"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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