...and He Made The Stars - Creation Day 4 Series

Dr. Bradford Reaves

Crossway Christian Fellowship

Hagerstown, MD, USA

www.mycrossway.org

View this and other messages at: https://mycrossway.churchcenter.com/channels/8118

Introduction

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14–19)

When you get to understand how big our world is, the more motivated you are to turn your life over to the Lord and say, “God, you’ve created his whole world. You have everything under control. You can help me hold my life together. I want to dedicate myself to you. I want to give myself to you.”

The sun is 93 million miles away from Earth. The sun provides heat, light, and radiation that’s needed, vitamin D. The moon is important because it controls the tides, creates the waves, and so on that exist inside of the ocean that is important for what takes place there. But I want to talk to you about the stars.

In the ‘70s there was a decision made that NASA would send up a probe and that probe would go out and visit all of the planets and take close-up pictures of them and keep going outside of our solar system. So in August of 1977, the Voyager 1 launched.

Once Voyager 1 passed the atmosphere and into space, all the rockets shut down and it is moving through space on its own inertia. As it passed by Saturn it catapulted a little faster. And then it goes past Jupiter and it slingshots a little faster. It passes all of the planets, takes pictures of all of them. It even passes Neptune and Pluto. Do you know how far away Neptune is from Earth? It is between 3-4 billion miles away. Voyager 1 passed Neptune in 1990.

Now when they got to about 4 billion miles, after it passed the solar system, they decided to turn off the cameras. Why? There is nothing between that and the next solar system that it is moving toward at a speed of 11 miles per second.

On this Voyager 1, there is a Golden Record. And if you do turn it on, you can hear sounds of Earth and in a greeting in 55 languages. Here’s the problem. Do you know how long it’s going to take for this Voyager 1 to get to the next solar system? To get to the next star (that God created, remember), it’s going to take 40,000 years to get there.

Now some of you are asking, if God created the stars and the closest one is 40,000 years away and the other are millions of light-years away, how can we see their light? Well, God created everything with the appearance of age. When He created the star. Alpha Centauri is the next star at 4.75 light-years away. He created not only the star, but He created the light that comes from the star so that we could see it. (Credit: Scott Turansky, Sermon Central)

Day 4 describes the creation of all the heavenly luminaries. Here in Genesis 1:14-19. It simply says God made them all. When it says that God made the stars along with the sun and the moon, it is saying something about his immense power. That simple, simple statement is almost like an addendum at the end of verse 16, which in Hebrew literally says, “The stars also.” 

Light travels at 186,000 miles a second, which computes to six trillion miles in a year. This morning, when your alarm clock went off at 6:00 a.m. a ray of light passed by the earth from the sun. As you sat down to your morning coffee at 6:41 a.m., the light beam passed Jupiter, and right about now it is passing Pluto. As you leave work on Friday afternoon, that little beam of light will be leaving our solar system.

It’ll be another 4 years before this beam of light has only reached the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. It has to travel 32,000 years before it will reach the center of our galaxy, that’s at six trillion miles a year. But wait, it still has another 50,000 years to get to the other side of the Milky Way, which is our galaxy and when it does, it will leave behind about 100 billion stars. It will need to travel a total of 20 billion years before it reaches the edge of the known universe. After over 20 billion years of travel, with about 50 billion galaxies behind it and each galaxy containing about 100 billion stars. (John MacArthur)