Do you have any idea what a miracle it is that you exist? Do you know how unlikely the odds are that exactly you would be created?
Now, I don’t want to get into all of the particulars of human reproduction here, but – of all the variables that had to come together – that your mom and your dad would meet, and fall in love, and have relations, and do so during the time of the month when your Mom could get pregnant, and that the two specific, individual cells that would need to come together in order to specifically create you –
Experts and mathematicians who are way smarter than me have calculated the odds of all of that working out to specifically create you are about 4 trillion to 1.
That’s a 4 – with 12 zeros behind it – 4 trillion to 1!
Those are astronomical odds! There’s no way that you were just an accident. And there’s no way you were a mistake. Nothing with those kinds of odds just happens by coincidence or luck. Accidents happen 1 out of 10 times, or 1 out of 25 times. We might say it’s just luck if something happens 1 in a 100 times, or 1 in a 1,000.
But you know what happens 1 out of 4 trillion times? We have a word for that: it’s miracles. Only miracles occur at that astronomical rate! In fact, let me tell you the odds of a few other things that are more likely to happen than you being created:
• You have about a 1 in 9 chance of being left-handed.
• 1 in 100 of being ambidextrous.
• About a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a 4-leaf clover.
• You’ve got a 1 in 16,000 chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime.
• You have a 1 in 662,000 chance of winning a gold medal in the Olympics.
• And your odds of winning the lottery jackpot are about 1 in 300,000,000. That means you’re still about 13,330 times more likely to win the Mega Millions lottery than you are to exist at all.
And listen, 4 trillion to 1 – those are just the odds that your Mom and your Dad would make you.
The generational probability that you would exist at all becomes incomprehensibly smaller when you realize that:
• It’s 4 trillion to 1 that each of your parents would be made by your grandparents,
• and 4 trillion to 1 that each of your grandparents would have been made by your great-grandparents,
• and so on, and so forth,
• including every single one of your ancestors –
• each and every single one of them having had the same unlikely probability themselves of being conceived by their parents –
• SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.
So, statisticians tell us that the REAL odds of you ever coming into existence at all are about 1 in 10 to the power of 2,685,000. Let’s put that number into perspective:
1 trillion is 1 x 10 to the power of 12. This number, though, is 1 x 10 to the power of 2,685,000! That’s the number 10, multiplied by 10, over and over and over and over and over again. 2,685,000 times. Those are the real odds – of you – ever existing – at all!
How incomprehensibly miraculous is it that you exist!? You are no accident. You are not here by coincidence or by luck. You exist by design. Someone thought you up. From before the foundations of the earth were laid.
Someone specifically knit your body together inside your mother’s womb. Someone first created the idea of you in Their head, and then was so thrilled with, and in love with the idea of you, that He decided to follow-through with that idea and create the reality of you!
The fact that you and I exist is an astronomically, incomprehensibly HUMUNGOUS statistical miracle! But we do not just merely “exist.” We exist as a result of a thoughtful, loving, purposeful design and creation.
We’ll look together at Scripture’s explanation of the amazing miracle of human life on the next episode of “Practical Faith.”
