Now let’s take a tour to get a feel for how big the universe is.  These slides were taken from a National Geographic map of the universe.

 

Here we see the planets in our solar system revolving around the sun.  (This graphic was created before the astronomers decided Pluto was not big enough to be a planet, so it’s still shown.)

 

This is how our solar system (think of it as our house) fits into our neighborhood. (This neighborhood is the region up to 20 light-years around us—trillions of miles away).

 

Then here is our neighborhood, located in our galaxy, the Milky Way, which we might think of as our county.  If we were to count all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy at the rate of one per second, it would take 3,000 years to count them all.[1]  And that’s just one of perhaps a hundred billion galaxies!  If the entire Milky Way galaxy were the size of  the North American continent, our solar system would be about the size of a quarter.[2]   Our galaxy is part of a region in the universe called the “galactic realm,”  there in the lower left.  Think of that as our state.

 

Our galactic realm is part of a still larger region called a local group seen at the far left of this slide.  To continue the metaphor, the local group might be compared to a country on Earth. 

 

Then the local group is just one of many such groups in our supercluster, there in the upper right of the slide, which we could think of as a continent. 

 

Our supercluster is just a dot in the known universe, which is getting bigger all the time.  That is to say, with images like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, we are discovering that the universe is much bigger than we previously thought.   So follow the progression from our solar system to our neighborhood 40 light-years across, to our galactic realm, to our local group, to our supercluster, and then we essentially get lost in the vastness of the universe, much too big for us to grasp. 

 

II.       Who Is This For?   Ps 8:3,4

          We naturally tend to think of ourselves as the center of things.  We think we, personally, are the most important person we know, and we evaluate everyone else in terms of how they relate to us.  We think our high school or college is the best; we think our country is sort of the center of the world, etc.  So we may think of the earth and the sun and the stars as our “home”—this was all provided for us.  But looking at it from that perspective leads to the question of Psalm 8:3-4, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”  The universe is way too big and awesome and glorious if its only purpose is to provide a place for us to live.  That would be like an older couple living in a 20,000 square foot mansion all by themselves.  They don’t need all that space!  We don’t need all the space there is in the universe, either! 

 

But what if the primary purpose of the universe is not just to provide us a home, but to display the glory of God? Then it’s not too big at all! Then it’s just the right size!   

 

III.      Listen Up!   Rom 1:20,21

          The heavens are shouting!  They are yelling at us, “There is a God, and He is glorious!  He is incredibly big and powerful; He is unbelievably creative; and He is beautiful, because He makes beautiful things.”  The heavens are saying, Listen up!  Open your eyes, and then open your mind to the obvious:  Nothing comes from nothing.  Everything has a cause.  If you happened upon a cell phone in the church parking lot, like somebody did a couple of weeks ago,  it would never occur to you that this cell phone just “happened” into existence all by itself.  You would know that there had to be a whole host of engineers who designed it, and people who manufactured it.  Nothing comes from nothing. 

 

So where did the universe come from?  The universe is the biggest thing there is.  It consists of all the matter that exists in all those galaxies we were looking at.  Where did it come from?  How did it get here? Three thousand years ago, a shepherd who had plenty of time to look up into the night sky as he watched over his sheep concluded that the heavens were telling us something about where they came from.  They were revealing the glorious nature of the God who made them.   

          Paul takes that argument a bit farther and says, that’s right.  You can tell, just from looking at the physical universe, that there is a creator, and that He is divine (i.e. God, unlike humans), and has incredible power.  Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”   Anyone who does not believe that there is a God like that has no excuse for his ignorance.  The evidence is there, right before their eyes, every time they look up into the night sky or feel the sun burning on them in the summer.  To fail to come to the right conclusion is willful ignorance.  It’s not just a lack of intelligence that leads people to say there is no God—many of them are very smart people; it is a willful determination to deny what is plainly before them.  They refuse to listen to what the universe is shouting. 

 

          So that’s one book of revelation—the physical creation.  It is called general revelation, because it is generally open to anyone—as David says here, Ps 19:3, “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”  

IV.      Special Revelation   Ps 19:7-9

          But there is another book of revelation as well, and that’s what the psalmist turns to in verse 7.   

“7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.

8 The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart.

The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.

9 The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.

          The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous”  (Ps 19:7-9).

          One of the things that is notable about this psalm is the variety of words he uses to refer to the Scripture:  law, statutes, precepts, commands, ordinances.  They are all synonyms that refer to the written revelation from God.  For the author, that was primarily the five books of Moses, the Torah.  For us, it is the entire Bible.  The Bible is what we call “special revelation”, because it is not as generally widespread as the revelation through the creation, and because God went to a lot of very special effort to make sure that His words were communicated accurately to mankind.  

          Verse 9 is a bit of an anomaly here, because it doesn’t use another synonym for the Bible, like the other verses do: it says, “the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.”  That may be because the primary thing the Scriptures teach is the fear of the Lord.  To make Him the Lord and Master of our lives is the central teaching of the entire Bible. 

 

V.       No Conflict

          Now the thing that I find so interesting about this psalm is that the author puts his comments about general revelation (the physical creation) and special revelation (the Bible) side by side.  He evidently believes that these two books both reveal something true about God. 

