The Heavens Declare the Immensity of God

The following is the text of a Calvin College Chapel service I led, along with members of the Physics & Astronomy department. Pictures illustrating the talk are at the end of the document.

The Heavens Declare the Immensity of God

Deborah Haarsma

November 16, 2000

Today I want to share with you some of the glories of the universe. As a professional astronomer and a Christian, I feel God has called me to share with others in the church the wonderful things in God's creation, things we hardly knew about until the last few decades of astronomy research. Many times these new discoveries are presented in the newspaper or on television within a context of overt atheism, or at least without any mention of God. Today I want to share these things with you in the context of worship, with God as their creator.

As we dim the lights, I'd like you to recall a time when you were far from city lights at night, and you looked up and saw the stars. Maybe you were out camping or traveling through a rural area. As you looked up, you saw the sky strewn with brilliant stars, many many more stars than you can see in Grand Rapids at night. Maybe you even saw the Milky Way spread across the sky!

Slide: Milky Way

Here's a long-exposure photograph of part of the night sky, showing a portion of the Milky Way, with even more stars than you can see with just your eyes. When David was sitting in the hills of Judah and looked up at the night sky, he would have seen the Milky Way too, and it inspired him to sing “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). If David only knew then what we know now about our universe, he might have written a much longer psalm!

Slide: Saturn

With the development of the telescope, we were able to see beyond just the stars at night. We discovered the beauty of the planets in our solar system, like Saturn. The wide ring system is so beautiful with its many colors, yet it is so thin you can see through it to the planet beneath. This photo is from the spacecraft Voyager which moved up beside Saturn, and could see the shadows cast by the planet on the rings and even the shadow cast by the rings onto the planet.

Slide: Eagle Nebula

With modern telescopes, we also learned more about objects beyond our solar system. This is a thick dust cloud in the Eagle nebula, which is about 7000 light years away from our Sun. That means that if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 7000 years to get there. The dust is so thick in spots that no light from behind can get through. Other telescopes which are sensitive to infrared light are able to see through the dust, and have detected stars deep inside these clouds, stars just in the process of forming. Within these pillars, and in other places in our Galaxy like them, God is making brand new stars. n fact, regions like this are like “stellar nurseries,” where many new stars are forming at once. The star light from new-formed stars reflects off the gas and dust in these clouds to create the beautiful colors we see. This dust cloud is bearing testimony to us, speaking to us about God's ongoing creativity, in making new and beautiful things in our universe.

This nebula is 7000 light years away, still within our own galaxy. I'm going to show you more and more distant objects, beyond our own galaxy, so try to keep in mind the great distances of these objects.

Slide: Andromeda galaxy

This is the Andromeda galaxy. It was less than 100 years ago that we learned that our galaxy was only one of many galaxies. Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our own, about 2 million light years away (that means it would take 2 million years for you to get there, if you were traveling at the speed of light). Our own galaxy looks something like this. You can see the spiral arms of stars and dust wrapping around. Many of the stars at the edges of the picture are just foreground stars in our own galaxy, but the blob at the bottom is actually a dwarf galaxy in orbit about the main one!

Slide: Whirlpool galaxy

Here's another galaxy, called the Whirlpool galaxy, which is 22 million light years away. That's ten times further away than the last galaxy I showed you. Galaxies like this are sometimes called “Grand Design” spirals by astronomers, referring to the way they appear to have been laid down in a perfect spiral pattern by a master craftsman. Through modern science, we can learn how God crafted this beautiful pattern! It has to do with density waves traveling through the galaxy, causing new stars to form along spiral lines. The waves are related to the satellite galaxy on the left, and computer simulations of the two galaxies have reproduced this exact spiral structure. So we have a reasonably good scientific understanding of how this spiral structure came to be. Does that mean it is any less glorifying to God? No! It means we can think God's thoughts after him and understand at least some of his work in the universe.

But these are just a few of the many galaxies in the universe. How many galaxies are there?

Slide: Hubble Deep Field

This picture gives you some idea. This image is called the Hubble Deep Field, and comes from the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting the Earth. The telescope spent several days of observing time looking at this one tiny patch of the sky, a patch which appears to be basically black when viewed in a ground-based telescope. This is the one of the most sensitive photographs of the sky ever made.

Look at the thousands of galaxies strewn about. You can see spiral galaxies (like the ones I already showed you), galaxies in red, white, and yellow, and small blue blobs which are baby galaxies, just in the process of forming. God is making whole new galaxies too. And this image is just a tiny part of the sky – there are probably 10 billion galaxies in our universe! This picture is like one of the ways God must view the universe – all the galaxies dancing and spinning through space, governed by him and following his grand design.

This picture can also make us feel really small. After all, we live on one little planet, orbiting one star in a galaxy of billions of stars, and our galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies in God's creation. Some people react to this by feeling profoundly insignificant: they think maybe God is just some idea we puny humans thought up to make us feel better, or an idea which can't possibly have relevance in this huge universe. They think that if God did exist, he couldn't possibly care about us while he is governing this whole huge universe.

But my Christian faith teaches me to react to this picture in a different way. This picture of the huge universe reminds me how big God is. The Christian faith has never said God was restricted to our planet, we've always claimed God is outside his creation and thus in a sense bigger than all of his creation.

But if God is so huge, how can he care about our little planet? And about my little life on this planet? This question isn't new. In Psalm 8, David says “When I consider your heavens and the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars” and the galaxies and the quasars and the whole universe, “what are humans that your are mindful of us? how can you care for us?” The question of human significance in the face of the cosmos has been with us for thousands of years. David answered it by remembering that “God has made us a little lower than the heavenly beings, crowned us with glory and honor, and made us ruler over the works of his hands.” So one reason we are significant is that God gave us a special role in creation, to study it and care for it. He has asked us to be partners with him in governing his creation. We are not insignificant.

Since David's time, we have learned so much more about God through his revelation to us. God himself chose to became human, like one of us. He sacrificed all of us glory, held back all of his power, and died to show us how much we matter to him. The same God who governs the galaxies all across the universe also loves each one of us enough to die for us. Looking at this modern scientific picture of the universe through the eyes of faith has shown me how incredibly huge God's love is. The heavens declare not only the glory of God, but his creativity, his power, and his immensity.

So here's the message I hope and pray that you'll remember as you leave today:

The universe is huge, but God is even bigger.

We're incredibly tiny in the universe,

but God's love is huge, deep, and personal for each of us.