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Good Heavens! Cosmic Grace and Mercy

Good Heavens! Cosmic Grace and Mercy

Good Heavens! Cosmic Grace and Mercy.

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in… Lord Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 40:21,22, 28).

DEFINING OUR TERMS:

Firmament = Latin, for vast expanse or sky; expanse of the heavens above the earth; the expansive atmosphere.

Celestial = Greek, “epouranis;” above the sky; heavenly; belonging to heaven; the world beyond our ability to perceive; contrasted with terrestrial (of the land); in Bible often pertains to spiritual heaven as a divine place above the sky, and the resurrection.

Cosmos = Greek, “kosmos;” all of creation; a well-ordered whole; the harmonious universe; the inherent ordered arrangement of the world; humanity, all the people on earth.

Star = Greek, “aster;” a giant, glowing ball of hot gas in space; composed of 90% hydrogen and 10% helium; powered by nuclear fusion as it produces light and heat energy, causing it to shine in the night sky.

Planet = Greek, means “wandering star;” a natural object that has a motion of its own, orbiting a star; is massive enough for its gravity to force it into a spherical shape; composed of rock or metal with solid surface (if nearer to the sun), or hydrogen and helium gas (if further away from the sun).

Galaxy = a huge, organized grouping of stars.

Galaxy Groups = a large collection of galaxies.

Galaxy Clusters = thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.

Super Clusters = large grouping of galaxy clusters.

Galaxy Filaments = huge ‘walls’ of galaxy super clusters.

Constellation = a group of stars that form a pattern or design in the night sky, making an imaginary shape or design; they are usually named after mythological characters, animals, or objects that they resemble; there are 88 officially recognized constellations.

Light-Year = This is a unit of length, not of time; it is a way of measuring the distance between objects in space; it is based on how far it takes light to travel in one year; light travels at 186,000 miles per second; one light year is about 6 trillion miles. So to determine the distance across the Milky Way galaxy, for example, we would have to multiply 6 trillion miles times 100,000 light-years. Practically countless.

“Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God, for He is gracious and lovely; praise is becoming and appropriate… He determines and counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by their names. Great is the Lord, and of great power; His understanding is inexhaustible and boundless.” (Psalm 147:1, 4, 5).

BY THE NUMBERS:

Size of the Universe = Impossible to determine the actual size; it may be an infinite size, or “maybe finite but unbounded;” the universe is flat and constantly expanding at a very fast rate; the observable universe is about 94 billion light-years in diameter; the most distant objects in universe are 47 billion light-years away; it is estimated that the universe is 250 times larger than the observable universe, or 7 trillion light-years across.

Number of Galaxies = in observable universe, there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies.

Number of Stars = in observable universe, there is an average of 100 million stars in each galaxy; many galaxies have billions of stars; the largest known galaxy has 100 trillion stars; astronomers suggest there are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of beach sand on the Earth.

Number of Planets = For every one of the billions of stars in the observable universe, there are many planets; the number of planets are thus literally uncountable.

Earth’s Galaxy = The Milky Way, which has between 100-400 billion stars; it is 100,000 light-years across; it appears there is only one sun in the Milky Way, sitting exactly in the middle of our solar system; our sun is a star that has eight planets orbiting around it. Our closest galaxy neighbor is the Andromeda galaxy, which has 1 trillion stars.

ISAIAH AND GOD’S INFINITY OF COSMIC GRACE.

“Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that He may have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Is. 55:7-9).   

For as the heavens are higher than the earth (verses 8-9). What is the context for God’s comment that His thoughts and ways are profoundly higher than mankind’s? God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and we aren’t. Let’s face it, there is God and then there is everything else. So of course His understanding and His actions will be unspeakably higher than ours. Isn’t that obvious? But what was the Lord specifically talking about in verses 8-9? The clue is in verse 7, the topic is mercy and compassion and forgiveness. His merciful ways and His compassionate actions will not be understood by us mere mortals. God’s ways are counter-intuitive to man’s. Theologians, and the rest of us, can only wonder at statements like this, “Mercy rather than justice is the outstanding attribute of God.”  (Abraham Joshua Heschel). The fact that God seems to have unlimited grace will puzzle us humans. The fact that He will eternally forgive wrongdoers will mystify us. The fact that He has no boundaries when it comes to His mercy will cause us to scratch our heads and acknowledge God’s vastly different way of doing things. The distance between God’s mind and our mind is like the distance between the heavens and the earth.

How distant is that, actually? We now estimate that the distance between the earth and the edge of the observable universe is 46 billion light-years, making the diameter of the observable universe about 94 million light-years. Scientists have determined at this point that there is very little curvature of the universe. The universe is almost perfectly flat, which means the universe is essentially infinite in size. So when the Creator of the universe says that his thoughts and deeds regarding mercy are as different from man’s as the distance from the heavens to the earth, we should sit up and take notice. It’s absolutely true then that God’s way of thinking about forgiveness is as distant from a human’s way of thinking about forgiveness as the distance between the universe and the earth. At a minimum, that’s about 46 billion light-years’ distance. At a maximum, God’s thoughts on mercy are an infinity in distance from man’s thoughts. Maybe at some point we will fully understand Father Patrick Henry Reardon’s observation, “Mercy is the cause and reason of all that God does. God does nothing, absolutely nothing, except as an expression of His mercy. God’s mercy stretches out to both extremes of infinity. All we will ever discover of God will be the deepening levels of His great, abundant, overflowing, rich, endless mercy.” (from Reardon’s book, Christ in the Psalms).

God’s Mercy and Man’s Mercy. Man’s mercy is stingy, conditional, inconsistent, tends to be self-serving, and often depends on the worthiness of the person being shown ‘mercy.’ Man’s mercy includes words like inexcusable, unforgivable, irredeemable, disgraceful. But God’s mercy is the opposite of all that, and is nothing even remotely like man’s mercy. God’s mercy and man’s mercy are like night and day… No, it’s even more different than that. God’s mercy and man’s mercy is infinitely distant from each other. God shows mercy in an infinitely different way than man. God’s quality of mercy is a universe apart from man’s mercy. God is infinitely more merciful than man, so much so that man cannot even hope to understand the depths of God’s mercy, unless you are looking at Jesus. God’s mercy is beyond human comprehension, but because of Jesus is now up close and personal. God’s lovingkindness breaks the mold, and now, since we’ve seen it in action through Christ, we can thirst for that mercy in a world devoid of authentic love.

“On the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of Your awesome deeds, and I will declare Your greatness. They shall pour forth the fame of Your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of Your righteousness. Lord Yahweh is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness. The Lord is good to all, and His steadfast love is over all that He has made.” (Psalm 145:5-9).

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