The Hope of the Believer … No. 20

A UNIVERSE OF HOPE

When I consider Your heavens … What is man that You are mindful of him? —Ps.8

If ever the psalmist David was an inspired poet it was that night he contemplated the heavens and ended up philosophizing about the nature of humanity. As he studied the magnificence of heaven and of all creation he was led to cry out, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth.”

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers.

The moon and the stars, which you have ordained

What is man that You are mindful of him.

This rendezvous with the star-studded heavens led David to write the most complimentary lines on human nature found anywhere in the Bible:

You have made him a little lower than the angels.

You have crowned him with glory and honor.

If we get nothing else from David’s sharing this experience, we ought to be motivated to look up to the stars more often and marvel over both the immensity and the magnificence of God’s creation. The poet had a point who prayed that God would make him a child again if but for a night. If with child-like wonder we could peer into the heavenly canopy and again be awed by the likes of the North Star and the Milky Way, we might be more inclined to accept life as the mystery that it is. How can one ponder the fact that there are 100 billion suns and stars in our galaxy and then fret over a few inconveniences.

The universe is not just immense. It is incomprehensible in its immensity. One nuclear scientist really shook me up some years ago in a speech at a college where I taught when he said, in an effort to get our attention as to how expansive things are, that if we should be tossed at random into space we might search for the earth for a thousand years and never be able to find it, even if we had a space ship that could travel as fast as light! Since he was from Cal Tech and involved in nuclear research, we were not inclined to dismiss what he had to say, not even when he told us, “In our ventures into outer space we’re not going anywhere, not even if we somehow managed to reach the nearest star.” He went on to illustrate: Even if we stood on the nearest star and looked out on the universe, what we would see of the universe would be comparable to what we see of our world by looking out the windows of the building in which we were sitting!

That was enough to keep me a little humbler for a number of years. But just recently I read the following paragraph, based on more recent astronomical data, and I must admit that I find it mind-boggling to the point of being overwhelmed:

The earth is traveling 67,000 miles per hour in its annual journey around the sun. The Milky Way galaxy speeds along at 1.3 million miles per hour, propelled farther into an expanding cosmos. Every four seconds the universe adds to itself a volume equivalent in size to the Milky Way!

If there are billions of suns in the Milky Way, and the mass of all these is doubled every four seconds, then every 24 hours we have the equivalent of thousands of billions of Milky Ways added to our expanding universe. I simply cannot handle such baming data. I am stunned by it all and can only ask, What is God up to?

That planet earth gets lost in all this is dramatically evident. Our own little solar system, which is only an infinitesimal part of the universe, has but one star (the sun), eight planets, 32 moons, about 50,000 asteroids, millions of meteorites, and 100 billion comets. The earth itself, as one of the planets, is such a small part of the whole that it can barely be counted. In fact the sun takes up 99.86% of our solar system’s substance. The earth amounts to only .0014%!

If David had such data at hand (Like all other ancients he probably believed that the earth was the center of the universe), he could have added to his soliloquizing, And how could You be so concerned for planet earth? And the psalmist would have been as dazzled as we should be that this incomprehensible universe functions with such uniformity and precision as to be likened to a timepiece. It makes one sound a bit ridiculous to suggest that it all came about by a Big Bang especially when he has no answer as to where the Big Bang came from!

It is a tantalizing question as to whether there is life, especially intelligent life, in other parts of the universe. One American physicist, Harrison Brown, estimates that there are a billion billion stars in the “visible universe” —that can be seen by our most powerful telescopes —and that many of these have planets orbiting them, some of which, judging by our own planetary system, might be inhabited by living things. Indeed, if we find life of some sort on Mars, which is altogether possible, Brown says “the likelihood would be high” that there are as many as a thousand billion planets in our visible universe with some kind of life on them.

It is understandable that an inquiring mind like Alexander Campbell would theorize that Jupiter (or some such planet) was inhabited with people. He is an example of how curious human kind has been about the possibility of other worlds similar to our own. But Brown says that Jupiter is too large to sustain life, just as Mercury is too small —and Neptune is too cold and Mercury too hot. Mars and Venus aside (which might sustain life), if in our system we have one planet (Earth) that is inhabited, is it not likely that out of all the billions of other solar systems there would be many that would be inhabited?

Who knows but what there are civilizations out in the vast expanses of the universe that are far in advance of our own? And might there be worlds inhabited by unfallen creatures? Or did Christ also visit other planets to give himself as a sacrifice for sin? Might other worlds be engaged in work far different from our own, even beyond our comprehension? How would it affect you if we should make contact with beings from outer space?

While there is of course much to wonder about in such matters, there are some things that we know, such as that on planet Earth we are hardly more than a speck in the universe. And as Christians we believe that God is the creator of all the universe. He made everyone of those billion billion stars and placed those millions of planets into orbit. We also believe that God does not act arbitrarily, and so there is purpose in all that he does. We may not know the purpose, but the purpose is there. And we believe that God is in control!

It is my opinion that the vast, immeasurable universe is related to God’s eternal purpose for his creation. I see planet Earth as a kind of boot camp or training station, and there may be innumerable such training space ships. We are being made ready for service in another world, perhaps millions of worlds, in the far reaches of the universe. Like angels, we will be able to move from one part of the heavens to another in the blink of an eye. When Alexander Campbell lost his precocious and deeply spiritual 12-year old son in a freak water accident, he wrote to a friend back in Ireland that God must have had need of him in some distant part of his creation. That fits with what I see as part of God’s eternal purpose for all these things.

But I am willing to settle for the way the apostle Paul put it when he pondered the mysteries of God: “Oh, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! (Ro. 11:33). I can also Identify with him when he talks about how our sufferings in this world in no way compare with “the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Ro. 8:18).

One wonders how any scientist who studies the universe can be an atheist. Einstein himself wondered that, and he doubted if there were any such atheists. He wrote in The World As I See It, “You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own.” He goes on to say that the scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of “a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law.” He also says that the natural order reveals an intelligence that reduces all human thinking to utterly insignificant reflection. He added that the scientist’s religious experience in probing the universe is closely akin to that of the religious geniuses of all ages.

You didn’t realize that Albert Einstein, the profoundest of all scientists, was a preacher, did you? He is saying that you can’t help but preach if you seriously rendezvous with the stars.

Einstein uses the words that say it all, rapturous amazement. It is that kind of awe that is crucial for the living of these days. How can we be rapturously amazed and live irreverently or indifferently? How can we look at the stars and be petty or peevish? How can we be awed by the heavens and yet be vindictive?

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was awed in a way different from Einstein. He saw an “unbridgeable gulf’ between the Creator of the universe and his creation, and it is this alienation that causes our despair. This is an understandable reaction to a baffling and incomprehensible universe. How could such a God have any concern for mortal man?, one could justifiably ask. We can rightly think, of such a Creator as unapproachable. Even the Bible uses that terminology —“He dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). Yes, of course! One who ordered a billion universes into existence would be unapproachable to such creatures as ourselves.

Praise God that we can conclude with what must be one of the greatest truths of all Scripture, and it is couched in one little word, access. It is in Christ that the unapproachable God has given us access unto himself. The apostle says it in Ro. 5:2: “through whom also we have access by faith into this grace.” The unapproachable God made himself approachable in the person of Jesus Christ, for “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19). When human eyes saw him they “beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14).

This makes Jesus Christ, who bore the very image of God, a universe unto himself, even more glorious, more magnificent, and more incomprehensible than the starry heavens above. Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift! —the Editor