it's far more complicated than radar and very, very quick indeed. Now sometimes when he's got a giant octopus that size in his mouth, think how big he is, and think of his tentacles, sometimes in the fight the tentacles do get detached from the giant octopus and they come up to the top, and I saw a photograph of one of them recently, 15 yards long, cut off at the base, and come up, floated up to the surface from a fight that was down three kilometres below. Now sometimes the octopus will lock round its mouth so that it can't open its mouth and get it inside. The octopus seems to know what the whale is getting at, and holds tight so he can't open his mouth. Now when the whale perceives that, he can't open his mouth, and there's the ice cream right in front of his mouth, you see, or round his mouth. Oh, do you know what he does? He's a very, very slick gentleman. He shoots up to the surface with the whale holding, with the octopus holding fast to him, and he shoots up three kilometres. Now the consequence is that all the nitrogen in the blood of the octopus, because they have a kind of blood, it's not the same as ours, but it is a kind of fluid for bathing the tissues with oxygen, he shoots up to the surface and the octopus gets bends, caisson's disease, you see, diver's disease, and he dies. And by the time he's at the surface, he's dead like coelacanth fishes are dead when you bring them up from the similar depths. The oxygen, the nitrogen dissolved in the blood comes out suddenly, and the thrombosis resulting kills the animal, just as it'll kill the diver if he comes up too quickly too. So the whale then eats in peace his morsel, which is now dead, swallows it whole, and says thank you very much for his breakfast. Now think of that. I told you at the time that I didn't know, and the Shell Company, I said, would give its right arm to know how to stop the nitrogen coming out of the blood. I couldn't think of a method of doing it then. I suppose with so many highly intelligent people at Calvary Chapel in front of me, it caused a mental block. But I had a dream a night or two later, and suddenly saw the wrongness of that statement, and you could stop the nitrogen coming out from the blood if you could fix it. Now, fix not in the American sense of the term, which you're going to fix the lunch, but to chemically make the nitrogen combine with another substance so that it doesn't have a vapor pressure. Now, what struck me in the dream was this. The name came into my mind in the dream, Azotobacter, which you find in the bacterium, which you find in the clover root, the white and the blue clover, the purple clover. That is capable of doing what chemists have had great difficulty in doing, fixing nitrogen. Now, if you get the Azotobacter to grow in the Rete Mirabilis, which I told you was the instrument which prevented the nitrogen from bubbling out and causing bends, if you could get it to do that, you'd have no trouble with the vapor pressure of nitrogen anymore. There wouldn't be any free nitrogen in the blood at all, and the job would be settled. Now, that information is worth $20,000 to the Shell company if they want to have a go and see if there's any Azotobacter in the blood of the sperm whale, but that's all between you and me, so it could be done, and the whale knows how to do it. Now, consider that. What I want to talk about this morning is the sea turtle. The sea turtle hatches out on the beaches all around the Florida Atlantic coast, particularly the loggerhead. Now, when it does that, the mother sea turtle comes in from the open sea. She's a yard or so broad, and she lays her eggs in the sand of certain beaches. They never mix up their beach. The various kinds of turtles always stick to one beach, and because people steal the eggs and steal the hatchlings, they're an endangered species today. Now, she lays the eggs in the sand and leaves them, and they hatch themselves like reptile eggs do, and the neat little method they have of getting out of their brood chamber bears telling about, because it's sublimely simple. The hatchling starts to wiggle when it hatches, you see, and that brings down sand from the roof, and then it tramples on the sand from the roof into the floor, and so the floor is raised and the roof is raised, and the whole hatching chamber moves up like an elevator up to the surface of the sand, all without the sand doing anything. The sand is really trampled on so that the elevator works, and up comes the hatchling. Now, the hatchling, when it gets out to the sand, it gets out at night. They're mostly hatched at night. Births have a habit of taking place at night, don't they, ladies? You know that. It scampers then down immediately, as fast as it can, to the sea, to the ocean, because that's the safest place for little turtles, because there are lots of things on shore that'll eat them up if they can catch them. So they scamper down to the ocean, and then they start to swim out to the open ocean. Now, how do they do that? It's dark. How should they know where the shore is, the shore is, and where the ocean is? Well, they want to get out, these hatchlings, to the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps you put the first slide on, would you be so kind? They want to get out to the Sargasso Sea. That's right, here it is. They want to get out here, you see, from Florida there. So what they've got to do is have a method of navigating, unfailingly, to the open sea. Now, how should a freshly hatched turtle do that? Well, that's been the subject of quite a lot of research lately. There was an article appeared by a man called Lohmann in the Scientific American about a year ago just now. And what he did was—would you put the next slide up, please, if you can? Thank you. What he did was put his turtles, the new hatchlings, in one of these TV antennas, the satellite antennas, and put the seawater in there, and put the little hatched turtle