Thoughts for the Day

The heavens declare the Glory of God.                      Psalm 19:1

It is probably best to begin our exploration of “Did God really say …?” by considering how God communicates with us.  This can probably be summarised as being through:

• What He has done,
• What He has said (recorded mostly in the Old Testament),
• Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection (the focus of the New Testament),
• The inspiration of the Holy Spirit (in both Testaments and mysteriously at work in Christians ever since).

In most of this series, I will concentrate on the words of Jesus recorded in the New Testament gospels.  But today I’m looking at this one example of God speaking through what He has done.  ‘The heavens declare the Glory of God … night after night they reveal knowledge.’  I imagine the psalmist staring up into the night sky, awestruck at the multitude of the stars and the mystery of their placement.  How little of that ‘knowledge’ he would have understood!  But does our scientific understanding increase the sense of awe or reduce this spectacle to nothing more than a ‘Big Bang’ and the random outcome of a few billion years of gravity?

We recognise a universe far more vast than the psalmist could have imagined.  Science generally rests on the reproducibility of results, yet scientific evidence points to a single once in billions of years and once across billions of light-years creation event of staggering proportions – the whole universe from nothing in a “let there be light” instant of unimaginable intensity!  And, though we may have an equation to describe gravity, who can understand it?  A force between objects across the emptiness of space just because they exist!  And why should that equation be fixed in all time and space?  What defined and sustains this ‘Natural law’?

What does the night sky speak of to you?