Rev. David Holwick
First Baptist Church
West Lafayette, Ohio
February 2, 1986
Mankind's Place In the Universe
Psalm 8 (NIV)
This has been an amazing week. (I liked the finale - a local earthquake.) It began with the only close-up photos ever taken of the planet Uranus and its moons. According to scientists, the pictures revealed the most complex surface features seen so far in our solar system. That was Monday.
On Tuesday, I received a breathless call from Linda McMasters. She wanted to know if I was watching the CNN channel. I said, "No." She said, turn it on because the space shuttle has just blown up. Now if you've had any contact at all with Linda McMasters, you know that she says this sort of thing every week. You have to take her with a grain of salt. So I said, "Come on Linda, what do you really want?" "No really! Turn on your television!" Then she hung up. I went downstairs and turned on my set. The now-familiar replay showed the craft rolling on its back as it climbed swiftly in the sky. The camera zoomed in on the shuttle and suddenly the craft exploded. Only at that point did I realize Linda wasn't pulling my leg. That huge spacecraft didn't veer off course like I expected. It just disintegrated in a huge fireball with the boosters forging ahead like the horns of a bull.
It has taken some time for it all to sink in. The American space program has made huge accomplishments and all of it has happened in my lifetime. As a youngster I remember being glued to the television to see Alan Shepherd take off. He didn't even make one orbit. They just shot him in the air and let him land in the ocean a few thousand miles away. Since then I have watched almost every one of the fifty-four manned launches. The climax was watching two astronauts skip on the surface of the moon in the summer of 1969.
We live in a time when science and knowledge are expanding at incredible rates. Every six years our knowledge doubles. We now have answers where we didn't have questions a short while back. All of this can be pretty unnerving, especially to Christians. There is a fear that it will all get out of hand so that maybe people won't need God anymore. We'll have all the answers without his help. This fear was reflected by a woman who called in to a radio talk show. She said God must have blown up the shuttle because he didn't want us poking around in heaven. If this was God's intention, all I can say is that he was a little late.
The fear of knowledge and modern science is totally unbiblical. As a matter of fact, the Bible clearly states that God created us to have a desire to explore and understand his creation. Psalm 8:6 explains this in Biblical terms. God has given us dominion over his creation and has put the world and its creatures under our feet. Dominion means you exercise power and authority over something. Kings have dominion over their people. It also carries the idea of having mastery. In Psalm 19:13 in the King James Version it says:
"Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them no have dominion [NIV = rule] over me...."
In other words, we should not want to be controlled by sin. God has given dominion - the ability to control and master and rule things - to his greatest creation, which is us. This authority covers everything God made, including the farthest reaches of outer space. Psalm 8 is not the first passage in the Bible to describe this. All the way back in Genesis 1, verse 26 it states:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule ... over all the earth...."
Every new discovery science makes extends our dominion over the universe. Just think of some of the things we are doing right now. Last year ultra-sensitive TV cameras photographed the Titanic even though it was two-and-a-half miles under water. These cameras had to be 100,000 times more sensitive to light than the human eye.
This month the Voyager spacecraft passed right by Uranus after traveling two billion miles. One scientist said this is like a golfer sinking a put - a 1,500 mile long put. New microscopes can see the shadows of atoms and telescopes may soon see to the edge of the universe, which is something I have had trouble comprehending since I was six years old.
When I consider all these accomplishments I find it pretty amazing King David agreed. In Psalm 8:5 he wrote:
"You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor."
Our quest for knowledge and exploration are a reflection of the image of God in us but they can also lead to over-confidence and a false sense of security. Crystal MacAuliffe, the school teacher on the shuttle, was repeatedly asked if she was afraid to go into space. In one of her last interviews she said, "It doesn't frighten me. They have a lot of back-up systems and they don't fly the shuttle when they have something go wrong. And if something does go wrong, they have the capacity to land it."
