Video Transcript: The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Just a couple things as you're as you're getting started.  In these videos, I want to show you pictures -  Astronomy is a very visual science - and there's amazing pictures to show.  And so what I've done is set up this monitor here so that you can see the pictures and I can point things out in the pictures for you.  But all of these pictures are also available as a gallery.  And so I'll reference which picture I'm looking at in case you're just listening to the audio of this video, then you can look at the gallery yourself.  Maybe you can look at the pictures in more detail in that gallery or share them with family and friends.

So the purpose in our course here is knowing God and it begs the question, how do we get to know God better?  How do we get to know God better?  And there's more than one way to get to know God better.  One way we typically think of is, of course, his holy Word, the Bible. This is God's special revelation to us.  We call it that.  It's a special revelation.  And, of course, when we say God's Word, we mean not only His written Word, but also The Word, Jesus Christ, who we read about in the Bible.  

But there's another way that we learn about God.  And that is through what we call general revelation, the world, the universe, really, that's all around us.  God has created this world and his fingerprints, his signature is everywhere around us, from our own bodies and minds, to the basic laws of nature, to the starry night that's above us.  All of this is whispering to us about the God who made it.  And we see this throughout the scriptures.  I can't help but think of Psalm 8.  It’s always been one of my favorite, favorite psalms.  You know, lord, my lord, I'll just read it:  

“Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the Earth, you have set your glory above the heavens, from the lips of children and infants You have ordained to praise.  When I consider Your heavens, the works of your fingers, the Moon, the stars that you have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, the Son of Man, that you care for him?”  You know, we can't help but think about God and how powerful and majestic He is and how low we are when we look at the night sky.

Another favorite which I think speaks to the power of general revelation, how God is revealing Himself to us through His creation is Psalm 19.  It says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of his hands.”  Now think about that in a really visceral way.  I mean, imagine the skies are shouting about God to us.  

Now we're going to be learning throughout this course about light and how light travels from deep space and how we study that light and analyze it and understand our universe.  But think about that light, those messages coming from space.  That is, in a sense, it’s nature yelling at us saying, “Don't you see this amazing God?” It's speaking to us in the same way that we read words in the Bible.  There’s a language that's being communicated from nature, and not just space, but from beautiful flowers, and all sorts of things. In fact, it daunts us, right?  “Day after day they pour forth speech… the heavens.  Night after night they display knowledge.  There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.  It's heard everywhere.  It goes out into all the Earth to the ends of the Earth.”  So the universe, nature, is speaking to us. It's declaring the glory of God.  Isn’t that amazing?  

Maybe you've been in a situation where you just can't help but share with someone what God has done for you.  You're like, I have to tell you guys, this amazing thing happened.  This is what God has done in my life.  You have to declare it.  That is what nature is doing.  That's what the flowers are doing.  And what we're going to do in this course is tune our ears to be able to listen to what nature is saying.  And here's the crazy thing.  Nature speaks to us in a language that we might not think of as a language to be listened to.  And that is in the language of mathematics, in the language of science, of patterns, of basic relationships.  And these are profound truths that we're going to be exploring throughout this course.  I'm getting ahead of myself.  

So nature teaches us in lots of ways, and we see that not only in the Psalms, but I want to also think to the ministry of Jesus Christ.  In what ways did he use nature to teach us?  Think about the parables that Jesus used.  The parable about the flowers, “Consider the flowers of the field, they do not labor or spin,” or “The birds of the air, they don't store away in barns, but your heavenly father cares for them.”  We should not worry because flowers don't worry, because the birds don't worry.  Or the parable of the sower where the farmer’s throwing seed and some of it falls on the path and the birds eat it.  Some of it falls on the weeds.  Or the parable of the sheep and the lost sheep.  The point is, Jesus used these stories to connect our experience.  This is a deep thought.  I'm starting off with a really deep thought. But Jesus used these stories to connect the kingdom of God to our everyday experiences.  But I want you to think about that at another level, which is, God crafted the flowers to teach us something about worrying.  God crafted birds so that we could learn from them about how to live our life and to rely on God.  Isn't that amazing? 

