01.11. Birds and Bees

Birds and Bees

Now let’s examine two Pacific coast water birds. I can find no stronger evidence of design in nature than with the Ousel, a very friendly little bird that lives near mountain streams. It can usually be found where the water is swift-flowing and splashy. This buoyant bird will be floating along, apparently weightless, and then suddenly sink to the bottom like a piece of lead. There he walks around picking up bits of food on the streambed. After taking his fill, he goes over to the bank, shakes himself, and mysteriously sets himself afloat again like a wisp of smoke.

It has been discovered that this strange bird has some special equipment—a muscular apparatus that can instantly exhaust every bit of air from its body, letting it sink down; then when it walks out, it can take in air again and float off once more. Now, that’s special creation, isn’t it? The evolutionists would say, "Well, it needed to have this bit of apparatus, so nature provided it." Of course, they don’t say what nature is, but maintain that it just grew by some accidental development. The truth is that God provided it. He made this particular bird as He did because He saw that it needed this for survival.

Another kind of bird found on the Pacific coast lives on a diet of large worms that live in holes in the sand. Because this worm is down at the very bottom of its hole, the bird must go down to get the worm out. It so happens that, although its beak is exactly the right length to reach into the hole, the narrow hole keeps the beak squeezed shut. What a predicament—to be able to see and reach a luscious worm but not be able to open his beak to pick it up! Do you know what God arranged for this particular bird? He created a tiny flap much like a surgeon’s forceps at the bottom of the beak. With this special organ the bird can pick up the worm, back out of the hole, and gobble it down!

Isn’t it wonderful that God thought of a little bird and made something special so it could get its food conveniently? If He so loves the little birds and provides the things to make their existence comfortable, don’t you think He’s willing to provide everything that we might need? He loves us even more. Remember, He knows when the sparrows fall.

Some years ago, a scientific magazine published an article by a clever biologist who did not believe in evolution. In Evolution Goes to Pieces on a Bee’s Knee, the author first reviewed the evolutionist’s teaching that when the need for a certain organ develops in any creature, the organ is produced in response to that need. Nature itself, or some blind chance, supposedly comes along and produces the necessary organ to fit the creature for survival. Then he cited the example of the bees. When bees crawl into pollen-filled blossoms, their breathing apparatus gets all stopped up with pollen. In fact, they can’t even breathe while they are inside gathering their pollen.

Now it so happens that every bee has a special brush located on its knees—a stiff brush—that it uses to clean out its breathing apparatus when it comes out of the flower so it doesn’t suffocate. This biologist noted that if it were true that these insects develop special equipment in response to a need, the very first bee to exist did not have those brushes on its knees. When it went into the flower, it would have suffocated; consequently, the whole bee family would have become extinct right then and there. No, rather than these brushes developing slowly through the ages in response to a need, they were provided by God to meet the need and save the very first bee that was made.

The conclusion is that God anticipated the needs of His creatures and made them with every necessary apparatus. How thankful we ought to be that God can supply all our needs in advance. The Bible says the fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God." Only a God of love and power could have made the marvels we see about us. And if He cares for the tiny animal world, He cares for us, too. He loves us even more than He loves that little bird out on the West Coast, and He wants to save us. He wants to take us at last to a place where nature will be in perfect balance again and where all of the curse of sin will be forever removed.