Why Doesn't Water Burn?

Every first year chemistry student knows that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. That’s what that “H-two-oh” thing is all about.

In our chemistry classes, we also learned that hydrogen is just about the most combustible thing out there. You know the story of the Hindenburg and “Oh the humanity” and all that.

And we also learned that three things are needed to create a fire: fuel, oxygen, and heat.

And any third grader knows that you can put out a fire by pouring water over it.

Waitammint. Am I the only one to see a paradox here? You put out a fire by pouring two-thirds of the formula for fire on it? Gee, it seems like water should be a tinderbox, just waiting for a match to turn it into a lighter-than air blazing inferno.

What gives? Well, if you just sorta mixed up the hydrogen and oxygen then, yeah, you’d have a ball of gas that’s ready to light up like a Kuwait oil field. But that’s not what water is. The hydrogen and oxygen form together at the molecular  level.

In a union that is only fully understood by God, atoms can bond together to form something completely different — something that didn’t exist before. Something that that has absolutely no characteristics of the original raw materials.

God allows us to use electrolysis to break the hydrogen and oxygen apart. But He bonds them together so tightly that it usually requires more energy to break them up than what is yielded in fuel. When God sticks things together, He generally doesn’t mess around.

In the book of Second Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells us that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature”. The implication is that we are made into a new species, literally something that never existed before, something that has no characteristics of the original raw material.

I guess God knows what He’s doing. After all, He can take the most perfect fuel in the universe and turn it into a pretty good fire extinguisher.