Cosmic Good Luck or the Love of God? 3-3-10

Anderson, South Carolina

While watching an inspiring meteor shower early one morning recently I realized that it is nothing short of a profound miracle for any kind of life to be extant on our world. With these heavenly stones crashing into the atmosphere every second, one quickly gains a sense of our planet being involved in a very high-stakes cosmic billiard game. The tiny grain-sized meteors that flashed across the sky at 165,000 miles an hour left impressive iridescent contrails of fire in the upper atmosphere. If these tiny particles leave such spectacular calling cards, one can only imagine what something of any significant size would leave. As it turns out, one only has to look at those worlds devoid of significant atmosphere to get a most disquieting answer. Mercury, Mars, our moon, and the larger satellites of the gas giant planets clearly reveal them to have been heavily battered by cosmic billiard balls for a very long time.

Professional astrophysicists have well proven that even one very large meteor or a modest asteroid colliding with our world would produce what is called an extinction-level event, one destroying essentially all significant forms of life on earth. A so-called cosmic winter would shut out solar warmth and cast the earth into a frozen wasteland. Hollywood has capitalized heavily on the spectacularly destructive results that would accrue if we did become a victim of a dead-on shot by one of these sinister cue balls. NASA and other agencies make it their business to track a significant catalog of hazards that are careening around us at speeds beyond imagination. These agencies make it their business to speculate about the results from a rock one mile in diameter landing on our world at one hundred times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet.

As it is, we live on a sapphire orb that is a stunning oasis of warmth, beauty, and life in a vast frigid vacuum fraught with immense dangers. Yet, this precarious world has proven to be a long-term shelter of safety and an incubator for abundant life in all its impossibly diverse and magnificent forms.

For me, it is a great stretch to think that this life-giving oasis is some kind of stochastic accident on the carpet of the universe. It’s no more rational to believe this than for me to blow up an old fashion print shop a thousand million times, hoping the widely scattered moveable cold type would reassemble itself into the complete works of Shakespeare.

Johannes Gutenburg printed the very first books on this world with moveable type, beginning the age of the printed book. One of these printed in 1451 indicates the world itself is compelling evidence for the existence of a Creator. This very same Creator knows too well about extinction-level events and sent his Son so we could have eternal life and avoid the ultimate form of extinction - the eternal separation of our souls from the heart of God. Even asteroids cannot separate us from the love of God but so far He has seen fit to keep them out of our hair.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.

For the invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.