The Scientist Who Read God's Handiwork

On April 14, 2003, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced that thirteen years of painstaking work had reached its goal: scientists had successfully mapped the 3.1 billion base pairs of human DNA. Researchers from twenty centers across six countries — the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, and China — had collaborated on what Francis Collins, the project's director since 1993, would later call deciphering "the language of God."

The deeper Collins' team looked, the more staggering the complexity became. Each human cell carries roughly six feet of DNA coiled into a space invisible to the naked eye — genetic instructions more intricate than any software ever written.

Three thousand years before any of this was known, Job spoke to the Almighty with startling confidence: "Your hands shaped me and made me... You clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews" (Job 10:8, 11).

Job couldn't name a single gene. He knew nothing of nucleotides or chromosomes. Yet he grasped what the Human Genome Project confirmed — we are fearfully, intricately made by a Creator whose knowledge of us surpasses anything a laboratory can decode.