The captain of the Titanic was even more confident. His ship was made with thirteen watertight compartments and had every safety feature that existed at that time. The best room cost the modern equivalent of $50,000. On the ship's very first voyage they came upon an area littered with icebergs. A crewman asked the captain if he was nervous. He replied, "God himself couldn't sink this ship." Famous last words. [1]
Mankind has been given tremendous power and authority but we do not have ultimate control. There are at least three things mankind cannot do. First, we will not be able to come up with all the answers. Every scientist realizes that each new answer poses two new questions. Theories that used to be considered unbreakable laws are discarded and rejected theories are brought back into prominence.
In the area of Biblical research one hundred years ago the majority of scholars decided the stories about Abraham and Joseph and Moses were just that - made up stories. They had no historical value. Then in our century archeologists began exploring the ruins of ancient civilizations in the Middle East. Libraries with thousands of clay tablets were found at Nuzi, Mari, Babylon and most recently Ebla. These tablets show that the Bible accounts are highly accurate in how they portray political situations and local customs. What was once considered fantasy is now admitted to have historical validity.
The Bible can stand up to scrutiny, as long as you don't limit yourself with preconceived ideas. We can't answer all the questions about it yet but that doesn't mean the answers aren't there.
A man named Job once thought he saw things as they really are but God had a different assessment. In Job 38:1-5 it says:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: 'Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?' "
A second limitation of human knowledge is that it cannot conquer our biggest fear of all - death. The space shuttle was the most complicated machine ever made by mankind. Computers on board analyze everything that is happening one thousand times a second, and yet it blew up. The computers didn't even give a hint that something was wrong. Something I found weird was that after the explosion the spokesman announced it was traveling twenty-eight hundred feet per second, nine nautical miles high, five nautical miles down range.
Science can delay our deaths but it cannot conquer it. Those seven astronauts probably never knew what hit them. Most of us will die less dramatically but we'll still die. The Bible says man has dominion on this earth but whatever we have is given by God and he will call each of us to account.
Would you be ready to die? That young man drilling a well in Fresno, Ohio, probably didn't give it much thought. Science cannot provide any comfort because it can only describe what we can see and feel. A cartoon in the Times Reporter newspaper summed up the fleetingness of life well. It was a drawing of the space shuttle, accompanied by these words from James 4:14:
"Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."
A third limitation of human understanding is that it cannot produce meaning in our lives. We have more to worry about than death. We should also be concerned about having a full life now. Science describes us as a collection of mere atoms and raw energy. The Bible says we are created in the image of Almighty God. To find out who you truly are, and what your greatest potential is, you must come to know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior....
________
Notes:
1. Other sources attribute this quote to a lower ranking sailor on the ship. Here is what I found at "Lessons From the Titanic" at http://www.biblestudylessons.com/cgi-bin/gospel_way/titanic_lessons.php (I do not know what the page numbers refer to):
Many passengers and crewmembers believed the Titanic to be unsinkable, and the ship's designers believed it was almost true.
One passenger asked a ship's agent for extra insurance on some valuables in her luggage. The agent replied, "Ridiculous. This boat's unsinkable" (p45).
Captain Smith himself was asked about the safety of the Titanic. He answered: "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that" (p48).
After the ship had struck the iceberg, a passenger asked her employer if they should do something about it. He replied, "Go back to bed. This ship is unsinkable" (p80).
The ship began to list as it took on more water. When a passenger expressed concern, another passenger replied, "You cannot sink this boat" (p82).
When early reports about the tragedy began to gradually reach America, Philip Franklin, vice-president of the White Star line in New York, responded: "We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable" (p168).
One passenger asked a dockhand, "Is this ship really unsinkable?" The man replied, "Yes, lady. God Himself couldn't sink this ship" (p39).
________
Typed on July 25, 2005, by Sharon Lesko of Ledgewood Baptist Church, New Jersey
Copyright © 2024 by Rev. David Holwick
Created with the Freeware Edition of HelpNDoc: Free PDF documentation generator