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The Created Things

By John F. Bulharowski
October 6, 2001
Tape FT01-08

I selected the topic that I am going to speak about almost a year ago, just shortly after I came back from the Feast of Tabernacles here in Jeff City. At least I thought it was I who selected the topic, but I find after listening to several of the messages that have already been presented that it really will be just adding another brick to the structure which has already been started by several other men.

So, if I am skillful, hopefully I can convince you of my thesis. I had forgotten, of course, foolishly, that there are higher powers at work in our Feast of Tabernacles, in all facets of it, including and perhaps especially the selection of topics about which we will speak. It always seems as if perhaps there was a script prepared or something by Charlotte, but it isn't so.

I have been accused as a speaker, not negatively, of being a storyteller. I will not depart from that method today. I will tell you stories. And I usually tell stories that are based on my own personal experiences, often times about myself or perhaps my family. Today I will be doing both.

I ask that you bear with me because over the years I have done this so many times that I have forgotten all of the things I may have revealed about myself. If you have already heard it, just bear with me and try to look like you are still awake. On the other hand, I would hope that you do not feel that I am trying to do this in a boastful manner because I am not doing it that way. I am simply calling on experiences and observations that I know best. It is not like choosing a page out of the Reader's Digest or something like that. It is my very own Reader's Digest.

To start, as I may have told you in the past, I have a technical background by education and profession. I am an electronics engineer. For the last thirteen years, almost, I have been working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. For those of you who do not know, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or simply JPL, is an arm of the California Institute of Technology.

JPL is totally funded by the government via the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So, we are involved in space exploration, specifically robotic exploration of primarily planets. We have sent probes to Jupiter. There is one that I was specifically involved in that is on its way to Saturn right now ? with an anticipated rendezvous in 2004.

In any case, I have been pretty much in contact with things technical throughout my working career. Personally, and as I think I said, I am an electronics engineer. I have been involved in circuit designs. And throughout all of this experience that I have had over the many years of dealing with things technical, I have become more and more amazed at the way things work and the beauty of God's creation and the way things just work out.

You can work through mathematics, calculate, and predict just how things are going to work. It is amazing... You probably never thought about the navigation problem of getting a spacecraft from here to Jupiter, or even to Mars, which is our closest neighbor. It is not an easy thing to do. It is not like driving from here to St. Louis where you have a highway with a number on it and you are basically in two-dimensional space. You go right or you go left, and your up and down is at the whims of the surface of the earth. In the other case, you have three-dimensional navigation that you have to take care of, looking at the various stars for reference and so forth.

It is amazing. And I am continually amazed that we can do this. Perhaps more amazing to me is to be involved in this community and see and meet other engineers and scientist who see nothing in it other than the greatness of man. They do not see in these things the beauty of the creation of God.

Immediately your thoughts may go to the first chapter of the book of Romans. Romans chapter 1 starting in verse 18:

Romans 1:18-20 - For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known of God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made ... so that they are without excuse,

Now I say this is very amazing when you consider people who have by education become scientist, engineers, and people well versed in the technical aspects of the things of the world and they continually study it.

But I think there is more to it. I don't think you have to be the rocket scientist or a Ph.D. physicist or an engineer to have this apply to you. Most of us in this room are probably not technically oriented. I don't know, you may be "butchers and bakers and candlestick makers," dentists, etc. Most people are probably not interested in what is out there and, coming from Los Angeles, you often cannot see what is out there. There is so much light and mist and smog that you just cannot see. So very few people even look up.

I think God is talking about something else when He says in Romans 1:20 that His invisible attributes are seen in the things that He has created. I have an idea. I have my own thought on the subject, which, I want to present. And, again, if I am skillful hopefully I can convince you. This thing, one item that God has created which more than anything in the whole world shows His Divine nature and the invisible things of God is... (Again, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or Ph.D. physicist, because each and every person ? every man, woman and child is exposed to this created thing every day of his life.) That thing which I am talking about, which has already been alluded to and spoken about in some depth already at the Feast here, is the family. The Family.

So that He says, since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power, and His divine nature are revealed in the FAMILY... That is what I am saying. That [is the] creation which exhibits His invisible nature, and we who would suppress it are without excuse.

Now, let me call on my experiences in my own family -- my first family, the one I was born into that I grew up in, obviously the junior member ? the child. [I will] hearken back to the days when I first came into the Church of God. I don't claim authorship to this by the way because I had heard about it very early in my church experience. But usually the rationale was "Well, yes, God is a family. And the family on earth just mimics and replicates the family of God so that you have this pyramidal structure: the father at the top... You have this nice hierarchical structure of things. And that is the way the government works." We were really big on government in those days. And it ended there.

I am saying it goes farther than that. It goes much, much farther and much deeper than that. It isn't that I am saying that my family was not that way. From my first recollections, my father was the boss in the house. My mother subjugated herself to him. She was responsive and subordinate to him. She supported him in every way. They worked as a team. But they were the boss.

Again, from my earliest recollections, when they gave a command we, the children, followed. "Go to bed." We went to bed. We lived in a two-story. My father used to have his favorite expressions for things. He would say, "up the wooden hill," and that was our command to go up and get ready for bed.

Now, my father, from outward experiences, seemed to be kind of a tough man, a gruff man. He was not big. I mean, you look at me you see my father. This is where I inherited my huge stature. For some reason, he had this appearance of gruffness. Although later I was to find out it was strictly a façade. I don't know if he tried to affect this façade, but it was the appearance that came through.

So as a small child, most of the kids in the neighborhood, all my friends were kind of afraid of him. I can recall in those days, growing up in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania ? St. Claire, Pennsylvania all of about six thousand people, the kids would "call" on each other. When we said, "I will call for you," that is exactly what it meant. My friend would come to the back door and say, "HEEYY JACK!" That was the signal ? no knock on the door, "Hey, is Jack home." It was, "HEEYY JACK!" And I would do the same thing with my friends.

If one of my friends came and did that around suppertime my father would respond, "He's eating. Go away." And they would scurry away. He was a tough guy. He took care of us. He provided for us. He taught me a lot of things.

I remember the time when he intervened in one of my problem areas. My brother and I used to love to build things. We were always doing something. One of our favorite things was to go up behind the local grocery store. We would get what was generically known as orange crates. They were wooden packing boxes in which fruit and produce of various sorts came. We would go up there; and sometimes we would find those things. Some of them had a little bit thicker slats on them, and boy could we do wonderful things with those things.

My dad, by the way, was a very analytical kind of man. He was not highly educated. He had a high school education. But he was highly analytical and cool. I never really saw him flustered or in a panic about anything. When he came up on a problem whether it was something broken in the household or his car broke down or something like that, he would kind of look at it coolly, maybe take something apart. He would look at things and figure out how they work, and go about fixing it.

In any case, getting back to my thing with the orange crate. I was maybe eight or nine years old certainly no older than about ten. I decided one day I was going to take this wood and build myself a little truck. So I went about planning it. I sketched the things out and I cut out the pieces. I took some wire brads (a tiny nail, basically a wire with a point on it with a flat head), and I started trying to nail this thing together.

The problem was that this wood was soft, cheap. The nails would come out the side. So I would cut a new piece and try again. It comes out the other side. I don't know how many times I may have tried to do this. I was nailing and splitting, nailing and splitting, nailing and splitting, until finally my frustrations got so high and burst out the top. I picked up the pieces that I had and I flung it out the door of the shed that we had out back and were working in. I was sitting there fuming. I don't remember if I was crying or not, but I sure was angry I can tell you that. I was just so frustrated.

I was sitting there just brooding. The next thing you know in walks my dad...calm, cool.

He says, "Hi, Johnny. What ya doing?" I thought, "okay," so I started explaining what I was trying to do. He, in his way, picked up the stuff. He looked at it. He says, "Well, you probably shouldn't try to do it that way because you can't help but split it."

Then he went on to calmly explain to me that probably a better way would be to use glue or something like that. And all my frustrations kind of melted away. Because my dad came in and he knew how to fix it. He knew the better way to do it. He taught me how to do it. I do not remember to this day whether I continued and ever really completed building the truck, but I do remember that incident with my calm, cool dad, and him straightening things out.

So, you see, "since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes." Those invisible attributes of God and His divine nature are clearly seen through the family ? through your dad...

Yeah, he was tough. He was cool.

There was another time, one of those things that remain in my memory rather vividly. It is almost fifty years ago now. My sister had gotten a rather serious sickness. It was a rather chronic kind of thing. It isn't necessary to go into exactly what it was, but it was rather serious. It wasn't life-threatening per se, but it was pretty bad. My dad and my mother had gone on taking her to various doctors, hospitals, and things like that trying to find out what the problem was.

