Delightful and Astonishing.
Imagine a creature so astonishing that the first British scientists to study it from written reports, and preserved remains thought they were being pranked. One of them, George Shaw, reportedly hacked a preserved specimen apart with scissors to search for the taxidermist’s stitches. His training and experience convinced him that someone must have stitched a bunch of different animal parts together. If only he knew the whole of it.
The creature’s unusual external anatomy is just the beginning. If George had been confronted with all the facts that we now have, he may well have thrown in the towel then and there. It’s challenging enough coming to terms with a beaver-like creature that has the face of a duck, webbed feet like a duck, and that lays eggs like a duck, but what would he have made of the more recent discovery of its similarity to sharks and scorpions?
The duck-billed platypus hunts underwater in poor visibility and relies on electroreception to find its prey. All living creatures emit electric fields which the Platypus can sense and use to locate their prey, even with their eyes closed. This is their shark super-power, but how could they possibly be like scorpions you may be wondering? Well, like scorpions, they glow under ultraviolet light, but it’s their ability to inject an excruciating dose of venom through sharp spurs located on their back legs that really clinches it. What a delightfully astonishing creature. I’m sure George would have agreed, eventually.
The more we discover about God’s amazing designs, the more we’re delighted and astonished. Christmas time delivers more of the same. It’s an opportunity to contemplate the astonishing way that the Creator of the Universe chose to become one of His creations. I can’t image how any biologist could have conceived of a Platypus without actually seeing it for themselves, and I can’t imagine anyone conceiving of the Christmas story, if God had not first revealed it in His Word, the Holy Bible.
Why would the God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them choose to become a helpless infant entrusted to the care of a first-time mother in a backwater town nobody cared about? Why would He choose poverty, obscurity and suffering as His entrance into the human race? It’s a story so astonishing that its left many wondering if it isn’t just a hoax.
But the more we look into it, the more deeply we search for stitches holding the story together, the more we find nothing but astonishing, delightful coherence. God loved the world so much that He entered into it, not as a wealthy dictator ushered in by cavalcades, but as a humble carpenter welcomed by shepherds. Not to gain anything for Himself, but to give Himself as a gift of reconciliation. If you’ve never looked into His story, now’s the time, it’s too good not to be true.