in a harness, hatched to the buoy and the revolving apparatus which measured all his movements where he was swimming to. And they found out by doing that, on hundreds of little hatchlings, that if you put a Reuben's coil round the whole bag of tricks, you reversed—you see, as a Reuben coil will do—you reverse then the magnetic field that reaches the hatchling, the magnetic field of the Earth. Now, if you reverse the current and reverse the field like that, as soon as the field is reversed and south is where north was, the turtle will change its direction and start swimming in the other direction. So it's—you just change the current, watch the turtle and see that it can feel that, it senses that. So it's got a magnetic sensor like migrating birds have. You know, the golden plover that comes down from Alaska and finds Hawaii has in its head a map to do its navigation by, provided you can give it the directions of longitude and latitude which it gets from its sensing of the magnetic field of the Earth. So you just change the magnetic field of the Earth like that and watch its effect on the hatchling. Now you think of this, ladies and gentlemen, I can understand a bird which is very highly evolved having such sensory apparatus in its head to carry a map of the land where it is. It knows where it is and it orientates itself with the help of the map, with the map, by the magnetic field. Now a small hatchling doesn't have that sense of orientating itself by magnetic field as strongly as the adult turtle does. The adult turtle has a much bigger problem on hand, navigationally, compared to the hatchling. You see, the hatchling's problem is how to get out to the open sea and to the Sargosso Sea and get some food. That's its great problem. The adult turtle is waiting to lay its batch of eggs on the beach where it came from and it has to locate that, the adult turtle, and in the course of growing up that sense becomes much more developed than it is in the case of the hatchling. The hatchling has it too, but not so strongly as the adult turtle that's wanting to lay its eggs. So the adult turtle is out at sea and has to come back to the beach where it came from. It does that by a very developed sense of map in its head, but it orientates itself, with respect to the map, by the magnetic field. Now the hatchling does it by another method as well. It has two systems of navigation. The first system is this. You put the hatchling in a little antenna, satellite antenna like that, and there's no waves there, and you neutralize the magnetic field of the earth by passing the right amount of current through it. The thing will just simply, the animal will just simply swim around in circles. It's confused, lost and goes in circles. But if you put in for the hatchling some waves, it will immediately orientate itself to the waves and swim into the waves, because you see on the seashore the waves, as the bottom of the sea gets shallower, the waves always come in from outside from the open sea. So it'll swim against the waves that are coming into the seashore and thereby get out to the open sea. But it's not nearly as specific as the map method and the magnetic field method that I've been talking about in the adults. So the adult, when it's out at sea, has in itself from its birth upwards, by the instrument which has been given it from its sperm and the ovum of which it was made, it has the instrument which can read that map once you give it the bearings for the map on the magnetic field, by the magnetic field of the earth. So the adult, once it has got its map of the place where it was born, which it has, you think of what that means. You remember during World War II, the aircraft had to refuel at Ascension Island. Now Ascension Island is also the home of certain types of turtles, and they nest there and lay their eggs there. And they find that speck of land in the middle of the Atlantic, unfailingly, they've got it. Now the World War pilots too, you know, they had a little saying, if you miss Ascension, your wife gets a pension. So I wonder whether the turtles say that to themselves, because they don't miss it. They find it immediately. It's exceedingly difficult to find a speck in the Atlantic like that, but they're so specific in their map sense, and the orientation to the map by the magnetic field of the earth, that they hit it unfailingly, and they don't get mixed up with other turtles heading in other directions. They go to their own place. They're perfectly clear in their senses where they're going, and they go there and get and lay their eggs, and don't mix up with other turtles either. So I want to ask you this question. You'll find in all the schools and universities taught, that everything is explained on the basis of sheer chance. Jacques Monod said that before he died. I think he knows better now, but everything is... No, I don't say that in any unkind way, because his father, you know, his father, or his grandfather, of Monod, was the revivalist of France. He knew the way, and he took a dislike to anything Christian, because he'd probably been brought up in rather legalistic type of Christianity, which turns a good many people off. And he was definitely turned off. I want to ask yourself this question. That's the basis of Darwin, you see. Darwin was an evangelical Christian in his youth, but he lost that as his evolutionary theory developed. As theory, evolutionary theory, went up, so his faith went down. Now, why? Well, you think, you know, I'd have great difficulty in being, you know, a worshipful sense of mind, turn of mind. I've got great difficulty, although I do sing, and I'm happy about that, that I can sing about Jesus loving me, and he loves me, I know that. But, you know, to work myself up to great heights of emotion, I'm one of these cold old English blokes, you know, have difficulty, difficulty in that area. Why? Because the command is that I should praise the