distance. Millions of stars and suns so far away that by the time they reach your eye they coalesce into one little dot of light. How vast is our universe? Dr. Einstein said that light travels in circles, not in straight lines, because light is bent by mass. If you projected a beam of light out into visible space, it would go on and on and finally transcribe a great cosmic circle and come back upon itself. How fast would the light travel? 186,000 miles a second — 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days a year, at the rate o f seven times around our earth in one second. At that rate of speed, light would go and go and go and finally come hack to its starting point, but it would take between 200 and 500 billion years to make the circuit. Inside that great circle are all the heavenly bodies created by Christ. How many are there? Says Sir James Jeans, “ If every sun were like a grain of sand, and you took all the heavenly bodies and reduced them to a grain of sand and spread them out on the earth it would cover the British Isles hundreds o f yards deep. And then contem plate that our little earth is one-millionth fraction of one such grain of sand and you get some faint idea of the vastness of the universe.” How many heavenly bodies are there? Astrono mers say there are more suns than there are grains o f sand on all the seas and oceans on the earth. How big are they ? Some so small you could put a million into our sun. Some so vast that you could put 25 million suns inside of them. If they were to take the place of our sun, they would be larger than the orbit of our earth. If some of the suns of the universe were put in place of our sun, we would freeze to death. Some are so hot that if they were put in the place of our sun, the temperature on earth would go up to 7000 degrees. Some are so heavy that you could not lift a fragment the size of your hand. Some are so gossamer thin that you could lift the Matterhorn with the touch o f the little finger. What did the Psalmist say? “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy finger. . . . ” Our Lord, when He created all things, did not have to put His mighty power behind all the worlds that we see, but with the fingers of His divine majesty and power He tossed off another island universe, an other galactic system, another world. T he I nvisible W orld What about the invisible world of mysterious emptiness? If you took all the space out of your desk and reduced it to only molecular material, you could not even see it. The density of the molecu lar structure of a piece o f metal is no greater than the density of interstellar dust that you see out in the heavens. If you were to take all the space out of our earth — 8000 miles through and 25,000 miles
sing it in our carols. We read it from our pulpits. We glibly speak it on our tongues. We love to hear the message, but sometimes I think we lose the amazement of it all—that God the sovereign, the eternal creator, should become a man and live among us. Jesus is God and He did come to earth. Read what Paul said in Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities — all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” And in Hebrews: “ In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He re flects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of His nature, upholding the universe by His word o f power.” C reator of the S tars Have you ever gone out in the darkness o f a night and observed the Milky Way — that lovely little path that goes from the southern part o f our hemisphere to the north? What are you looking at? You are looking at the edge of our galactic sys tem—only the edge. The earth and its planets are about two-thirds of the way out towards the edge of this great spiral galactic universe. Millions and millions of stars, and the Milky Way is just part of them. The inter-stellar dust has clouded so that you cannot resolve the individual stars with the unaided eye. But you see the glow of these billions of stars. How many are there in our little universe called the Milky Way? There may be as many as from one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thou sand million suns. And how many other Milky Ways? There are literally millions of them. The universe is unbelievably vast. If you were to view one o f the pictures of our galactic system taken by the 200-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar, and if you wanted to see anything the size of the earth, you would have to enlarge the picture until it covered the whole continent of Asia, before the earth would be visible under the most powerful microscope. And then you would have to remember that there are millions of galactic systems like this in the universe. Do you remember the nursery rhyme, “ Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are” ? What is that little twinkling star? Just a star? It’s an island universe, in which from one edge o f that little dot to the other edge, there are some times thousands and thousands of light years of
DECEMBER, 1967
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