March 9, 2005

[Rev. Doc]

God's Glory

"This is what the Lord says: 'Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things, and so they came into being?' declares the Lord."
Isaiah 66:1-2

God created the earth and the universe. Most of us do not comprehend the vastness of the it.

Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second (not per hour but per second). That is roughly 700 million miles per hour. Our modern airplanes fly approximately 550 miles per hour.

The moon is roughly 238,000 miles from the earth. If we were to travel to the moon by plane, it would take us about eighteen days. But light travels there in 1.3 seconds!

Let's continue. The sun is 93 million miles from the earth. To reach the sun by plane, your journey would last over twenty-one years. Think of how long the past twenty-one years of your life has been. Then imagine flying that long without stopping to reach the sun! For those of you who prefer driving, it would take you roughly two hundred years, without any rest stops! Yet it takes light only 8 min*utes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun to the earth!

The nearest star is 4.5 light years from the earth. To reach it by plane would take approximately fifty-three billion years! That is 53 with nine zeros behind it! Yet light reaches it in only four and one-half years!

The average star you can see unassisted with the naked eye is 100 to 1,000 light years away. It's hard to even attempt to calculate the amount of time it would take for a plane to reach it. But think of it: Light traveling at a rate of 186,000 miles per second takes one thousand years to reach the earth. That means there are stars you see at night whose light emanated from them in the days of King Richard's reign in England, and it has been traveling at the rate of 700 million miles per hour ever since, without slow*ing down! That light originated seven hundred years before America became a nation!

Let's expand this further. In the mid-nineties NASA's Hubble Space Telescope sent back pictures of galaxies that were 7,000 light years away! Our minds cannot even comprehend distances like these. Are you getting a greater glimpse of His glory?

Prayer: Ask God to help you see a glimpse of His majesty and glory.

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."
~C. S. Lewis