First off, a few facts, many of these are estimates based on theories:
Distance to the sun. 8 light minutes
Distance to proxima centauri. 4.2 light years
Distance to the north star. 400 light years
Distance to the Andromeda galaxy. 25,000 light years
Distance to the furthest detectable galaxy 34 billion light years
Distance to the edge of the observable universe. 93 billion l.y.
Distance to the edge of the rest of the universe. 7 trillion l.y.
Speed of a commercial airplane. 500 mph
Speed of a satellite. 10,000 to 25,000 mph
Speed of our solar system around the Milky Way 500,000 mph
Speed of the Milky Way, rel. to cosmic background 1.3 million mph
I’ll start with the distances. I spend a lot of time in a dark sky area looking at the night sky. I see a lot of stars, each of them a ball of burning gas. They are so far away that the light that I see tonight is due to gas that burned some time ago. In fact, most of the light from the stars that I see is from gas that burned before I was born. I see the stars as they were hundreds to trillions of years ago. The cold, hard reality is that I don’t even know if they are still there. There is a star in the constellation Orion named Betelgeuse. Astronomers expect it to explode soon. But, Betelgeuse is 600 light years away. It is entirely possible that it exploded before Columbus sailed. We just haven’t seen the explosion……yet.
On a typical night, I’ll see a few airplanes, a dozen satellites, a meteor or two, maybe a planet, and thousands of stars. The planes, satellites, and meteors are visibly in motion. The stars and planets hardly seem to move. And yet, they are all moving at a blistering pace in every imaginable direction. The night sky looks relatively quiet; but the reality is that it is a seething cauldron of activity. The vast majority of what is going on up there is beyond my vision. Worse yet, I can’t even be sure that what I am seeing is still there. And what I can see, if it even still exists, is already billions of miles away from where it appears to be.
There’s a lot going on up there….. I just can’t see it all.
What I can see isn’t where or what I see today.
Even worse, some of what I can see……is no longer real.
Which brings me to the topic this week.
Reality and what I can sense, measure, analyse……..what I can know………..do not always agree.
What I know falls into several categories:
The things that I can see and touch……..the tangible.
The things that I can’t see or touch, but can infer…..the intuitive.
The things that I simply can’t detect using the tools of the physical world……the spiritual.
The tangible world is pretty straightforward. I’m holding my phone……it’s real.
The intuitive world is a little tougher. It’s 6 am and the sky is getting brighter. I can’t see the sun……but I am confident that it will be up in about an hour. The sun is real.
The spiritual world is where we get into trouble. It is beyond our senses. It is beyond our ability to logically explain. And yet, we sense its reality. Ask 100 Americans if there is life after death. 75 will say yes. There are not many things that 75% of Americans agree on. This, in spite of the fact that there is little hard physical evidence to prove the existence of the spiritual world.
We accept the existence of the spiritual world for three reasons. The first is that, though we hate to admit it, we respect our ignorance. We accept the reality that most of the cosmos is beyond our understanding. What follows from this is that……the fact that we cannot measure, understand, and manipulate something…..does not preclude its existence. The second reason is that we can sense the spiritual realm. It is written on our hearts. We recognize the spiritual for the same reason that we love our children. It is built into our design. It was put there by our creator. It is the very purpose of our existence. We deny or ignore it at our peril. The third reason is miracles. A miracle is an event that defies the rules of the physical world. It is a window into the spiritual world…….a world where science simply does not apply. We encounter these miracles with some regularity. The Bible is full of them. But, they also occur in our everyday life…….if we are tuned in to the spiritual.
The final point is this:
The tangible world will have an end.
The intuitive world will have an end.
The spiritual world, whether you accept it and honor it…..or not, will not end.
The spiritual world is real.
The spiritual world is your destiny.
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
John 5: 24, ESV
And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
John 17: 3, ESV