Lord, and I want to. Why don't I? Well, I don't know. If you ask me to love a person I don't know, and don't even know her name, I've got great difficulties. You do too. And if you don't know the Lord, you can't do it. And to demand it, legalistically, turned off a man like Monod, and he said, chance will explain it better. Now, if chance movements of molecules produce these instruments that these little animals have, well, I say, as the English say, then I'm a Dutchman. That is, I can't, that is, I can't think logically, that's what it means. I'm not saying that about the Dutch, not in the least, but that's, that's what these awful Britishers say, you see. Okay, now, I find great difficulty on command in praising the Lord. And I do love the Lord, and I do pray, praise him. Now, why? You see, I learnt more and more as the years went by, to love my wife. You think, we've moved house 26 times, moved house, and we've changed our language four times, and we've had four children on the way. Now, think of putting all the children to school, seeing they don't get behind and, and have to do to a class over twice, you know, a grade over twice. You think of doing that, and running the household too, and looking after a handful like me, my wife. Now, the more I learn of her characteristics, is how she faces up to problems like that, and the last one is the biggest one, and puts up with problems like that, and solves them, gets through joyfully, and keeps a stiff upper lip, as the British say. You know, you can't help praising a person like that, now can you? Be quite honest. You can't. I mean, you just see that, it just overwhelms you. That God had made a partner like that for me. Just think of it. Now, when you think of that, then you don't have any trouble about praising people, do you? Or loving them. Now, the more you know about Jesus, that he, in him, dwelt the whole fullness of the Godhead, including all the Godhead's wisdom, in bodily form. Colossians 2, verses 9, 10. When you think about that, that he was the one who knew how to do this, make these instruments for these little animals, so that they got what they needed to live. He guided us with intelligence to understand, and follow his ways, because we're made in his image, so that we can love him, and can praise him, because he looks for the praise of Israel, you know. That is the Israel of God. That's what he looks for. When you think that he's given us the instrumentation to do that, and the sense by which we can appreciate it all, and he's done it, because I think in nature, you know, he's hedonistic. He loves joy, because at his right hand is joy forevermore, says the Holy Scriptures, doesn't it? That is, it's catching. If there's joy in the house, it'll catch on to the rest of the members of the house, won't it? And so it is with us. Now, you think of Jesus, the one who knew how to sense the instrumentation necessary to appreciate the magnetic field of the earth, and also how he knew how to make an instrument that can read the map, in the sense of a turtle, and guide it, therefore, to its feeding ground, and guide the mother turtle back to the beach where she came from. You think of the supreme amount of understanding of scientific matters he must have, and think of the understanding and patience he must have to deal with a person like me, and yourself. I'm not going to excuse you, Pastor Chuck, to get a hold of me if I did, so I won't do that. Now, you think of that. Now, that's why I think it's unconscionable for people not to be interested in the scientific problems that confront us in our age, because they are out to show you that there is no volition, there's no will, and there's no person behind the it's all dead law. Now, I can't love dead law, and I can't have any relationship to dead law, can you? Therefore, if I'm asked to praise dead law for having made me like I am, you know, I stand there absolutely blank. I can't do it. But if it's a person who willed me into existence, then that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it? Don't you think so? Now, we know that we are willed, that the volition is there. We know from scientific principles that we are. I can understand you people say, I'm not going to send my kid to a school which teaches us that two plus two equals five, because that's what they're doing in biology. Because they're saying that the instrumentation of man, the map sense we have, the ability to will and all that, all arose by chance. Now, let me ask you one question. You have in your Cadillac—I hope the one's not the one that the light's burning on—you have in your Cadillac a little instrument on the dashboard which tells you how many miles per hour you're going too fast. Now, that's an instrument called a speedometer, isn't it? Now, look, that's only an example of an instrument. Now, think of the component parts of that instrument. One of the component parts is a dial and a hand, so that you can show how fast you are going and how fast too fast you are going. Now, think of the dial, an essential part of the speedometer, okay? Now, would you like to tell me, not under the influence of drink, that that dial, with all the figures on it, was made by chance? Because if you're going to explain the instrument which measures the magnetic field and gives direction for the map sense, which the little turtle has, well, boys, you're going to—ladies and gentlemen—if you're going to tell me that, you know, I shall say, go and look for the next psychiatrist's couch, because instruments, none that we know, was ever made by chance. Never. You take a car engine. Now, a car engine, the essential component of it is the crankshaft. If it's an eight-cylinder one, if it's an inline, then it's an eight-cylinder, an eight-bearing crankshaft, something like that. Now, if you're going to tell me that a component part of an auto engine, which is far less complex than an instrument to measure