“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts…
Isaiah 55:8, 9
Over and over in Scripture we are instructed to look up to the heavens to gain the proper perspective. When ancient people looked up they saw a sky that was really big and stars that were very far away. And from that they understood that the God who made it all must be bigger still.
Because of modern science we also know that:
Outside of our sun, the closest star, Alpha Centauri (which is actually a star system) is 4.22 light years or approx. forty trillion miles from us at its closest point (Proximus Centauri.)
The Andromeda galaxy, the galaxy closest to us, is 2,537 light years or 14.6 quintillion miles from us.
The Hubble Space Telescope and its kin have seen beyond the Milky Way which is in the Andromeda Galaxy and previously thought to be the outer limits of space, to discover thousands of previously unknown galaxies and systems yet to be analyzed and explored.
This passage in Isaiah, however, is not about the vastness of God’s real estate, but the vastness of God’s mind, and the complexity of the ways that are the outflow of that mind. Because of Genesis 1:1 we understand that everything begins with God: He who thought then spoke the physical world into existence, is not just a few IQ points above us; He is awesomely alien from our best speculations. Because He is outside time, everything He thinks and does is viewed from an eternal perspective and based on an eternal time table..
And next to His eternity 2,537 light years is a snap of the fingers.
Nancy Shirah
No comments:
Post a Comment