In a lot of ways, what I like to think about is that nature and these specific parables are what I would consider living analogies.  Now, a living analogy, like a flower is alive, right?  And I can look at that and in many ways, it's an analogy for my own life.  Or the bird is like a living analogy, a real life thing that you can touch and feel but it's communicating a deep and profound truth about ourselves, about our God, and our relationship with God.  I mean, think about this idea of living analogy, that's something that's going to come up throughout our course, but I wanted to just tease it out a little bit more in this in this first lesson.

Think about the story throughout the Old Testament of the Israelites; their captivity in Egypt.  The story of the Israelites is in many ways, a living analogy for our own story - our captivity to sin.  The Israelites were set free through the process of Passover and the plagues.  Passover, where a lamb was sacrificed, but the Israelites were spared.  We were set free from our captivity by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and our lives were spared.   There's a powerful analogy between the life of the Israelites and our life today. It's amazing. So not only does sort of the natural world, the animals, have something to teach us, but even the lives of other people can be like a living analogy for us.  And in the same way, even nonliving things can be a living analogy that teaches us. 

So for example, the stars.  Stars are born, in a sense, they don't live but it's like they're formed, they live a life, and then they die a spectacular death that we're going to see pictures of and learn about how that happens.  Again, they don't live in the traditional living sense as an animal, but we talk about the birth, life, and death of stars.  But after a star dies, there's actually a new birth that happens in stars with a second generation; a new body for that star that forms.  And so in a very real sense, and we'll look at this in more detail, but in a very real sense, the life of a star is like a parable of the life that we experience where we live in this physical body, experience death, and then experience new life in a new body.  And so my hope throughout this course is to highlight those ways in which the universe, and God is communicating to us through the universe, and teaching us something.  And my hope is that we can extract these living parables, these ideas, these lessons that God is trying to teach us through the world that He made.  

Cool.  Okay.  So just as a preview, what is it that God is teaching us through nature? I mean, Scripture teaches us the story of God's people and his salvation story, right?  How God saves his people.  In a sense, that's the story of Bible.  And so one question I have is, well, what is the story of general revelation? What is God trying to communicate to us through the world that he made?  And I think there's a couple things that we can see.  

The first one that I want to highlight is the power and majesty of God.  The power and majesty of God.

My favorite place in the Bible to see this, and I want to connect the Bible to the heavens, I mean, naturally, if you've gone out and looked at the night sky, you are, like me, overwhelmed by the beauty and the size and the scale and how small we are and how big God is.  But what I love, I love the passage Job which connects this experience of looking at the night sky with the power and majesty of God. 

So you remember the story of Job?  Job's got a lot of good things going on in his life and then everything falls apart.  And God allows that to happen.  He loses children, loses his spouse, who's his animals, he loses his own health.  And he and his friends are like, Why me?  Why is this happening?  It doesn't make any sense.  And so on and on, they're questioning God, how could you allow this to happen to me? And then eventually, God responds.  And I love this response.  It's profound.  

And my favorite part here, God says, “Brace yourself like a man.”  He's like, “You've been questioning me?  Brace yourself like a man.  I will question you, and you will answer me.”  And God gets ready to kind of put Job in his place and the things that God says - He's pointing to his creation, to reveal his own power and majesty - God says things like, “Have you ever given orders to the morning? Or shown the dawn its place, even told the sunlight where to go? Have you ever comprehended the vast expanses of the Earth? Do you know, can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water?” He says, “Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?” - that's the star cluster here – The Pleiades; the star cluster that goes together – “Can you bind them together the way God has done? Can you loose the cords of Orion?” – the constellation Orion – “Can you pull those apart? Can you call forth the constellations?” God is pointing to the sky to say, “Can you do anything that I can do? You have no clue how powerful I really am.”

That's one of the lessons that we're going to learn.  And Job certainly learned a lesson.  Of course, at the end of Job, he says, “I have heard, I have heard my God.  My ears have heard you.  But now my eyes have seen you.  And therefore I despise myself.”  Job was like, “Wow, you are God!” 

