| Andrew Lim
1 June 2008 - Job 38:8-34
No one can know the universe
and the answers to the great questions of life unless one knows God
The question of the purpose of your existence
is inseparable to the question of your origin
There are three great questions of life:
Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?
The first question / Where did I come from ? / is the most crucial
Until you answer it / you cannot answer the last two properly
If you think that you evolved up from the slime
if you believe that you arrived on the earth by chance
as the result of blind evolution over millions and billions of years
if you believe that you are the product of an evolutionary stream
that was started when a bolt of lightning hit the primordial soup
in the dim reaches of the distant past
if that is what you believe about yourself
then truly you don't know where you came from
or why you are here or where you are going
And you may despair
G.K. Chesterton argued that evolution not only destroys religion
it destroys reason itself / It destroys human people
Back in the 19th century people embraced a false hope
based on the naïve optimism of their own brand of humanism
But that buckled in and it gave way to various kinds of nihilism
Martin Heideggar for example sees human people
trapped in the claws of time
The human person is conscious of the passing of time
but he is threatened by the uncertainties of life
- he does not know from where he has come
and to where he is going
- he feels that he has been hurled or thrown into life
with no rhyme or reason
And the only certainty he has is death
Frederick Nietzsche spawned much a similar kind of philosophy
He declared that God is dead
and what is left is the nihil or “nothingness”
Except for the values and purpose your create for yourself
there are no values or purpose
But each of these philosophers leave us with no answer
to the apparent chaos out there except with the call
to us to take a blind leap of faith
and believe in the values we’ve created for ourselves
But this is a bag of contradiction
For if there really is no value out there
such philosophies cannot have any value in themselves
Other thinkers have attempted to find human meaning
to help them understand his cosmic predicament
In our own time we have no shortage of people
who take the view of a mechanistic determinist
Perhaps the most well know in our time is Richard Dawkins
Dawkins made the point that God is a delusion
Only science is evidence-based
Lennox / who debated Dawkins
insists that faith is clearly evidence-based
he says / “It is the very nature of science
that leads me to belief in God”
Dawkins tells us that “the origin of the universe
is a genuinely difficult problem”
He says / “Cosmology is waiting for its Darwin"
But Lennox rightly assumes
that cosmology is waiting for no one for its explanation
He rightly asserts that it is our uncreated God Who created the cosmos
Dawkins begs the question / when he suggest
that incoherent / chaotic movement of particle matter
has somehow self-organized into our fine tuned universe
of ordered and information-rich biosystems
Logical coherence cannot result from logical incoherence
It does not happen in our physical universe
It does not happen in our process of thought
Mary Midgley who is 89 this year / is an English moral philosopher
She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Newcastle University
She rightly criticizes Dawkins for believing
that humans could be understood in terms of their genetic make-up
as Dawkins seemed to suggest in his book The Selfish Gene
After a lengthy discussion on the subject
Mary Midgley concluded that Dawkins’ views on evolution
are ideologically driven / and we all know that
He smuggles metaphysics in from the back-door / again and again
Where do we stand / as Christians / where cosmology is concerned
From where has this universe come?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
As Christians / we believe that God existed before anything else
and He is the creator of everything that exists
You and I may quibble over when it was that the world was created
but fundamentally / the Bible is non-negotiable
over the teaching that God is the Maker of everything
And He did this simply by an act of His will and decree
by His powerful word / He brought everything into existence
Gen. 1; Ps. 33; Isa. 44, 45; John 1; Romans 1; Colossians 1
And quite evidentially / the Bible affirms
that God created everything after its kind
which rules out Darwinism / which says
that from one form / evolved all the species
It also rules out Darwinism that asserts / that it is through the means
of natural selection or beneficial mutations
that species as we know them today have come about
Psalm 33:6-9 / “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made,
their starry host by the breath of his mouth
He gathers the waters of the sea into jars
he puts the deep into storehouses
Let all the earth fear the LORD
let all the people of the world revere him
For he spoke / and it came to be
He commanded / and it stood firm”
Psalm 148:5 / “For he commanded and they were created”
2 Peter 3:5 / “For by the word of God the heavens were of old
and the earth standing out of water and in water”
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
When the writer of Genesis took out his pen / and wrote the words
“In the beginning / God created the heavens and the earth”
his was not the only creation story around at that time
and he was well aware of it
There were many other stories making their rounds
sagas / myths / legends / yarns / about the origin of the world
The Egyptians believed the sun god Ra created all life
The Babylonians believed it was Tiamat / their goddess
who gave birth to many gods
and through their strife with one another the earth was born
Part of the reason the Book of Genesis was written was to counteract
these other competing stories about the origin of life
The God of Israel is presented / again and again
and the One who is not a part of the world
but one who created the world and who transcends it
The writer was aware of those in their surrounding who worshipped the sun
So he made sure God is presented
as having create pure brilliant dazzling light
even before the sun was created
It’s as if its saying to these sun-worshippers
“Look / You worship the sun
