How can watching a documentary about insects be a worship experience?

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By John Piper About Worship
Part of the series Ask Pastor John

How can watching a documentary about insects be a worship experience?

I just bought a DVD called Life in the Undergrowth.

In it there is a scene of two slugs that are crawling along the ground seeking a way to mate with each other. They're hermaphrodites. And the way they mate is climb a tree and go out on a limb. Then suddenly one of them, with a piece of slime, lowers himself until he's hanging in midair. He starts to twirl around, and then the other one comes down and they intertwine. And the DVD has perfect music playing for it too.

And you think, "OK, that's unbelievably cool that they have to get in a tree, crawl out on a limb, hang with slime, and intertwine in order to mate." But then this little sexual organ emerges. The sexual organ comes out of both of them. It's about as big as the slug himself. And it's almost translucent in beauty. And it intertwines.

And the next thing you see is that the intertwining of these two sexual organs flattens out into a kind of disc, and they're just spinning. And the whole thing is one beautiful, almost translucent, spinning, hanging event. And when they're done, it all goes back in and they just plop down on the ground.

Now... evolution? With no Intelligent Designer? This absolutely counter-effective, totally beautiful, unimaginable way of mating just happened by chance? And there are many such scenes in this video. I paid $20 or whatever on Amazon for it. But nobody will watch it with me! My wife won't watch it. My daughter won't watch it. They think it's gross. And I'm sitting there praising God for his incredible design!

Another one is of this centipede that lives in a cave, and it's about two feet long. It has about a hundred legs and is about 2 inches in diameter. And he's totally white, because he lives in a cave and is an albino. And what he does when he's hungry is crawl the wall of the cave. And when he gets to the top he hangs down, holding on with his back legs, and he snatches bats out of the air and eats them! (The photography in this is miraculous!)

He snatches a bat, but you can't snatch a bat! They're smart! They don't run into things, right? They're in caves and they never hit the wall. So they don't hit centipedes either. And this one is fat and slow and ugly, yet he can snatch a bat and eat it, hanging from the roof.

So get the DVD. Either you are a pagan hard-hearted naturalist, or you're going to worship. You can't not worship the God of creativity. Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field... Consider the birds of the air." And if he had more time he would have said, "Consider the slug, and consider the centipede."

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