AutoCAD again...and Other Things

Yes, I know - you're probably getting sick of AutoCAD. But, it's just too much fun - and I love the way the drawings look when they're done. AutoCAD makes it really easy to make a drawing - and this one took me a lot less time than the first one:

 I guess I'm starting to get the hang of it - but of course, I still have only scratched the surface of what the program can do. I feel sorry for the guys who made the program - they must have been typing code for years! I can't imagine the amount of work they put into one simple command: the "Line" command. They must have been typing for days just to make that one command work, and then I come along and type one letter - "L" - and I use all those days of their work drawing 1 line. Pretty mind-blowing when you think that there are thousands upon thousands of commands! It makes you start to appreciate the things we take for granted - like gas stations or the like. We come along in our cars, park along these structures that suck in a piece of plastic with a metal strip, and then, like magic, gasoline comes out of a nozzle! But if you think about, imagine the amount of work just designing, let alone constructing, a gas pump. There's so much intricacy in that one piece of machinery - and yet we encounter it almost every day without noticing. Of course, that doesn't even touch on the difficulty of refining the oil to make the gas - that itself is a huge process that takes very intricate machinery. And yet we take it for granted.

Can you think of some other intricate "machines" (if you can call them that) that we take for granted? Look up. Do you see the sky? Have you considered how incredibly complex the sky is? Meteorologists study and study the sky, and yet they still can't figure out when it's going to rain! And what makes up the sky? Little atoms of material? What holds the atoms together? Little protons, electrons, and neutrons? What holds those together? What holds the thing that holds those together together? Not even the smartest quantum physicist could give you an answer. It is a matter of irreducible complexity - you can only break things down so far before you hit something that cannot be broken down any further. And of course, these are supposedly the most "simple" things on the planet! Can you fathom the creativity, the complexity that is manifested in you and me? It is incomprehensibly more sophisticated than anything the AutoCAD developers ever came up with!

Do you know something else we often take for granted? It happened a long time ago when a man named Jesus took up a cross and died. Of course the story didn't end there - He rose again, and even now, he is “at the right hand of God,” and is “interceding for us.” (Romans 8:34) Christ died for our sins so we would not have to pay the penalty for breaking God’s law, and yet we take that for granted! When I look back, I know that I am a grievous sinner – I have broken God’s law time and time and time again. I have broken it today, I broke it yesterday, I broke it the day before that, and the day before that – every day of my life I have broken God’s law. And when I read in James 2:10, that “whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles in one point, he is guilty of all,” I begin to comprehend the significance of my sin. Sinning just once warrants the same punishment as sinning a thousand times. And when I have sinned many more times than a thousand, I begin to realize just how grievous my offences are. And when I begin to comprehend the significance of my sin, I begin to understand, in small part, the significance of Christ’s sacrifice. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!”  And “thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” God has made us special, intricate and marvelous, and he has given us the much more marvelous gift of salvation through Jesus Christ!

Casey