I can't remember how long it was going on, but my dad in his usual fashion seemed to be holding up, seemed to be carrying the load, seemed to be calmly and analytically going about this. Or so I thought ? until there was the one-day, we were on our way to church. This was a Sunday morning. We were a Catholic family. I can't remember if my brother was with us or not. I was just barely a teenager or twelve years old or something. We were outside the church on Sunday morning. I can't remember if we just paused for a while or what. But my dad started crying.

He was concerned about my sister and her condition. And he started crying out there in public. I didn't know what to do. I really didn't know what to do. I don't say this that I was ashamed of the man. I wasn't. I looked and I just felt so helpless. I wanted to say something or do something, but there was nothing that I could do.

I was to learn later, of course, that here was a man that had a burden on his shoulders that he was carrying and he couldn't put it down. Nobody could pick it up for him. It had worn on him and worn on him to that point where he finally let go. And like I said, this was in public. He ultimately, of course, after a little while gained control of himself and things went on. How many tears he may have shed in private, I have no way of knowing.

Question: Do you think God cries when you hurt? Do you think He does that?

Well, I will tell you, the invisible things of God ? even His divine nature ? are clearly seen through the family ? that creation which is more wonderful than anything you can ever begin to imagine. The family is not an accident. It's not something that was invented here by men. I don't bear the title of father first. The Father wore the title of Father first.

Time went on, of course, and we grew. My mom and dad did everything they could do to support everything, certainly, that I ever tried to do. My mother went without things so that she could do things or give things to us. They went to school for the open houses, the art shows, or whatever we participated in. When I was involved in music, when I wanted to plan an instrument, they were there. They went in hock so that I could have the horn. They endured the band concerts.

Now, as I am old, I look back. There are a lot of memories that I have. I think of the things we used to write in our high school yearbooks, "I'll never forget the times we had in such and such a class." And I scratch my head and think, "What are these times?" But my memories that I have of those times are the family memories, those things that we did as a family. The way we sat around the kitchen table on a winter night working on a jigsaw puzzle or playing 500 rummy or whatever. All these things that my mom and dad taught us, and taught me.

My dad gave me more than I can ever imagine, not in things. I never realized it until really in later years, in the last five or ten years maybe. No, His eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen, clearly seen, and understood. Note those words clearly seen and understood by that which is created, the things that we can see. That family that we can see...

I know, of course, there are probably people among you who will say, "Yeah, well, you are lucky, Jack. You are one of the lucky ones. You had a good family. My dad used to beat us. My dad ran out on us." I know that is true. I have known people in the church who have fought bad childhoods throughout their lives, trying to gain control of their life and work their way out of the bad effects of it.

This does not disprove my thesis. Rather it underscores it. I say that because Satan hates family. He hates it so much that he has been working relentlessly over many, many years to try and destroy it.

If I can reverse part of the procedure that he has gone through... Of course, in times past, at least in the way I envision it, most of the families worked together. They had either family businesses or farms or whatever. The whole family worked together. Dad was the leader. Mom took care of the girls. Everyone worked together to make the farm or the enterprise work.

Then along comes that wonderful thing that we know of as the Industrial Revolution. Dad finds out that he can get a job downtown in a mill or something or another. Then suddenly, dad is out of the household so mom is back with the kids. Dad goes out early in the morning. He comes back late at night. He becomes kind of a visitor.

Then somebody decides it's great to have education for the kids outside the home. So, we have schools. Next things you know you have kindergartens. Now you have pre-school. It is getting earlier and earlier and earlier in age that the children are taken out of the home to go to these preschools.

Then along comes women's liberation, and many women are convinced it's demeaning to be a housewife, to be a mother at home, to take care of children. I mean, wow, change diapers ? that's awful. That's terrible. That's demeaning. I would rather be a secretary, a clerk, or whatever. And, believe me, I have seen it. I see a lot of young women around my place of work. Talk about demeaning jobs, they have them. But they want these things rather than stay at home with the children.

Of course, the effect is to split the family in all different ways. One would think that Satan is really, really effective in his methods. Again, I say, the fact that we may have had unhappy childhood's or bad families only underscores my basic premise that the family is the primary creation of God which really graphically shows what He is and how He works. It is not just a little hierarchical structure, but I have tried to give you an idea of some of the things that I have experienced myself with my own mother and father.

I have heard it said, for example, that if you don't go to God in a certain way in prayer He won't hear you. Your prayers won't go higher than the ceiling. I don't believe that ? not for a minute. I can't remember however angry my dad may have been at me, that he would close the door on me. If I came and I wanted to talk to him, he would listen to me. Is our Father in heaven worse than that?