          In our day, we are accustomed to hearing people say that there is this great conflict between science and the Bible.  If you don’t hear anything else I say this morning, hear this:  both science and the Bible, when properly understood, will say the same thing.  There are two books of revelation—the physical world and the Bible, and there is no conflict between them. The heavens declare the glory of  God; the law of the Lord is perfect.

          But notice the condition I put on that statement—there is no conflict between science and the Bible when they are both properly understood.   As it turns out, we have a great lesson in history, in which both science and the Scripture were misunderstood, and when we finally sorted it out, we had a better, more accurate understanding of both books of revelation. 

 

VI.      Correcting a Scientific Misunderstanding to Correct a Biblical Misunderstanding[1]

          A.       Key figures:  Aristotle (384-322 B.C.); Ptolemy (A.D. 100-170), Great System of Astronomy; Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543;  Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy, 1609; Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

                    Starting with Aristotle and Ptolemy, up until the 1500s, everyone believed that the earth was the center of the universe.  Then came Copernicus, a devout Christian and a leader in his local church, who did careful observations and calculations on the motions of the heavenly bodies, and concluded, “the center of the earth is not the center of the universe.”  He boldly declared that the earth revolved around the sun, and offered mathematical proof for that startling assertion.  Copernicus saw no conflict between his Christian faith and his scientific research.  As a result of his study and calculations, he concluded, “The universe has been wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator.”

          The next scientist who advanced our understanding of astronomy was Johannes Kepler.  Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer, and another devout Christian.  At one point he wrote, “O God, I am thinking thy thoughts after thee.” [2]

          Then came Galileo.  But these Christian astronomers ran into opposition from the scientific establishment(!)  So then we had the very unusual situation of the scientific community and the church being united in their opposition to Christian scientists, and especially to Galileo.  Galileo became the lightning rod of the new astronomers for the opposition to strike.

          B.       Biblical arguments   Ps 19:4-6; 104:19; Eccl 1:5; Ps 93:1

                    The religious and scientific establishment insisted that the Earth was the center of the universe, and pointed to biblical passages like these:[3]

·       One of them was the passage we are looking at today. Psalm 19:4-6.  “...In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,... [6] It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other...”  This clearly says that the sun moves, and that it makes a circuit, a circle, around the earth. 

·       Psalm 104:19 “The moon marks off the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.”  Again, the sun moves— it “goes down”.

·       Psalm 93:1 “...The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”  This supposedly clinched it, because the earth is specifically said to be immovable.  The earth does not move, the sun rises and makes a circuit.  Case closed on the basis of proof texts. I wonder how many times Christians today make that same mistake.

          In response to these concerns, Galileo carefully spelled out his position as a scientist and as a Christian.  He reaffirmed his commitment to the truth and authority of the Bible, referring to the two books of God’s revelation to man, Nature and Scripture.  But in the end, the religious authorities made him recant his scientific position, in order to avoid excommunication from the church and imprisonment.[4]  That was a tragedy, both for science and Christianity. 

 

          We have to admit that there are sometimes apparent contradictions between science and the Bible.  Why is that?  This history lesson teaches us that it could be one or both of two possible reasons. 

VII.     Apparent Contradictions  

          A.       The scientists could be wrong

                    —as, in fact, they had been for the previous 1400 years, all the way from Ptolemy to Galileo.  The entire scientific establishment of the Western world was mistaken in their view of the structure of the universe.  So scientific assertions and theories must always be carefully examined, tested, and refined.  But when we have sound scientific conclusions based on reason and repeatable experiments, then those conclusions will always be in accordance with the Bible when properly understood.    

          B.       Christians could be wrong

                    However, it is also possible for Christians to be mistaken in their interpretation of the Bible, as they were in Galileo’s day.  Galileo emphasized that the Bible was written for “the primary purpose of the salvation of souls and the service of God,” and not to teach science.  I agree wholeheartedly with that!  I think Christians get themselves in a mess when they try to make the Bible teach science, when it was written in a time when the modern scientific method was not even known. 

          Today, everyone agrees with Galileo’s view of the universe.  The theologians, the expositors, the church establishment of his day had all been wrong in interpreting those passages of Scripture that we looked at literally.  The Bible accurately describes these heavenly phenomena as they appear to us[5], not necessarily as they really are.  Today, no one insists on a literal interpretation of these verses; everyone agrees the earth revolves around the sun. 

          So we have two books of revelation, and both tell the truth about God, but only when they are both interpreted correctly.  Aristotle put it nicely when he said, “It is not the facts which divide men, but the interpretation of the facts.”

          When apparent conflicts arise between the two books of revelation, we should not consult the biblical writers on scientific questions they did not address.  Galileo liked to quote someone who said that in the Bible, the Holy Spirit intends to teach “how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.”   Christians who want to reject a scientific statement must prove it false for scientific reasons, not for theological reasons.  That’s the battle that we face with evolution in our day.  Most Christians are convinced that evolution cannot be true, but simply citing Scripture will not convince anyone.  We have to show scientifically that evolution could not have happened.[6]

          In the beginning, God the Eternal Word spoke the universe into existence.  Then starting at a point in time, over a period of  1,500 years, He spoke the words of Scripture. Both books reveal God’s nature to mankind; both were authored by the same Person.  When we understand them both correctly, we will see that they speak the same truth. All truth is God’s truth. There can be no conflict between science and Scripture. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Information about the various pictures taken from Wikipedia, 2/2/10.