We humans need reminders that we are not, after all, the center of the universe. That’s why I try repeating all 14 verses of Psalm 19 by memory most every morning. The act of memorizing forces me to slow down and meditate on the words, which is necessary for me, lest I forget and fall back into my default position where it’s all about me. So, it’s best for me to begin my day by thinking of my Creator rather than myself: God is the one in control of this show that I may mistakenly refer to as “my day.”
I’m often up early enough to walk outside and peer into the night sky, and on a clear morning, the bright stars glitter the dark expanse like tiny eyes peeking through a black, velvety curtain. Standing there with my head tilted back, it seems like I can see into their forever world.
Last week, thanks to NASA’s Webb telescope, I realized I’m not only gazing into forever, but I’m also the recipient of a blast from the past: a billions upon billions of years-old blast.
The James Webb Space Telescope has made it possible to visit previously invisible celestial neighborhoods, parts of our cosmos, ancient galaxies, formed over 13 billion years ago. Because of infrared, the telescope can penetrate through dust clouds and view images from the far corners of the universe. The pictures reveal stars being born and stars dying about the same time our sun and earth were being formed.
“We’re looking for the first things to come out of the Big Bang,” said John Mather, senior project scientist for the telescope.
“That was always out there,” remarked Jane Rigsby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and telescope’s operations manager. “We just had to build a telescope to see what was there.”
What is there is far beyond what I could imagine: brilliant images, a mere teaser slide show of our universe, billions of light years away, reaching our eyes long after many of those stars and planets have been born and others have died.
And it’s only a tiny part of the universe’s vastness. It’s like we’ve picked up a mere handful of sand along the cosmos’ boundless seashore.
Try visualizing the so-called Big Bang. Now go back before that, when there was no time as a frame of reference, nothing called “matter,” only emptiness, no universe, nothing. I know. It bends the mind to try.
Now imagine that Something—call it God, if you will—spoke. According to the Scriptures, it happened, and then “a hundred billion galaxies are born, in the vapor of his breath the planets form,” as the Christian pop band, Hillsong United, worded it.
But then, I can reverse directions, and instead of looking up through a telescope, I focus through a microscope into the tiny recesses of the human body. And this constitutes another mystery: my physical body. It’s made up of something like 100 trillion cells that came from the division of one single cell, and with every minute, some 300 million of those cells die, but every day, some 300 billion new cells are born.
So here I stand, gazing into the night sky. I am more than the birth and death of billions of my cells, just as there is more to this universe than billions of stars being birthed and dying. The God who created it all has come to us in a Person, so that the very One who flung the universe in place billions of years ago can also erase as many failures as the number of stars he created or cells he generates in my body.
Looking up, under the canopy of space, with my head still arched back, I see light that is billions of years old. Yet it’s from the same light source that penetrates my soul’s depths. It’s from the one and only Light that creates a life that will endure beyond any measure of that thing we call time.
And lowering my gaze from the heavens above, the scientist’s words echo in my mind, “That was always there; we just had to build a telescope to find it.”
Before “that” was there, there was the One who created it.
And like the telescope, I just have to find Him.