God's Creation

Job answered his friends and said: I know well that it is so; but how can a man be justified before God? Should one wish to contend with him, he could not answer him once in a thousand times. God is wise in heart and mighty in strength; who has withstood him and remained unscathed? He removes the mountains before they know it; he overturns them in his anger. He shakes the earth out of its place, and the pillars beneath it tremble. 

He commands the sun, and it rises not; he seals up the stars. He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea. He made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south; He does great things past finding out, marvelous things beyond reckoning.

Should he come near me, I see him not; should he pass by, I am not aware of him; Should he seize me forcibly, who can say him nay? Who can say to him, “What are you doing?” How much less shall I give him any answer, or choose out arguments against him! Even though I were right, I could not answer him, but should rather beg for what was due me. If I appealed to him and he answered my call, I could not believe that he would hearken to my words. (Job 9:1-12, 14-16)

Whenever I’m remined of the stars and the heavens, such as with these passages from Job, I think of the vastness of space and what we have learned since Old and New Testament Times.  We can see the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades and they seem so close.  But they are not, and that’s what makes the universe so incomprehensible – God’s creation of unfathomable size and distance.

For example, Orion is a constellation in our Milky Way Galaxy and located on the celestial equator. It is one of the most conspicuous and recognizable constellations in the night sky. It is named after Orion, a hunter in Greek mythology. Its brightest stars are blue-white Rigel and red Betelgeuse.  

The Orion Nebula is about 1,500 light-years away from us.  The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would take 736 years to get to Orion’s Belt, but at our current fastest rate of space travel, it would take around 18,000 years for each light year, so it would take around 13 million years to reach the nearest star of Orion's Belt.  Incomprehensible!!  To travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other at the speed of light would take 200,000 years!  Sorry Star Trek fans: no intergalactic travel is possible even at the speed of light.  

There are about 200 billion galaxies in our observable universe.  Our Milky Way is just one.  On a more local level Mars is 43.5 million miles away from the Earth and about 7 months to reach it at our current space-travel speed.

“God commands the sun, and it rises not; he seals up the stars. He alone stretches out the heavens.”  Indeed.  It is some stretched.  We have to stretch our minds to appreciate God’s marvelous things beyond reckoning.

Deacon David Pierce