The story, of course, doesn't end there. It is a marvelous creation, the family, because as I grew old and finally reached adulthood, I left my father's household, and started making my way on my own. Then there was that inevitable evening, the enchanted evening I suppose, I met this one woman who captivated me. And as time went on, I saw more and more and more of this young woman. Ultimately, I married her. I thought at that time it was my selection, but again I think it was a providential conspiracy.

Now the show was on the other foot. A remarkable thing with this family... because most people get the opportunity to see it from both directions. Now, I am in my father's shoes. And if it is not being too presumptuous, now, I am in God's shoes in some restricted way.

Now, I can see the things that my dad experienced first hand. I learned for example what it was like to take my own first little baby. When Bobbie and I brought her home from the hospital, for some reason there were people at the house. We wanted a few moments to be together so I drove off on the back road and came home the long way. We pulled off and we just played with our baby for a few minutes. We counted the fingers, counted the toes ? all the sorts of things new parents do. I learned that. It is an amazing feeling.

I learned what it was like to feel pride in the accomplishments of those children. I ultimately had four. We did loose one. I learned what it was like to loose one. It was a full-term child, lived about three days. It was kind of hard.

I learned what it was like to feel the disappointment when they didn't live up to our expectations. And, yes, they did sometimes... but not very much. I learned what it was like to take a load on your shoulders that you couldn't put down, that you couldn't pass off to somebody else, or nobody else could pick up for you ? that you just had to keep carrying.

Finally, I guess, after all these years, I even found out, I got understanding as to why my dad cried. Now I know.

The invisible things of God, you see, are clearly seen and understood from that family He has created.

My argument so far has been really anecdotal. Let me get a little analytical here and go to some Scriptures to, I think, prove that this is so, that what I say is true, that this family is really what He is talking about here.

Let's continue reading, verse 21 in Romans 1:

Romans 1:21-27 - For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks, but became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of the corruptible man-- and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. 24 Therefore God gave them over to the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. 25 For they exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen. 26 For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

Do you see what it is saying? Do you catch it? He doesn't say here that "Hey, you suppress this truth and I am going to let you believe some cockamamie ideas about Big Bang theory or evolution or some incorrect and stupid pseudo-scientific theory." What He is saying here ? and I don't think we have to draw pictures about what He said - is striking at the very heart of the FAMILY.

I was captivated by that young woman. And we two who grew in love, and the family grew as a result. In essence, God is saying in these later verses that "because you have suppressed this idea of the family, this proof and vision of what I am, what I am like... Okay, you are given over to this. Go ahead. Do all this garbage if you want." And even those that are not given over to this obvious homosexual reference....

I mean you look at the movie stars. They go from man to woman to man to woman like a pack of dogs. I heard one young actress, who is known for playing the sweet girl next door type roles, say in one of these interview programs that she had four active relations ? they like to call them relationships now days. And she chuckled and she said, "Well, if you have the energy, why not have twelve?" The interviewer thought that was kind of cute.

No, the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen from the family that He created.

Hopefully I didn't bore you with the stories about myself and my family. Again, please understand that I am not trying to boast. I am not trying to present my family, my father and mother, as having been perfect. They were good people, really good people, not perfect. No, not at all ? they made a lot of mistakes. But here again, they presented and gave to me what I think was the really important things to have, which I tried in turn to pass on to my progeny.

Perhaps I have been a little more emotional in my appeal than normally I am. I didn't want to get sappy, but then on the other hand, this has already been brought out. God is a God of emotion. He is strongly emotional. I can recall, again, in my early days in the church where in order to counteract the tendency, or trend, toward Protestantism, Protestant ideas, the Charismatic thinking and that sort of thing, we kind of went in the other direction and sort of portrayed God as the emotionless person.

Do you remember the old, original, Star Trek movies that had Mr. Spock with his pointy ears? He was totally devoid of emotion. "That's illogical Captain." And we would tend to picture God that way. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. If you think for a moment that we have a God, a Father in heaven that does not laugh with you, you are wrong. If you have the idea that your Father in heaven doesn't feel some pride in your accomplishments, you are wrong.

Do you remember in the gospels when Jesus Christ was baptized? "This is My Son," He says. It was not just a booming roar of a canon or something. Let your mind work on this and think of the emotion that was in this, "That's my boy!" This is God speaking.

If you think God doesn't feel great disappointment in your failures, you are wrong. If you think God does not cry with you when you hurt, you are also wrong.

For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly seen and understood through the family he has created.

JFB/mng/

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