magnetic fields, if you're going to tell me that happened by chance, well, I shall say, I don't believe you. What's the evidence? There is none. And I can understand parents saying that I'm not going to send my kid to school, who's told that instrumentation like this arose by chance. And that's what Monod taught the day that he died. And that's the basis of modern biology. You can explain everything without volition. Now, there's one point here, ladies and gentlemen, and I'd like you to turn up the intelligence quotient just for a moment, because it's rather hard. I've had a lot of experience in the course of my 50 years in the lab, a lot of experience in having to translate documents from one language into another. And if you can translate a document, say, from German into English, there's one thing that's certain, that you do understand the document if you can translate it into another language. That's one of the tests. If I'm not sure if I understand anything, I always try and translate it, and then I know whether I understand it. If I start to waffle, then I know I don't, because you can't waffle in translations, you know. You get into all sorts of grammatical difficulties if you do. Now you think, the Lord Jesus wanted to fix up these little turtles with the instrumentation they need for life. And he wanted to fix us up with the same instrumentation that we need for life. We need a bit more than a little turtle, but we do need instrumentation. And the fact is that he's translated the concept he needed for an instrument, he's translated it into a language, namely the genetic language. Now there is the proof of volition, because you can't translate by chance, I'll tell you that. Not even a machine is able to translate properly and really as well as an individual with his own volition and understanding of idiom can do. That's what Noam Chomsky found out when they asked him to make an instrument which would translate stolen Russian secret documents direct from the Russian. You put it in one end and the Russian document in the machine was translated into English and came out the other end. They spent millions of dollars on trying to perfect machine translation and found it couldn't be done. Now if translation can't be done by a machine, but can be best done by an individual, what should we say about the translation of the concepts of all this instrumentation in, say, the little turtle or the grey whale or the sperm whale? It presupposes volition and understanding of design. Now Jesus did that because he says all things were made by him and for him, and he proved that it was the case in that he took a man who'd been four days certified dead by the official priests of the Jews, namely Lazarus, and with one word, one concept, because that's what a word is, it's a concept, logos. With one word he said, Lazarus, come forth. Now he must have known what was lacking in Lazarus that he should have died, because Lazarus got up immediately and he said, loose him and let him go. Now if that doesn't prove that Jesus understood the metabolism of Lazarus, what else would? And you see, the Jews couldn't say anything against it, because they certified Lazarus as dead. Now if they said, look, our certification was wrong, they'd have gone for their office. They'd have made their office as priests who had the right to certify whether a person was dead and should be buried or not. They'd have made their office of none effect. So they couldn't say anything about him. All they did was got so furious with him that they wanted to kill him. When you don't have an answer to anything, you know you get undertaken, taken over by fury. That's what happens to man. That's part of the trouble today. There are so many problems that are unresolved, people get furious about it. Well anyway, the fact that the concepts of the machinery to make this instrumentation did not arise by chance, that was the error of David Hume. David Hume, the materialist and the atheist, taught the British and all the rest of the philosophers in Europe that all the component parts of a machine were made in the course of time. Every possible combination of matter took place in time by chance, if you gave enough time for it to happen. Now look, that's the basis of materialism such as it is taught today in the schools. Everything will happen by chance if you give it time enough. They call it the law of probability. Well it isn't true. The law of probability is true, but that interpretation of things is wrong because you'd never expect the dials of a speedometer or any other instrument of that type to arise by chance. Well if you can't get them out by chance, how can you select them out by natural selection? If natural selection has nothing to work on, there's nothing to work on there. Because certain parts of every instrument need special shapes, like a crankshaft or a speedometer dial, whatever you like, like the component parts of an optical isomer. They need special shapes to make an enzyme work. And if chance doesn't make those special shapes, then how are we going to select them out by natural selection? The whole bag of tricks is for the birds. It doesn't work. Now if Jesus did that, and did the translation himself of the concept of the instrument required that he was wanting, and put it down in the most sublime system of information storage and retrieval known to man, that is the system on the DNA molecule. If he did that, I'll guarantee you one thing. When I've translated a document or a concept into another language, as he did when he built the language of the DNA molecule in three dimensions, which chemistry can't do. If he did that, he understood very well what he was doing. You translate a document or a concept into another language, you do. So he must have done that when he was working out the plans for these little fellows to equip them for life. Now think of how well he's equipped me for life. You think, I'm equipped with five senses, more if you care to count differently, but it doesn't matter. I'm equipped with eyes, and there's one thing about my eyes, you know, I do appreciate beautiful things. It gives me great joy to see beautiful young people, beautiful mountains, all the beauties round about. I am equipped, you might not guess it, but I am equipped with good taste buds. And you know, when I have a good meal set in front of me, don't think I'm a okay. I just have to hedge my way in, otherwise I think somebody will misunderstand me. But you think, in the last analysis, the old five senses have one aim, to let me appreciate my environment with joy. My ears are made for good music, provided you don't turn the decibels on too much. I appreciate it ever so much. Now, why did God do that? Why did he instrument me to have joy when I have bacon and eggs? Why did he do that? I could have just swallowed the stuff down like the sperm whale does, you see, and not even chew it. I could do that, but no. No, no, I take just a little time, and I extract all the nice flavor, like these advertisements you see around here, you see, extracting the flavor. Now, they're hedonistic. They're for joy. And it says, rejoice in the Lord at all times. And again, I say, rejoice. Our whole instrumentation is built with that end. Now, you think, Jesus translated that into the genetic code. And if you translate a concept into a language, write it down as it is in the genetic code, then you know what you've done. And I think that when Jesus had finished making Adam and Eve, he looked at his concept, breathing, and enjoying one another, and loving one another, and he said, it is very good. There you've got the volition in it. He willed us to make us capable of rejoicing in the Lord. And that same Lord that did all this supreme technique that we don't understand, because it's too deep for us to think how all that could be put in one little sperm, you know, a few micrometers long, and one little egg as big as a pinhead, the nuclear part of it. If you think of that, think that that one, who was so educated, and so understood the creation, but still, when he saw there was no other way to redeem the world, went to the death of a criminal on the cross, knowing perfectly well, if it is possible, Father, let this cup pass from me, knowing perfectly well that if he was going to redeem the world, there was only one way, that he paid for the sin of the world, and he did it. Think of that. He loved me first, and then gave me instrumentation so that I can see what he's done, and thank him. Then I have no trouble in praising the Lord when I see that. Then I don't have to work it up with loud music and all the rest, you know. It comes automatically. It's like a bucket running over. There's too much water in it, so it runs over, and the water is the joy. You see, it runs over when you just see it. Think of that. Now, the instrumentation of these little gentlemen, these little sea turtles, is such that the instrumentation is cut out for its needs. You see, the hatchling knows how to find the open sea because it swims by its senses into the waves, and that takes it where it wants to be, where it can eat. The grown-up turtle has a more developed sense of map in its head, and the instrumentation to orientate itself according to the map, and it can find a pin in a haystack. It can find Ascension, or it can find the Atlantic coast of Florida, two or three yards where itself was hatched. It's absolutely incredible, but you see, the Lord seems to delight in these sorts of things. The albatross does exactly the same. It'll fly four years round the Antarctic, after it's flown, never having taken a trial flight, for four years and fished squid all the time, and it'll land within a yard of the nest where it took off from. Now, you think of the sense of map in those regal bird's heads. I went and saw them again three weeks ago in New Zealand. It's absolutely incredible, and what's more, those birds are also instrumented for joy because when Father comes home and takes his turn at sitting on the egg—they only have one egg—takes his turn sitting there, his wife will stand up and she'll put her beak up to heaven and do like storks do, just simply cry out for joy that he's come. Now ladies, now ladies, I'm an old man now, but let me tell you that that's one of the real joys for which we were made, and the love between a man and his wife is taken as an example in the Holy Scriptures of the love of the bride for the bridegroom. And the bride is the church, and the bridegroom is Jesus. And the one who made it all, and translated it, and put it into practice, looking at how his concepts worked when they're breathing, said it is very good. Now if that's the case, we ought to be interested, oughtn't we, in the things he's done, because they're the things that lead to true worship, because you understand what he's getting at with us. He's made us for joy, his joy, and his presence, there's fullness of joy forevermore, regardless of time, forevermore. Now keep that in your mind, and if you want any more information on these things, you'll find them out on the book table, and you will find the greatest treasure on earth for me, out there looking after them for me, and you have the privilege of hearing from the one who did all the hard work on what's in each book. So think about these things, and keep them in mind. The Creator is a lovable Creator, and he made us to be lovable. We'll pray together. Thank thee, Lord, for making us as thou hast made us. We thank thee that thou dost choose the things that are rejected, choose the things that men despise, because thou dost wish to work on us, make us more like thyself. So we ask thee to bless us all, give us a blessed Sunday, Lord's Day, with thee. Bless the good pastor here, too, on his voyage, and give him the rest he needs to do the job he's doing in thy name. So we praise thee. Amen.