Fruitless efforts
This weekend, let’s talk about stars. When I was a small boy, I liked staring at the “twinkling, twinkling little stars, up above the world so high, like diamonds in the sky.”
Against the moonless sky, the stars spread brightly across the never-ending expanse. And I used to wonder, “How many are the stars?”
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One night, fascinated by the blinking stars, I began to do the unthinkable—count the stars! But the more I counted, the more they popped up, and I knew I had embarked on a childish and fruitless mission.
Years later, I learnt about the mind-boggling reality of the stars. Here are a few examples paraphrased from information available in the public domain—
• Stars are grouped in galaxies, such as the Milky Way galaxy in which our Solar System is located.
• There are over 500 billion galaxies in the universe, and each galaxy contains between 200-400 billion stars.
•Most of the stars we see at night are larger, brighter and hotter than the sun.
• The sun, which is a star, is the “nearest” to earth. It is over four light-years away and it will take the fastest spacecraft some 70,000 years to travel there from earth.
• Some stars are over 19 quadrillion miles away from earth. Can you imagine what a quadrillion might be?
• Stars don’t twinkle like the poet wrote for children, but as the stars’ light travels through earth’s turbulent atmosphere, the illusion it creates resembles the sparkling of diamonds.
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• Stars seem close to each other when we watch them at night, but they are billions of kilometres apart. That should tell you how far “the east is from the west.”
• When a star throws its light, it takes millions of years to reach us on earth, yet we know that light travels faster than sound . . .
This is not a tutorial in Astronomy—of course, not! I’m simply amazed at the marvels of the universe, the stars being only a fraction of them.
There are also planets such as our Earth, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, among the brightest objects visible to us from earth.
No wonder the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the works of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).
Although these heavenly bodies have no voices, they “speak” about the wonders of God.
The leading cause of God’s displeasure with humanity is idol worship—ascribing honour and glory to his creation instead of to him.
The stars, the moon, and the sun have been objects of worship for years, a practice that displeases God.
People who dabble in practices associated with star constellations, signs of the zodiac and horoscope are in danger of experimenting with the mystical world away from the Creator God.
If my attempt to count the stars as a boy was a childish act, I laugh at another equally fruitless effort advanced by people who say there is no divine architect behind such phenomenal creation.
On the contrary, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
And, as the psalmist declares, “Look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place . . . (Psalm 8:3-4).
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Of all the questions I used to ask about the heavenly bodies, none of them bordered on who created them.
I knew without question that God created them.
So, imagine my surprise when I heard about people who, wise in their own eyes, propose that the universe came into existence on its own!
A so-called Big Bang split huge rocks, soil and liquids into stars and planets and oceans!
They even say human beings used to be apes that evolved over millions of years into homo-sapiens but they have no explanation why we still have apes in the jungle.
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Their unbelief in the existence of God is guesswork, not certain about what they don’t believe.
Being unwilling to exercise faith in their uncertainty, they rather choose to disbelief.
But “by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible (Hebrews 11:3).
There is such awesome evidence of God in his creation that you need more faith to be an atheist than to be a believer.
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It is a fruitless effort to try to explain away the awe-inspiring truth that behind creation is the Creator.
To say someday in defence, “Sorry, I didn’t know!” would be a lame excuse coming too late in the day.
Therefore, let those who observe all these praise God the Creator of the universe and extol him for his wonderful deeds.
The writer is a publisher, author, writer-trainer and CEO of Step Publishers.
E-mail: lawrence.darmani@gmail.com