Awesome Astronomy

  "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands!" (Psalm 19:1).  This is another example of that glory, how amazing creation actually is, and it isn't even the beginning!

The Creator and me

I'd just like to share something with you of what's been put in my heart this past week by God.

So, Doc recommended reading this blog by a mate of his about the God of Gaps theory (which is a good read) and from there I'm sent to an article in The Times about the 10 plagues which God brought upon Egypt and utimately led to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The article is about sceintific explanations for these events to have happened: not blood in the river but sediment-rich water; not a plague of frogs but toads sudennly appearing after heavy rainfall; not a plague of midges, dying livestock, hail, locusts and dark skies but a freak storm which lead to all of these at once. I thought the article was all very interesting, especially that they admitted having no idea about the first-born plague (:P) and the theory that Jews took these 'natural disasters' as a triumph over polytheism.

Another tick for science over religion then? Using the God of Gaps theory, another gap that God does not fill? Well, not really. Does God have a magic wand which He uses to magically cause miracles? No, of course not, isn't it pretty clear that He would work through nature, how else?!

This popped up again on the train back from Lincoln last Thursday when I was reading Bible Doctrine by Wayne Grudem on God's providence. It talked about how The Creator not only created the whole universe (Genesis 1:1) but continues to preserve it (Hebrews 1:3) and holds it all together (Collosians 1:17). Without God everything would fall apart, cease to exist and nothing would have existed in the first place anyway!

His preserving the universe leads on to God's concurrance with the universe (concurrance doesn't mean much to me, I understood it eventually as 'working in co-operation with'). Ephesians 1:11 says that God 'works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will'. Everything that happens in nature is worked out through God, He chooses it all to happen and causes it to happen. This is said throughout scripture in Psalms 148:8, 104:14, Job 37:6-13, 38:32 and Matthew 5:45. So yes, science may explain how something like the 10 plagues happened but we need The Bible to tell us why the same thing happened.

All this thinking of creation and the universe led me to a video that my mate Rachel sent me a while back, of a speaker called Louis Giglio on a tour named 'How Great is our God?' (it's worth watching all five parts, here is a video of him talking about just stars). One thing that stuck out in my memory was a star called Betelgeuse (aka. BeetleJuice) which he talked about. It's 427 light years away, it is twice the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun and you could fit Earth inside it 262, 000, 000, 000, 000 (I think that's enough naughts for a trillion!) times! If the Earth was the size of a golf ball, BeetleJuice is the size of five Empire State Buildings ontop of eachother!

It's hard to even conceive that something so big is in this universe. Even harder to conceive that the same God who made this 'supergiant' also created us and He loves each one of us and wants to know us all personally. Absolutely humbling.

I stumbled across this blog today looking for the picture above and it talks about these inconceivable stars also. It gives a great bit of advice at the end which I'd like to share also:

"Don't tell God how big your problems are...tell your problems how big God is"

This God who has power to create such immense things can cope with the biggest of our problems; all we need to do is give them up to Him, trust in Him and accept His love and forgiveness.