NASA has a new set of eyes named the James Webb Space Telescope. This massive telescope is a million miles in deep space and is sending to earth pictures that are astounding the world. Scientists who have spent their professional lives probing the universe in search of its secrets are awed by what they are seeing and just how little they know. A new day has dawned for our understanding of the world in which we live. Given this new perspective, we are awakening to the fact that earth is a mere dot, a small insignificant speck in this vast cosmos.
The pictures that are being sent back tell us that there are colors that we didn’t even know existed because our eyes are incapable of seeing them. Pictures show cosmic cliffs speckled with glittering stars! (NASA TV). As one scientist put it, there are questions that we couldn’t ask because the knowledge needed was beyond us. We didn’t know what we didn’t know!
Another said, “”It’s really hard to not look at the universe in a new light and not just have a moment that is deeply personal,” he said. “It’s an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly releasing some of its secrets. and I would like you to imagine and look forward to that.””
There are other reactions that are less positive. Some people are saying that this is all a hoax. It is all being made up— pictures and all, to justify man’s desire to probe the unknown! A comment that is reminiscent of the attitudes to earlier moon landings.
There are others who have been thrown into anxiety and panic. A lady interviewed by National Public Radio expressed the fear of being swallowed up by some “black hole”. This reaction is not new, 15th century skeptics believed that to sail into the vast seas would result in man dropping off the edge into an abyss, an interminable waterfall!
So discoveries of our world are nothing new. They can lead to pompous declarations of scholarship and erudition or gasps of humility and awe; overwhelming fear of the seeming chaos or awe and worship of an organized Creator; declarations of accidental happenstance or reverence for the Power that has been holding all this vast complexity together even as we journey in ignorance.
I want to believe like Job and the Psalmist that there is a Creator, God who has designed it, sustains it, and reveals it to us in small manageable portions. Like Job I believe that “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth on nothing. He locks the waters in his clouds, and the clouds do not burst with the weight of them. . . . By his power he stills the sea . . . By his breath the skies became fair . . . Indeed, these are but the outer fringes of his ways! How faint is the whisper we hear of him! But who can understand the thunder of his power?”” Job 26: 7-14. NET
I believe that the Webb is relaying to us are real, mind-blowing revelations of an ordered creation and Creator. I’m no scientist, but I believe this is no hoax!
A Wilderness Guidebook . . . 