Friday, November 21, 2014

Do You Ever Feel Insignificant?


"God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).

Hey Gang:  An astronomer, I am not.  I have become somewhat interested in the blood moon discussions that have become very popular in the past year or so only because I believe they have great prophetic significance.   I believe it is one those signs that Jesus referred to when He said, "When all these things begin to happen, look up for your redemption is drawing near.”

But the bride-of-my-youth brought to my attention a book by Dr. William Allan Dean, titled The Names of God; it caught my immediate attention.  On page one he wrote the following:

     "For years in one of the hallways of the Benjamin Franklin Museum has been a very interesting model of our solar system.  In it we see the sun, and around it revolve the various planets, Neptune, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, and our earth.  Then, surrounding the whole system is a glass globe on which are marked many of the great constellations, the Big Dipper, Orion and others".

    Now the problem with such a conception of the universe is in the distances between the sun and its planets and the starry heavens surrounding it.  If we were to build such a thing to scale and would put the earth six inches away from the sun, representing the more than ninety million miles separating these two heavenly bodies, then Neptune would have to be fifteen feet away from the sun, and on the scale you would have to put the nearest star more than twenty six miles away. (Stars that we know today but we keep finding more galaxies out there as we improve telescopes).

   It is hard for us to appreciate these tremendous distances.  While we measure distances in miles, the astronomer measures distances in light years; light travels eleven million miles a minute and yet takes many thousands of years to reach from a star to the earth.  We might grasp something of the size of it this way: If we were to send a rocket ship from the earth to Neptune at a speed of forty thousand miles an hour, it would take fifteen years to make the roundtrip to Neptune.  But, at the same rate it would take the rocket ship 36,000 years to travel from the earth to the nearest star in the heavens.

   Now check this out!  While our solar system is of such size, our sun itself is so large that if we were to hollow it out, leaving a crust 100,000 miles thick, and put the earth inside the sun, the moon circling the earth would not reach within 100,000 mile of touching the inside of the crust we left on the sun.

    And yet, Alcyone, one of the Pleiades, those seven little stars we find in the cluster walking across the night sky, is as bright as a hundred suns like ours.  Vega, one of the our brighter stars of the sky, gives as much light as 55,000 suns.  Antares, which is really a star cluster, is so large that, if you were to put the sun inside Antares, our earth (circling the sun, more than ninety million miles away) would not come within one hundred million miles of touching the edge of that star.  Yet we look up and say, "Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are." 

Soooo, I repeat, "God saw all that He had made" and behold it was very good!"  Now back to the question "Do you feel insignificant".  The God who created all of this, did this because of His love for you!  Not only did He create the universe and all that is in it for the person that stares back at you each morning in your mirror, but also did not restrict His love to our tenure on earth but "…So loved the world (you), that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have ETERNAL LIFE" (John 3:16).   

Blessings,


Gramps

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