But we worship One who created light
even before the sun came to be
He also made sure that he presented God
as having created green plants on day three
before the sun was made
Its as if the writer of Genesis knew / that no one needed to first know
anything about the presence chlorophyll
or know about the process of photosynthesis
to know that plants die / when deprived of sunlight
The writer of Genesis openly declares a God who filled the whole earth
with every kind of green plant and vegetation
even before the sun was created
He is calling on the people God to worship God
the Maker of heaven and earth / and not all the spurious deities
Then in what is perhaps the greatest understatement the world has ever seen
after saying / God made two great lights
the greater light to govern the day / lesser light to govern the night
he said ever so quietly / you could have missed it
“He also made the stars”
Such restraint / almost an understatement
no blowing it up / no exaggeration
not stretching it / no touting it / “He also made the stars”
In reality what a feat! / With a casual move of his hands
he flung billions upon of billions of theses nuclear furnaces
into existence and they began piercing the darkness of space
and from their hydrogen-helium fission / they burst forth
giving flaming light / fiery heat / and intense radiation
God did all that without breaking a sweat!
And Genesis shows us a God Who not just creates but who creates
with a spirit of extravagance / and generosity
He is not skimpy or frugal / He is freehearted / bighearted
He creates in profusion / in quantity
He creates a world that throngs and teems with copious life
Liberally / He lavishes the earth with plentiful
If you thought the desert is such a sheer waste of space
you make a study of life in the desert /and you’re amazed
how prolific and superabundant life in the desert is
In the 1803 / when the famous explorers Lewis and Clark
went on an odyssey through the uncharted West of North America
there were between 40-60 million bison lived in North America
and as many as 5 billion passenger pigeons
They came across the super-abundance of grizzly bears / wolves
salmon and other wildlife species
In their explorations / Lewis and Clark were stunned
to see prairies literally black with herds of buffalo
and as they run / the thunder of their hoof-beats reverberated for miles
On some day / the sunshine would be blocked from view
for long periods as flocks of passenger pigeons fly by above
One day the river on which they were traveling
became clumped and clustered with some white fluffy substance
It was only when they rounded a bend in the river
did they discover the source of this stuff
There right in front of them
was a mind-boggling rookery of white pelicans
- It was the molting season of the pelicans
This is the picture the writer of the Book of Genesis wanted to portray
A big-hearted God / Who teems the world up to the brim
with swarms of creatures / and the Lord made each one of them
Then came the creation of human people
and here the greatest expression of God’s generosity is seen
For He liberally imparts to us Hid own image
He created us in His own image
He created us with rationality / creativity / morality and community
But how did God bring this universe about?
In what way did He choose to create this universe
Most scientists today believed that at one point about 14 billion years ago
the universe exploded into life
in a mammoth explosion of unfathomable power
- literally an astronomical explosion
So profoundly enormous was this explosion
that the effects of that huge bang have yet to die out
And even today the universe continues to expand
from that initial explosion
It is hurtling ever further and deeper into the dark recesses of space
And as it does things get more and more disorganized
Imagine a completed jig-saw puzzle lying at the bottom of a huge tray
it displays the beautiful complete picture
Now the box is repeatedly shaken
the puzzle pieces will gradually break apart
and lose the image of the initial picture
Disorder will increase / and if the shaking continues
the puzzle will approach a condition of total disorder
In science / this tendency towards disorderliness
is known as the Law of Entropy
best expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics
There was a time when scientists believed
that this seemingly ever outward expansion will not go on forever
but that it would reach a reach a limit out there
and then / like a rubber-band / it would snap back on itself
what is called the oscillation theory of expansion
But most scientists today believed that will not be the case
Recent pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope
seem to conclude that such an oscillation may never happen
Instead / and this is the fascinating scenario
instead of bouncing back / this massive power of that initial explosion
will continue to push matter and energy outward and forward
But eventually / as each matter grows further and further apart
all that energy and drive
will simply become too thin / too diffused / too widespread
to be able to go on to sustain life
It will be a cosmos spread too thin
Then / suns will flatten out / every star will burn out
space will grow colder and colder
And all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes
- there will be no light at all
- there will be no life only copses of dead stars and galaxies
grinding slowly into the endless darkness
and cold recesses of space
It will be / a universe in ruins / entropy has set in
Did you notice something here / the seeds of the universe’s end
were already sown / on the day the universe burst into life
And it was God Who planted those seeds there
right at the beginning of the universe
The New Testament actually alludes to this ultimate decay and death
both in the physical and spiritual spheres
Romans 8:21 tells us the physical material creation itself
will be liberated from its bondage to decay
and verse 20 confirms that it is God / the creator
who “subjected” creation to this death / deliberately
Isn’t it awe-inspiring to note / that even the redemption of humans
was in the mind of God before the beginning of time
I Cor. 2:7 / II Tim. 1:19 / Tit. 1:2
And I want to take some tome for us to take a look
at what an amazing universe God has created
Do you know how many miles are in one “light year?”