Now, one of the other things that we learn about God through His creation, is the tremendous size of God and, and really size isn't even the right word because God is beyond the notion of size.  But we can be overwhelmed by that when we look at some amazing pictures from space.  I want to share with you just one example of the overwhelming size of our universe.  Now as we make sense out of this picture, we have to get some basic terminology, which is probably familiar to most of you, but the basic structure of our universe as we go from small to big … so we all live on a planet, Planet Earth.  Our Planet is a part of a Solar System, which orbits a Star.  So we're getting bigger now – Planet, Solar System, Star. That Star is one of many stars in a Galaxy – a Galaxy is hundreds of billions of stars.  So now we're getting really big.  And all of the Galaxies, everything, make up our Universe.  So really our Universe is everything physical; every physical thing that exists is our Universe.  So that’s the basic structure:  Planet, Solar Systems, Star, Galaxy, Universe.  

So when you look at this picture - this is one of my favorite pictures - it's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. It is the most deep picture ever taken of the Sky.  What that means is it's sensing the most light that's ever been sensed before it.  It's the most sensitive picture and it was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  And we'll learn more about Hubble later on.  But this picture is from a telescope in space, and it's looking at a tiny little patch of sky.  Imagine your pinky nail on your finger held at about arm's length, that's the patch of sky that's represented in this picture.  And the area here - they didn't see anything in the original pictures - it was a dark little patch of sky.  And astronomers decided to take a picture, a very long exposure picture; they leave the camera open for weeks and let all the light in and let it all accumulate so that they can see the faintest, faintest objects that are possible to observe.  And when they capture this picture of this dark, dark patch of sky, this was the final result: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Now, every single speck that you see in this picture, now this is the fourth picture, I believe in the gallery, every picture that you see, every little speck of light that you see in this picture is an entire Galaxy.  An entire galaxy.  So like 100 billion stars inside one of these things.  Now, of course, we live in one Galaxy, we just orbit one star in one Galaxy.  Each of these is an entire other galaxy.  And this is just a tiny part of our night sky.  Our universe is full of galaxies, full of galaxies, and each of those galaxies is full of stars.  And many, many, many of those stars have planets.

Our universe is so big, it is truly impossible to comprehend.  Impossible.  And God is bigger, and broader, and more impossible to understand.  It's truly astounding.  Truly astounding.  So what is nature teaching us about God?  It's teaching us that He's powerful and majestic.  It’s teaching us that He is beyond understanding and his size and scope and ability.  But it's teaching us something else that has to do with our relationship to God.  And that gets at this last picture I want to show you.  And it's not as pretty as any of the other pictures I'll show you in this class but I think this is my favorite picture ever taken in astronomy.  So let me tell you about this picture. 

In the 1970s there was a spacecraft called Voyager.  And it was launched, the Voyager spacecraft was launched to observe some of the outer planets. So it went out past Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.  It took pictures of those planets and their moons.  And it kept going, and it's still out there on its way out of our solar system.  But as it was traveling out, it had finished the bulk of its mission, and the spacecraft has a limited amount of battery on it.  And astronomers wanted to keep contact with this spacecraft as long as possible. So they decided they were going to shut down the camera to save battery.

But the wise astronomers, this is in the 1990s, they decided that now this spacecraft Voyager was out near Pluto, like out beyond Uranus and Neptune, they should turn the spacecraft around and take one last picture of the Earth.  So this picture, which is sometimes called The Pale Blue Dot, this picture - the arrow is pointing at a little tiny speck.  That little, tiny speck is the Earth.  This is the most distant photo that has ever been captured of the Earth.  

And here's what's so profound to me about this picture.  It’s that every person who has ever lived, every war that's ever been fought, it's all happened on that tiny little dot.  That's the Earth.  So this is just a start of giving us this cosmic perspective on how small and truly insignificant this planet of ours is.

And this points to the fundamental paradox that I think is at the heart of our relationship with God, which is God is beyond measure, beyond understanding, has everything, can do anything, and yet He chooses to be in relationship with us.  He wants to be in relationship with us.   And we are nothing.  We are nothing.  But we are special to God. That's this profound paradox. We are nothing, yet we are very special to God.  

Astronomy, and the study of the universe, is a way that we can begin to see God.  It's a way that those people who don't have this and haven't made the Word a part of their heart, a part of their lives, they can see God.  His signature is there.  It's also a way for us who have this Word, who already have Christ in our lives, it's a way for us to enrichen... you know, I don’t think it’s a word -  enrichen, you know, but it's a way for us to have a richer relationship with God.  And that's why I'm so excited about this.

Thank you for watching this video.  Thank you for being a part of this course.  And I'll see you in the next one.