Friday, March 20, 2020

Heavens

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” – Psalm 8:3-4

While raiding the library last week, I ventured into the non-fiction section and checked out some reference books. One of them is a Picturepedia, the first spread of which is entitled “The Universe.” In it, there are a series of seven pictures, each one a zoomed-in view of the one to its left. First is the universe (“full of dark energy, dark matter, and other matter such as superclusters of galaxies”). Then take a tiny speck there and zoom in, and it’s a supercluster (“made up of a cluster of galaxies”). Then zoom in on one tiny speck, and it’s a local group (“a cluster of about 50 galaxies inside the Virgo Supercluster”). Then zoom in on one of the smaller bright spots there, and it’s the Milky Way Galaxy (“200 billion stars”). Then zoom in on one of the smaller specks there, and it’s the stellar neighborhood (a gathering of stars in one arm of the Milky Way). Then zoom in on one of those stars, and it’s our sun in its solar system, then finally zoom in on the third planet from the sun, and it’s Earth.

This is difficult to comprehend. Personally, I work in a microcosmos. I specialize in a part of the body that measures 24 millimeters in its entire diameter (26 for the highly myopic). The posture of my profession is hunched, looking down and in: I don’t so often look up. And these days, we are all indoors; it’s easy to forget we can still go out. The most profound words in this Psalm seem to me today to be “When I look.” When have I looked? When have I taken my eyes off myself, my troubles, my concerns, my microcosmic world, and looked, really looked, at God’s heavens?

When we look, David says, what we see is the visible definition of God’s glory, the outworking of his power. What we get is a glimpse into the reality of God’s being compared with our being. As R. C. Sproul wrote, “Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.” The same line frames the start and end of this Psalm: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”—and that word “majestic” means large, very great, might, powerful, glorious. It is also translated “magnificent,” “excellent.” You get the sense David means something utterly beyond us in scope, beyond even his ability to really describe. 

That, David says, is God’s name. In that context, it’s interesting that David writes into these lines two names for God. He says, “O Yahweh,” (God’s given, unutterable, unique name) “our adown” (personal lord, possessor, master, husband). The only possible reaction to a comprehension of the universe is to say, what is man? Who the heck do we think we are? Yet this God, with the name too holy to be uttered, displayed in a universe too vast to be comprehended, is also our God, as close and intimate as a spouse. That is the real mystery, the real secret of the heavens, written large for us all to see if we look.

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