There’s 5,873,327,712,000 miles in one light year!!!
That's five trillion / eight hundred and seventy-three billion
three hundred and twenty-seven million
seven hundred and twelve thousand miles!!!
Now multiply this times 4.24 light years
to see how far the nearest star is to the earth
The nearest star to earth is an astounding 25 trillion miles away
If that’ not staggering enough / consider this
The farthest star from the earth
is a staggering / 13,230,000,000 light years away!!!
That’s seventy-seven sextillion / seven hundred and four quintillion
one hundred and twenty-five quadrillion
six hundred and twenty-nine trillion
seven hundred and sixty billion miles away!!!
(77,704,125,629,760,000,000,000 miles away)
Light travels very fast / about 186,000 miles per second
just shy of 6 trillion miles every year
Now / that’s super fast / but the universe is super big
So even at that breakneck speed
it takes a single beam of light / a long time to travel anywhere
The stars you see tonight / are very old lights
- they have been traveling for several light years
- they have only now reach us
This earth and our life on it is truly fascinating
The earth's relationship to the sun is not perpendicular
it is tilted at a 23-degree angle
While tilted at this 23-degree angle
our world is rotating on its axis at about 1000 miles per hour
Scientists say if the rotation were only 100 miles per hour
our days and nights would be ten times as long
and whatever survived the incredibly hot days
would freeze in the night / when temperatures
would plummet to something like 240 below zero
This 23-degree tilt is not absolute / it wobbles off by about 3 degrees
with amazing regularity
Our seasons and our climates are affected by it
If the world strayed up or down more than the 3-degree tilt
life might perish
Without the tilt to deflect the light and heat
the earth would absorb too much heat
Moisture would be pulled to the north and south poles
and build up in tremendous ice caps
We are approximately 93-million miles from the sun
just about right to receive neither too much
nor too little heat and light to allow us to live
And our moon / while the earth tilts
wobbles / and races around the sun
orbits us at about 240,000 miles
just about perfect for our well-being
controlling the tides and keeping them within livable levels
Now it takes a lot of faith to believe that this is all by accident
On top of all that / what we have is beautiful
And how many galaxies are there out there?
Depending on which astronomer you ask
there are anywhere from 50 billion
up to as many as 230 billion galaxies out there
Our own Milky Way galaxy in which our solar system is located
spans 70,000 light years across
This means that it would take a human being
traveling at the speed of light / 1,000 lifetimes
assuming a life-expectancy of 70
to cross our own Milky Way galaxy
Our God is almighty / He flings out stars with his hands
If you remember your science / stars are way bigger than our sun
First of all / compared to earth / the sun is simply ginormous
The earth is a mere golf-ball when placed next to the sun
- 1,300,000 earths can fit inside the sun
The sun is 1,391,000 kilometers across
- 109 times the diameter of Earth
- weighs about 333,000 times as much as Earth
But there are numerous other galaxies out there
Louie Giglio / a dynamic preacher / who was recently
in the How Great Is our God Tour with Chris Tomlin
highlighted on particular galaxy to stress God’s greatness
He was referring to the Whirlpool Galaxy / also known as M51
This is probably the best known galaxy out there
because it sits at such a perfect angle to us
It spins out there / about 37 million light years away from us
The Whirlpool Galaxy is so massively huge
the distance across it is more than 100 thousand light years
It is estimated that there are more than 160 billion stars in this galaxy
This picture was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
And do you know what is found
right in the core / the heart of the Whirlpool Galaxy
Using the Hubble telescope
they zoomed to the very center of that galaxy
and this is what they saw.”
