When we look to the skies, God doesn’t explain
with answers to all of our whys — instead:
God explodes art
and all the glory of a trillion galaxies of stars.
When we pause in awe
over these staggering stellar nurseries where bona fide stars are born,
who can blithely say all this is mindless accident —
rather than this is clearly a cosmos birthed into being?
And when we sit stunned with these images of the shimmer
of literal star birth, here in this universe birthed into being,
we know it, that this is a created cosmos,
and because this is a created cosmos,
we must have a Creator.
Now, even us, us who’ve seen only dimly, now we see into the enormous nebula nursery where supercolossal stars are being birthed, see through the glowing dust, see all these inflamed fireworks, see the passionate heart of God exploding with love, birthing baby stars.
Out of the auroral dust, God births newborn stars, and out of the spheral dust, God made us.
Blazing stars, and our beating hearts, are both made of the same dust, both the art of God.
Out of the auroral dust, God births newborn stars, & out of the spheral dust, God made us.
Blazing stars, & our beating hearts, are both made of the same dust, both the art of God.
And in the hands of God, all that’s been ground down into dust can be made to breathe with possibility, can be made to burn with brilliancy. This is a universe of hope.
This is a universe teeming with more than just galaxies, this is a universe teeming with God’s glory.
“We can’t take [an image of] blank sky,” is what James Webb Space Telescope Operations Scientist Jane Rigby said when the NASA released these deepest ever image of space. “Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.”
There is not one fraction of an inch in the universe that is blank space, every minute planck of space in the whole of the universe is a canvas for the Maker’s masterpiece. Galaxies everywhere, God’s glory everywhere.
Yet who are we, that He is mindful of us, and who is He that all of us can see the glory of Him?
This is more than a Goldilocks universe of all the “just right” properties for life, this is a God-glorious universe of all these rightly-designed properties for life, made by a God who fits just right into the God-sized hole in all our longing hearts.
Know that this universe is no cosmic jackpot. Know that the word cosmos itself means “order, good order, arrangement.” Know that none of this cosmos happened by accident, but by order, by the good order of a good God.
Go ahead: Across the whole of the known universe, stretch out one long, flimsy measuring tape with one marked dash to “represent the acceptable value of the force of gravity” suggests the physicist-philosopher Robin Collins.
And if you shift that one dash, symbolic of the acceptable force of gravity, even but a mere inch — on that tape that spans the expanse of the unfathomable universe — and all that exits everywhere in the universe could no longer exist anywhere in the universe. Let the full gravity of this make God the gravitational centre of your life.
Let your belief in there being a Maker of heavens and earth be unmovable.
Let the soul go ahead and see it: The needed degree of the exact ratio of the electromagnetic force to the gravitational force for this universe to even exist — is one part in ten thousand trillion trillion trillion. Let the soul truly see how the odds of this ratio can in no way be any cosmic accident:
Know that there are impossible odds that this universe exists apart from being made by God.
Imagine laying down enough dimes to cover every square inch of the whole of North America, says astrophysicist Hugh Ross — and then on each and every one of those dimes, stack up enough dimes to touch the silvery moon — 238,000 miles high on each and every dime. And then — rinse and repeat for nothing less than one billion silvered North Americas.
And then?
Blindfold yourself, spin yourself around, and reach out, across a billion dimed continents that are dimed right up to the moon — to rightly pick out the one and only dime marked with a red dot. What are the odds? Exactly the same as needed ratio of the electromagnetic force to the gravitational force for this universe to even exist: One in ten thousand trillion trillion trillion.
Know that there are impossible odds that this universe exists apart from being made by God.
If, like astrophysicists suggest, more than 322 conditions have to be miraculously met to make a planet like Earth, there is only a 10-304 chance to ever find a planet like ours in all these glorious whirling galaxies.
Which is to say: Even if there are a billion trillion planets across all this lit cosmos, the odds of a planet like ours is, according to the astrophysicists, is one in a million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.
In all the universe, there is only one word for those kinds of odds:
God.
So now, even us, us who’ve but seen only dimly, we see how these galaxies, like diaphanous, delicate skeletons, these cosmic bodies, reach toward each other, close to merging, like the whole universe is made for union and communion and connection with souls and God.
Now, now we can see how galaxies spin in this intimate gravitational dance, imitating the intimate, invitational dance of the Trinity.
Now that we see in ways humanity has never, ever seen before, as we dare to unravel more of the cosmic mysteries of the universe and God — dare we see that we can’t afford for this world to unravel anymore with all kinds of global and interior wars —— that we are all tied to each other and glory of stars and the marvel of God?
Ready to intimately know this Maker of heavens & Earth, this WayMaker?
“The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate Himself. God is a communicative being,” wrote the tried-and-true theologian Jonathan Edwards.
God’s deepest desire is also ours: to be known.
Because God wants to be known by us, He communicates with us, and He communicates through creation around us, through our conscience in us, through Christ with us even now.
All the world’s a seashell, and if you lift it up and really listen —
you can hear the ocean of God.”
