by Bill Nugent
Article #65
At first glance there wasn’t anything unusual about the middle aged man getting on the elevator. His rumpled business suit and bulky briefcase were ordinary but the beads of sweat on his forehead told a different story. Harry wasn’t just having a bad day at the office — he wanted to make it the last day of his life!!! He was taking the elevator to the top floor to walk out on the roof and take a final plunge.
Harry was mumbling to himself “Why do I feel such pangs of guilt…this is primitive…..there’s nothing to this religion stuff….I can just jump off this roof and the lights go out and it’s over….my depression, my pain….all over!” Harry continued his melancholy self talk “I have no soul….I’m just a hairless ape that evolved from pond scum!”
Suddenly a contrary thought flashed across Harry’s mind. It was of a Christian friend named Salvatore who knew that Harry was suicidal and who tried to warn Harry that there is an afterlife in which we encounter God. Harry had resisted Salvatore’s intervention and he told him that he believed that the physical material realm is all that exists. Salvatore persisted but Harry shot back “Life came about by random interaction of chemicals!”
Salvatore had continued to press his case by quoting one of the most brilliant scientific minds of our day. The man he quoted was none other than Sir Fred Hoyle (1915- ) a brilliant mathematician and astrophysicist, a man uniquely qualified to calculate the probability of life forming randomly from chemicals.
Hoyle said “Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the 50th power blind persons each with a Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all SIMULTANEOUSLY arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers [proteins] on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order” (from “The Big Bang In Astronomy” New Scientist vol. 92 11/19/81 p.527).
Harry struggled to put this out of his mind but by the time he arrived on the roof he was really sweating. He looked over the edge at the street below and also glanced down at his briefcase. He remembered that Salvatore had given him a Bible during their previous conversation. The Bible was still in the briefcase. Harry took it out on a whim and flipped open randomly (or so he thought!) and his eyes fell to Isaiah 14:9 where it says “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming…”Unnerved by this he slammed the Bible shut and then opened it to Jeremiah 31:3 “The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, ‘Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.'”
At this point Harry abandoned the madness of suicide and turned to God. He contacted Salvatore and learned more about God’s plan of salvation. Harry received Christ as Savior and made a commitment to follow Him as Lord.