Before the severe winter arrives the wood frog is designed to store glucose in its liver. When the frog’s feet begin to freeze, its liver is programmed to release lots of glucose into its blood stream. This glucose enters the frog’s cells and acts like antifreeze! During winter 35-45% of the water in the frog’s body freezes and makes it as stiff as a block of ice but upon the arrival of spring, in only a few hours the frog’s frozen body revives. Within hours it resumes normal breathing with a beating heart, circulating blood and fully operating brain and is once again able to move, jump and mate.
(This remarkable ability of the wood frog to survive being frozen is the reason why some people believe that human organs can be frozen and brought back to life. Whether this is possible or not remains to be seen.) The wood frog’s genetic programming is designed to allow it to survive freezing and it is only now that we are beginning to understand how this is achieved!
The Bible refers to God as being a creative genius, for example in Psalm 139 King David wrote “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made”. The more science discovers about genetic programming, DNA and “the instruction list” that exists in every cell, telling it how to function, what to do and how to act, the more one realises just what a creative genius God really is! (Human DNA is such a colossal biological database that it is now known to contain no fewer than 3.5 billion “letters”).To think this all “just happened” without Intelligent Design – i.e. that it all came together by coincidence is absurd, hence the Bible bluntly states in Psalm 14 v 1 “it is a fool who believes there is no God”.
This cleverness of God’s Design teaches us a very important lesson. Since God is clever enough to create and design life surely it follows that when God issues Commandments and Instructions on how to behave, He really does know what He is doing! The Bible is often described as God’s Instruction Manual to the human race because it gives details on how we are to live and behave, how we are to treat those around us and indeed how we are to take care of the planet. All of these instructions are summarised in “the Ten Commandments”.
The Designer of Life has given us specific instructions on how to behave! Yet while we marvel at His creative genius, we often think we know better than God when it comes to His Commandments and think we can get away with disobedience. Why marvel at one thing but think we know better than Him when it comes to the other? The same One who designed the frog, is the same One who said that this world would turn to chaos if it rejected His Laws! The same One who designed you, is the same One who has said you need to place Him at the centre of your life in order to obtain real happiness! The same One who designed DNA is the same One who warned that terrible consequences would follow if people didn’t take their spiritual life seriously!
We are witnessing today what it is like to live in a Godless society with immorality and perversion accelerating at an alarming rate. Such behaviour effects us all one way or another and we may be sure it effects our Creator even more. God cannot bless or endow a nation that clearly wants little to do with Him. Sadly, the warning in Deuteronomy ch 31 seems all too fitting. “I will forsake them because they have forsaken righteousness. I will hide My face from them and many evils and troubles shall befall them so that they will say in those times ‘have not these evils come upon us because our God is no longer with us’.” I am hard pushed to think of anything that is going well for our nation at the moment. Perhaps the thousands of Churches lying empty and disused across our land today give a clue as to where the blame lies! Between 1969 and 2005 churches closed down at an average rate of one every eight days. It is little wonder that today our country and society is in such a mess.
