Life Style PARK PLACE OF ST. JOHN
Chaplain’s Corner Under the Starlight of Christmas
In Psalm 8:3, he declares, “When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—the moon and the stars you set in place—what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” In Romans 1:19-20, the apostle Paul used the cosmos as a reason for God’s existence that leaves people without excuses to believe: “They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the Earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” In our celestial neighborhood, our sun (a relatively small star) has about eight planets that revolve around it. “We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star… tucked away in some forgotten corner” of the universe, astronomer Carl Sagan once wrote. But smallness should never be equated with insignificance. This Christmas, the second greatest miracle in the Bible took place (next to creation itself). The coming of Jesus Christ gives a powerful answer to the question of human significance, for if the heavens are unfathomable in their greatness. This truth is even more stunning: the Creator of the cosmos chose to become incarnate HERE .
I had a telescope as a teen. I loved watching the heavens all the time. It was also a period where we were
sending up manned spacecraft on our journey to fulfill President John Kennedy’s proclamation that we would put humans on the moon. That occurred in July 1969. Much has been learned about the “heavens” since then. Through much stronger telescopes and other technologies, we can now “see” further into the universe than ever. And the sight is beyond astonishing. We now know there are hundreds of thousands of galaxies, each containing trillions of stars. People who study the starry cosmos are known as astrophysicists. While it’s true that a majority of them are atheists, there is a growing number who are coming to believe in the Lord God. The vastness, beauty, and the laws that govern the cosmos should lead one to believe in a personal God, so that astrophysicists who have become Christians state that the reason their colleagues remain atheists is because of a willful refusal to believe. Of course, the Bible has a great deal to say about the cosmos. The psalmist declared, “The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship” (Psalm 19:1 NLT).
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