To read the Bible in one hand with the newspaper in the other is to understand that man is the freak of the universe. Read in the newspaper about man's nobility. Man paints the Mona Lisa and writes Paradise Lost. He composes "The Messiah" and throws a baseball at 95 miles an hour with pinpoint accuracy. Man pushes, pulls, and prods the earth into breath-taking landscapes, vistas of his creative eye and muscle. He repeatedly hits marble until it becomes "David." He hammers at a mountain until four presidents emerge. He spans rivers with suspension bridges over which he drives the machinery he's invented to get him from one place to another fast and ever faster.

With trained hands, he transplants a heart from one body to another and calls it, "All in a day's work." He bounces live pictures all over the world from satellites he's thrown into space and he sends his eyes to Mars to view its terrain. He manufactures tiny bullets which, when swallowed, hunt down and kill the invading bacteria so that the once sick are the now well.

He has dreams and aspirations. He conceives of the good, the right, and even the perfect. The Statler Brothers wrote "The Class of '57," a song celebrating the fact that "We all thought we'd change the world with our great works and deeds." But, as the song says, "Things get complicated when you get past 18. The class of '57 had its dreams, but living life from day to day is never like it seems."

He conjectures about a life going on forever. He thinks of goals and reaches them. He climbs mountains and investigates the deepest recesses of the earth. He dives into oceans and comes to the surface brimming with knowledge.

He types on a screen, clicks a button, and what he's typed speeds to other continents within seconds. He delivers orations with words that can inspire others to fight and die. He conceives of freedom and draws a line in the San Antonio sand and 187 men step across it and die for a concept.

No wonder a man once wrote, "You [God] crown him [man] with glory and majesty!" (Ps. 8:5) Like the Bible says, the human being is the wondrous climax of that six-day week a long time ago.

But something's wrong. While the newspapers and the Bible both record man as a wonder (Gen. 1:26-28), both record that he's a freak. This wonder kills, murders, plunders, and slashes his way through life. He spends his time getting before he's gotten. He lies, cheats, and claws at anyone who gets in his way. He's decimated whole nations, killed his own family, and sometimes, in the doing feels no remorse. He sometimes kills for the feeling. He speculates which director will put his life on the screen and then goes out to kill his fellow students.

He can spend his time specializing and devoting himself not to ideals, but to the trivial. He can concern himself with the most mundane and empty of things. To watch what he watches, to read what he reads, to buy what he buys, one would think that the most important thing in the world is to have a flat stomach and radiant hair.

He conceives of the good, the upright, and the perfect, but can't get there. He tries. His politicians promise a better, gentler life. They pass the laws, enact the legislation, and set out the judicial decrees. He sees little or nothing change for the better. His teachers promise life will be better when more get educated. When it's all said and done, he's an educated freak. As he wears the cap and gown, inside something is still wrong. The inhalation of chalk dust, the high-tech power point presentations can't eradicate the problem inside the freak.

The newspaper can report it, but can't explain it. The Bible does. The freak isn't as God made him. The freak is a freak because he fell, rebelled against God with malice aforethought. It's not "just the way we are," we became that way.

The surprise comes when the Bible says that God moves toward the freak with a grace so powerful that it can save him from his rebellion, forgive him, and give him eternal life, all free! All this from faith alone in Christ alone. The Bible comes to the freak with the message he needs-Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and rose the third day.

The freak has the innate rebellious tendency to rely on himself. God says, "Rely on Christ alone." Christ has done it all. We like to think that there's something in us worth saving. If that were true, then grace isn't grace. There's nothing worth saving in the freak, and that's why grace is grace.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor