Fourteen Billion Light Years!

The new James Webb telescope Launch December 25 2021 is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope that has been orbiting our earth since it was launched in 1990. The amazing photos of our universe it has taken are sublime.

The new telescope, we are told, can look 14 billion light years into the past. This is the immensity of our universe! A light year is the distance that light traveling at 300,000 km/sec can cover in one year. For instance, it takes light 8.3 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. A distance of 152 million Kms.

But our sun is small! The star VY Canis Majoras is 2,000 times wider than our sun, and, according to those who have worked it out you could fit 9.3 billion of our Suns inside. It is already 250,000 times brighter than our sun. It is part of our Milky Way galaxy, and the constellation of Canis Major is in the Southern Hemisphere. It is only 8 light years away. The constellation of Canus Major contains our night sky’s brightest star – Sirius.

So how amazing is light? The Bible tells us that God is light (1 John 1:5.) The unsaved, we are told, will be destroyed by the brightness of His coming! In His sermon on the second coming in Matthew 24 Jesus told us that His coming would be like lightening from the east. In Revelation 1:7 it adds that every eye on the planet will see Him. That’s one blaze of glory all around the globe, witnessed by all those living at the time.

In the manifestation of God with His people, light has ever been a symbol of His presence At creation light shone from the darkness. There was a pillar of fire by night at Mt Sinai. The Mercy Seat in the Tabernacle is the home of the Shekinah Glory. Solomon’s temple was filled with light at the temple dedication. On the hills of Bethlehem light shone at His birth.  Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” 

Divine manifestations are usually accompanied by ineffable glory. Isaiah described God as “everlasting light.” Paul in 1 Timothy 6:16 said, “God dwells in unapproachable light.”

Almost Everyone can identify the constellation of Orion by his ‘belt.’ The bright star just above Orion’s belt is Betelgeuse, which is 1000 times bigger than our sun. If it were our sun, it would cover our solar system all the way to Jupiter. It is the 8^th brightest star in our night sky. It takes light from this star 430 years to reach our earth. What was happening in 1593? America was being settled, the reformation was raging in Europe. Australia had not even been discovered!

Our nearest Star is  Alpha Centuri. It is ONLY 4 Light Years away. If we took the Hubble telescope out there and pointed it back towards where we knew our solar system was, what you would see is nothing! Our sun would not even be visible through Hubble.

Our earth is an insignificant spec (an orbiting cemetery), circling an insignificant star. And yet the Bible tells us we are a recent creation. How do we understand that? This is how I understand it. If I were to shine a torch light across a dark room, it would show the dust and other particles in the air. But then at any time I could step into the beam. To me this is what happened at creation. The light from these distant stars was travelling through our space, then suddenly our solar system was hurled into the beam. Thus, we see the recorded light coming from eons away.

As we contemplate the immensity of Eternity, the trauma of time and dazzling distances, we can struggle understanding God in all this. If this is so, then maybe your God too small.

How do we reconcile the omnipresence of God and the immensity of eternity, with the Bible’s picture of a Snow White bearded man sitting on a chair (Throne) as for example in Dan 7, Ezekiel’s visions and Revelation.

Take a moment to read Hebrews 8:1ff. The Heavenly Sanctuary is the meeting place of Omnipresence. God is Omnipresent, but He decided to choose a specific place to meet with the angels and with the non-fallen worlds… and with us when we’ll be finally with Him.

God speaks to us in conceptual language that we can understand. For instance, A Throne is conceptual language that speaks to our minds of rulership, authority, sovereignty. What about Judgement books? God is omniscient. He doesn’t need books! But it tells us that a record is being kept. Do angels actually have wings?  I don’t think so but it speaks to our minds of beings that can get around like birds and can travel at lightening speed from heaven to earth.

The Bible, in an attempt to help our limited finite minds grasp something eternal uses concepts we can grasp. How about the Lion and the Lamb, or the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. These are concepts worth considering!

The Heavenly Sanctuary is a prominent neglected truth in both testaments. When we lose the Jewishness of the Bible we often lose the colour. For instance, the book of Revelation has seven major scenes, each one is prefixed by a sanctuary scene. Revelation gives us a  virtual tour  of this sanctuary. In fact Revelation cannot be understood without an understanding of the sanctuary.