God gave us “ears to hear.” In fact, He designed ears to hear just what they need to hear. Let’s look at some ways ears are designed to hear.

Evidences for Design: The Wonder of Your Ears (Part one)

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” This command was given by the Lord Jesus (Matt 11:15; 13:9, 43), the one who fashioned our ears in the first place. (Prov 20:12) When Jesus made our ears, He designed them marvelously in every part to hear, not everything, but all that we need to hear. Let’s examine a few ways our ears are marvelously designed to hear:
1. The outer ear is a trumpet to capture sound and funnel it into the ear canal. Because of it, we can both gather more sound from before us, and eliminate sounds from behind. The outer ear also helps us determine the direction of sound by comparing time and volume between the two ears. The outer ear is designed so that we give eye contact to the one who is talking.
2. The ear canal is about an inch long. It is ¼ wave length of the frequency of the average human voice, especially a woman’s range. Thus, we are designed from the beginning to hear and respond to our mother’s voice (Prov. 1:8).
3. Ear wax keeps the canal flexible, moves dead cells out of the ear, and guards against infection. 
4. Sound vibrations (pressure from air carrying the sound) go from the ear drum through three tiny bones to the oval window at the cochlea. The size and sensitivity of this system increases the sounds heard 1000 times!
5. The eardrum can detect pressure changes of one millionth of a millimeter. Ordinary sounds vibrate the eardrum a thousandth of a millimeter!
6. The three tiny bones in the middle ear commonly called the hammer, anvil, and stirrup because of their shape, transfer sound and increase its intensity 22 times. Two tiny muscles increase their movement in soft sounds, and decrease it in loud sounds.
7. The sound vibrations are transferred to the oval window in the cochlea, vibrating a fluid in the inner ear. In this spiral organ are 30,000 hair-like sensory cells, each one tuned to a particular frequency. They pick up these vibrations and change them into electrical impulses.
8. The electrical impulses are carried only ¾ inches to the brain through the auditory nerve.  Thus sounds are transferred from a gas (air in outer ear) to solids (middle ear) to liquids (inner ear) to nerve fibers. Our own voice goes through our bones more than our ears. This is why we think we sound strange when we hear a recording of our voice.
9. The brain is trained to filter out sounds that are not important, interpret sounds that are important and then to direct itself to act on them or store them for future use.
10. The ability to hear is one of the first senses used in life. Babies can hear and discern voices two months before birth. Hearing is also one of the last senses to die. The human voice cannot make a sound that the ears cannot detect.
11. Hearing is best in the young. By the time we are teenagers, our upper frequency limit has dropped from 30,000 hertz (cycles/second) to 20,000. By 50 it is only 4000. (spiritual lesson?)
12. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Hearing is designed by God to involve the will. Unlike the eyes, nose, and mouth, the ears cannot be closed without assistance. They are working continually, even in our sleep. But we can filter out sounds we don’t want to hear. We do this by plugging our ears, by ignoring the sound, or by moving away from the sound. This selectiveness can be both good (Prov. 19:27) and bad (Prov. 8:1; 21:13). Ears are mentioned 15 times in Proverbs. Most often it is admonishing us to listen as Jesus did in our text. But it is also possible to want to hear things we shouldn’t. (Prov 17:4; 2 Tim. 4:3)
Our ears are a wonderful gift of God. We must use them as He instructs us.