Releasing the power of the atom is one of the greatest marvels of science. Men have unlocked power far beyond their ability to control. This is truly the scientific age—the age of wonders. On every hand are evidences of the ingenuity of men so much so that science is almost worshipped as a new god—not that these things have brought men closer to the true God, nor caused them to feel their own littleness and dependence of the God in whose hand their breath is. On the contrary, they have tended to take men generally farther away from God onto paths of conceit and independence, if they have not been used to actually discredit God and make man supreme. And the real purpose of this greatest scientific development was to kill and to destroy—surely “their feet are swift to shed blood.”
One is reminded of the magicians of Egypt in the days of Moses who did great and wonderful things by the power of magic, behind which Satan was. The effect of their wonders was to blind the minds of Pharoah and his men to the fact that God had been speaking to them and that they had to do with Him.
While the magicians did some things that the present men-of-marvels might not be able to do, they never dreamed of the thousands of things that science has developed. There is one point in common between them, however, and that is, there is one certain place beyond which neither can pass. Both alike come to an abrupt stop when it comes to producing life; neither the men of that day nor this, can make a single little louse. They might breed them today and so make a plague, or when ready, use some scientific method to exterminate them and stop the plague; but man never has and never will create life. Only God can give life and (alas, too often forgotten today) only He can sustain it. “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” Isaiah 2:2222Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? (Isaiah 2:22).