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)
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and the stars, which you have set in place, (Psalm 8:3)
Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?” (Job 26:14)
Genesis explains all of that by saying this, by saying, “-and the stars.”
What I want you to know this morning, no matter what is going on in your life, the challenges you are facing, the stress, the worry, the tears. The God that made the stars, cares for you. He knows. He sees you. He loves you. Look up to Him!
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; (Psalm 146:6)
Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing. (Isaiah 40:26)
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. 4 He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. 5 Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure. (Psalm 147:3–5)
The universe holds over a billion, trillion stars – more than we can ever comprehend, but now look at this:
He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. (Psalm 147:4)
I think what we want to know more than ever today is that we are connected to something beyond ourselves: to belong, to know, and be know. Genesis in undeniable terms tells us. In 3 words Genesis outlines God’s creation of the stars and the rest of the Bible is His love song for you, the bride of His Son.
No star was put in its place by accident and yet in the enormity of these giants, the most complex and beautiful image of God is not found in them or the galaxies they inhabit. His image is found in you. The love of God shows us that God alone bridges the distance between him and us, enabling us to see this world through Calvary.
Let’s bring it down to a smaller level. We go from the vastness of this amazing and immense universe to the minutest complexity of life. We’ve talked about DNA before that carries the life code for the function of every organism. DNA exists in every single cell. You have 100 trillion cells. Every one of those cells has a little strip of DNA. It is a copy of coded information and it’s coiled up in every single cell in every living organism including you. Now, you have 46 segments in that little coil. Twenty-three of those came from your father and 23 of those came from your mother to make the 46. The combination then of your father’s and your mother’s DNA is uniquely formed to determine what you look like, your personality, abilities, and precisely how every single cell in your body is to function throughout your entire life.
If we just took one little cell and got the little coiled DNA strip it would be 7 feet long. That’s in every one of your 100 trillion cells. If all the DNA in your body, let’s just take all of it and stretch it out and connect it together, it would stretch from here to the moon one-half million times. If all this very densely coded information were placed in typewritten form, if it was just typed out in you, just for you, it would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times. You can go to the farthest vastest complexity of the universe or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body and you can see the fingerprint of God.
Your brain has about 100,000 billion electrical connections, 10 to the 14th power. In fact, your brain has more electrical connections than all the electrical appliances on earth, yet your brain with its 100,000 billion electrical connections fits in a quart jar and operates for 70 years on 10 watts of power fueled largely by cheeseburgers and French Fries.
God wants to do this great work in our lives. He wants to give us something special. He wants to help us hold it together. God is the one who holds together a relationship between a parent and a child. He’s the one who holds a relationship between a husband and a wife. God’s the one who knows and holds together the issues about finances or how a car operates. Do you believe that God understands how a car operates? Do you think God understands how computers operate? I love talking to kids and ask them that question.
Our God is so big. Forty thousand years to the next star. 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars... When I get a picture of how big God is and then I recognize that He does understand my complex situation. He understands my life and the challenges I face. No wonder he chose a star to lead the Maggi to the manger!
He offers me an abundant life. It starts when I come to Him and I say, “God, I want you to hold me together with the same way you hold this universe together... I want you to take my life. I want you to work this miracle inside of me.” God wants to do that in your heart and my heart today.
I wonder how many opportunities we’ve missed in life because our faith wained and we stopped trusting Him. “When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”
Corrie ten Boom has long been honored as an exemplar of Christian faith in action. Arrested by the Nazis along with the rest of her family for hiding Jews in their home during the Holocaust, she was imprisoned and eventually sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp along with her sister, Betsie, who perished there just days before Corrie’s own release on December 31, 1944. Inspired by Betsie’s example of selfless love and forgiveness amid extreme cruelty and persecution, Corrie established a post-war home for other camp survivors trying to recover from the horrors they had escaped. She went on to travel widely as a missionary, preaching God’s forgiveness and the need for reconciliation.
If there is anyone who endured the worst of life enough to shake her fist at God, it was Corrie, but she refused. Do you remember the other week when I shared with you how our lives are like a tapestry full of the threads of life God has weaved? Listen to this poem written by Corrie:
“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern, He has planned
He knows He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.”
The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. (Psalm 33:11)
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
God makes appointments with us in our disappointments. There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny. I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is that is where we put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where we left him.
When you come to religion, you come to a place. When you come to Jesus Christ, you come to a person. He was there and created and with a purpose that exceeds the stars. Will you come to him today?