- right in the heart of the Whirlpool Galaxy
Scientists call it an “X”
This is officially known as the “X Structure
at the core of the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy
We understand that for reasons of political correctness
scientists have to call it an X factor
As Louie Giglio says / “They call it “the ‘X’ factor’
“Call it what you will / I know what it looks like to me”
Mind you / this galaxy is approximately 31 billion light years away
and God left His calling card there / to remind us of the reason
why He came down to this planet
It looks like the cross of Jesus was on the mind of God
even as he was creating the universe
There is no running away from the cross / the cross is everywhere
It casts a long shadow over the entire universe
a constant reminder to us / of what Jesus did for the world
What a mighty God we serve / what a big God we serve
Doesn’t this make your heart pound!
Makes you want to stand up clap / cheer / stomp your feet / and dance
and sing and shout out loud / to God’s glory
God puts a stamp of His fingerprint on the universe
Of course we see His fingerprint everywhere in creation
but high up there is the highest heavens
God is declaring Himself in the creation
Psalm 97:6 / “The heavens proclaim his righteousness
and all the peoples see his glory”
Psalm 19:1 / “The heavens declare the glory of God
the skies proclaim the work of his hands”
When you were being woven together in your mothers womb
just for one of your eyes to come together
a million nerve endings start to travel to the eye
and another million from the eye to the brain
And every single one of these millions of nerve-endings
must mesh up accurately / every single one of them
each of the millions of nerve endings has to find
its exact match in order for the eye to work
Now that / is to incredibly amazingly mind-boggling
On the last night of the How Great Is Our God Tour
Louie Giglio tells us / that a molecular biologist took him aside
and told him / he’s got to check out on a substance called laminin
Laminins are a family of proteins
that are an integral part of the structural scaffolding
of basement membranes in almost every animal tissue
Laminins are what hold us together / literally
They are cell adhesion protein molecules
They are what holds one cell of our bodies to the next cell
Without them / we would literally fall apart
The molecular biologist insisted that Giglio should go check it out
and to take a look at what laminins look like
He did / went home / googled it / and what he saw blew him away
Because this / is what he saw
This is what the actual structure a laminin looks like
Now / this is not a Christian portrayal of it
Turn to any scientific or medical journal / this is what you will see
Now is our God cool or what!
The glue that holds us together / all of us / is in the shape of the cross
Isn’t that amazing?
The glue that stops us from literally falling apart
is the very symbol of our salvation from sins / pain / and sorrow
Giglio says that for him
Colossians 1:15-17 immediately comes to mind.
“He is the image of the invisible God / the firstborn over all creation
For by him all things were created / things in heaven and on earth
visible and invisible / whether thrones or powers
or rulers or authorities / all things were created by him and for him
He is before all things / and in him all things hold together” Col 1:15-17
I though a lot about it this week / and I thought how amazing it is
that long before the seed fell on the ground to produce the tree
whose timber will go to construct the cross
on which our Lord as to be hanged
Long before all that / the shape of laminin
was already lodged in Adam’s body
In fact / long before Adam was fashioned from the dust of the earth
God Almighty planned for what laminin to look like that
For even before that primal titanic explosion
when time and space and matter came into existence
even before that explosion / when there was utter nothingness
God had planned for laminin to carry the shape of the cross
He designed His calling card
way before the sin of the first man
Psalm 147:4 / “He determines the number of the stars
and calls them each by name”
There is an exact number of stars in the heavens
God knows exactly how many there are
But even more glorious / God has named every one of them
Chris Tomlin the one who wrote the song How Great is Our God
says there is one star that out-shines them all
The Scripture says Jesus Christ is the Bright and Morning Star
Scripture says He is the Light of the entire world
I want to end here / with something practical you can all do
Tonight / Step outside
If the air is clear / and the night sky cloudless / look up
Why not go a step further / Lie down flat on your back
and stare at those incredible stars
Don’t rush / Stay long enough to allow your mind
to grasp the sheer immensity of the galaxy out there
And then try to comprehend the fact
that vast / and immense / as it is / it is ONLY ONE
among the hundreds of galaxies
Then do this
Remind yourself / that you are more significant to God
than all of those planets and stars in the stellar spaces
Just think / they will all pass away / burn up
and swallowed into black holes / but you are eternal
Your name has been engraved in the palm of His hand
And think about this too
That the day God made you / he broke the mold
You are a limited edition of one
God made you
with all your quirks and idiosyncrasies and uniqueness
You are here because God wanted you here
Even if you were a surprise to your parents
you weren’t a surprise to God
That’s how much God loves you
Then pause and give Him thanks
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