Originally posted June 22, 2011, at Kaleidoscope Faith. Republished with permission of the author.
The Hubble Space Telescope snaps pictures of beautiful images of other places. The picture I have included with this blog entry is a picture of a spiral galaxy.
It is an amazing gift to be able to look into space and see the beauty of God’s creation. But what really gets me is that the picture was taken in 2010.
That means that in 2010 we took a picture of something 72 million years ago. We actually snapped a shot of history.
If you’re saying, “What?”, let me explain: The spiral galaxy is 72 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
A light-year is the distance a particle of light (photon) will travel in one year, nearly 6 trillion miles. This means that a picture of something 72 million light-years away shows the way things were 72 million years ago.
Really, really long time
That means that in 2010, we took a picture of how something looked 72 million years ago. Now when we think about time as humans, something like that almost seems impossible.
I mean, how often do we say, “There isn’t enough time in the day?” How often do we rely on calendars, clocks, daylight and death to determine the amount of time we have.
Yet God doesn’t work on the same time schedule. God is actually beyond time.
We occasionally experience time differently too. We have those days that fly by so quickly it’s as if it never even began. Then we have moments when five minutes seems like five hours. Time is a funny thing and changes with our perspective on life.
God never changes. God is beyond time, beyond daily pressures, beyond our understanding of life and death. God is awesome!
Find a link to Dana Hendershot’s blog Kaleidoscope Faith at Lutheran Blogs.
Isn't the more impressive thing not that God is unchangable, beyond time, pressures, life/death, is awesome, etc, etc, etc, but that God came into the world as a crying infant who needed his diapers changed, grew up as a man, and died on a cross for us? Without this crucial connection, the awesome God of the heavens is light-years away from us sinners today.
True, Peter. God chose to exist in time in the God-man Jesus Christ. The same God who made the galaxies counts the hairs on our heads and His eye is on the sparrow.