The Incredible Expanding Universe

January 7 at midnight was a perfect night in the Houston area; the almost-full moon directly overhead was casting heavenly moon-shadows on the ground, and the clear sky was accompanied by a remarkably mild temperature for mid-January, even in Houston.

As I gazed in wonder at the stars, I couldn't help but think about how large the universe is, and how little we understand about the nature of God.  The night before I spent a few hours reading about how scientists measure the distance to the stars, and the theory of relativity.  I'm naturally a skeptic so I don't accept scientific theories without at least attempting to understand them.  How little I understand about physics pales in comparison to how little we all understand about God.

Being a skeptic, I also don't easily accept anybody's interpretation of scriptures without studying and at least attempting to understand in my own mind and spirit.  As a result, I have studied the most mysterious parts of the Bible at great length.  So, rather than being puzzled about these passages, my understanding now supports my belief.

So now I want to share with you what I am learning, if perhaps it can help you understand and overcome your own skepticism.  Specifically I want to talk about the creation account in Genesis  and the apocalyptic vision of Revelation.  These two topics are quite large and will probably require several posts to cover each, even from my limited understanding.

Let be begin by giving you some wonderful insight into parallels and contrasts between the two books.

Genesis begins with a vision of the beginning of time.  Revelation ends with a vision of the end of time.  (I don't believe either author fully understood what he witnessed, but recorded the vision as it was given.)

In the beginning, creation is spoken into existence through the power of God's word.  In the end, the enemy is destroyed by the power of God's word (the sword coming out of his mouth in Rev 19:21 is the Word of God).

In Genesis Adam is placed in a garden.  In Revelation the saints worship in a city.  In the Garden, man is innocent. In the Heavenly City the saints are redeemed. There is no return to innocence.  As Winkie Pratney once said, "God is a progressive God."

In the middle of both the Garden of Eden and the Heavenly City you will find the Tree of Life (Gen 2:9, Rev 22:2).  Adam and Eve never ate from the Tree of Life or they would be eternally sinful, as Satan is.

The purpose of the creation account in Genesis was to establish the principals upon which the Law would be based.  Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Torah, the five books of the Law of Moses.

The purpose of the Revelation was to warn the saints of the things yet to come; that we would heed the warnings and guard the prophecy as one would guard a valuable treasure.  Revelation is the last book of prophecy in the Christian Bible.

Paul said that there are mysteries in the Bible hidden even from the "principalities and authorities in heavenly places."  God granted the Church to make known His manifold wisdom which had been "hidden for ages" (Ephesians 3).  I believe there are still mysteries to be revealed, and we won't fully understand these mysteries until "we know as we are known."

One of these mysteries is the incredible expanding universe that God has "stretched forth in the heavens".  Mankind continues to learn more about the size and character of the universe through powerful telescopes and sophisticated mathematical analysis.  The universe we can detect is unimaginably large, yet most scientists believe it started as an unimaginably small, unimaginably dense object that exploded something like 14 billion years ago to form everything that exists.

OK, so here's a question I can't answer: if we can detect stars 13.5 billion light years away, that means that it took that radiation almost the entire age of the universe to get here.  That means those stars either started out near where they appear to be, or travelled at near-light-speed to get there.  The former would contradict the Big Bang Theory; the latter would challenge the Theory of Relativity.  And where are they now, 13.5 billion years later?  I might need to spend some time with an astronomer, but I suspect there are more questions than there are plausible answers.  So it remains a mystery to me, and I suspect that at the end of this line of futile speculation is a mass of human foolishness.

At any rate, this very large universe causes me to reflect on the awesome and unknowable majesty of God, and to realize how much we need Jesus to mediate our relationship to God.  This God who created the universe by the power of His Word, stepped into our world from infinite power to become mortal and suffer a brutal and unjust death in our place.  "Amazing love, how can it be, that thou my God shouldst die for me!"

Update January 16
On further reading I found that the Big Bang theory is really mis-nomenclature for an event in which the universe suddenly appeared out of nowhere in an instant, all over the place - not from a single point in space.  That, my friend, sure sounds like God unveiling his majestic creation!

By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God's command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen. (Heb 11:3)