In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth

Genesis 1:1

This is the first verse in the Bible. It's got to be up there with the most well known too. I'm not suggesting it's the most important, but it is something I think God wanted us to know very early on. He wanted us to know that he is the creator of everything.

I'd like to talk today about the vastness and the magnificence of the heavens that God has created. I think it's impossible to look up at the night sky and not be in awe of it. However, my proposition, standing up here at the front is that most people looking up don't have any idea just how immense it is.

My hope is that you'll leave today with a new sense of awe for the universe. And more importantly, the creator of that universe.

To do that, we're going to have a bit of a science lesson. There are some people who think that science and religion shouldn't mix. I am not one of those people. I think the better we can understand this universe we live in, the better we might be able to understand the mastermind behind it.

So, we're going to go on a bit of a journey, starting here at CLC Hereford. The yellow dot should be more or less where I'm standing. However, unlike most journeys, we're going up to start by going up.

The red line around Hereford represents, as best as I can tell, the official border around the City.

At 70 mph, we'd travel 5km in a little over 2 and a half minutes to cross in a straight line from east to west.

Herefordshire is just over 50km across. It therefore follows that we could, at 70mph, drive from the east to the west in around 27 minutes if such a road existed.

Now, it's ok. We're not going to be doing this for the whole morning. We're about to make our first big jump.

From Herefordshire, to the planet earth

On a human scale, this is obviously quite big. Until only a few decades ago, everything that humans had ever done happened on the surface of this planet.

It was only in the 1700 we got the first manned hot air balloons.

Around 1900, we got our first powered airplanes. I know we have some Brazilians here, so I'm going to avoid attributing that to anyone in particular.

It wasn't until 1961 that the first human, Yuri Gagarin orbited our planet. There's probably some people here who remember this happening.

I'm sure you know where I'm going next.

This is our moon. It is about a quarter of the diameter of the Earth.

It is the only celestial body other than earth that Humans have ever walked on.

56 years and about 7 months ago Neil Armstrong became the first Human ever to walk on a celestial body other than earth, shortly followed by Buzz Aldrin.

You might not know that both these men were Christian and before disembarking the lunar lander, Buzz took communion. I haven't been able to find *proof* that Neil joined him, but isn't it remarkable to think that earth isn't the only place that communion has been taken?

Anyway, back to our journey. What depictions like this fail to convey, is the distance between earth and our moon

The average distance between the earth and our moon is 384,400km. It varies a bit.

If we were to attempt to drive that distance at 70mph, it would take us about 150 days of non-stop driving. This is a slight simplification because the earth and the moon are both moving through space, what I'm trying to get at is it is a long way away.

Apollo 11 traveled an average of about 3,000 miles per hour, getting the crew into lunar orbid in just 3 days.

I could talk about the moon and the space race for hours, but I won't.

Instead, I want to take another few steps out to show your our solar system.

Now, I'm sure you've all seen something like this depicted before.

The planets, and our sun, are shown at their relative sizes.

As you can see, at this scale, the earth is pretty tiny. Our sun is over a million km in diameter.

However, once again, this doesn't properly show the distances between our planets. Nor does it show their apparent positions.

This is what it would look like if we did show the planets up to earth to scale, including the distance between them.

At this scale, earth is less than a pixel on the screen, but you might just be able to make out the sun.

So, I'm going to scale up the planets by 100x.

I'm no longer going to try and keep the size of the planets to scale, because if I did, you wouldn't be able to see them, but the distances still will remain to scale.

Thi distance between earth and the sun is, on average, about 150 million km.

To travel that distance at 70mph, it would take over 150 years.

Even Apollo 11, traveling at 3000mph would take over three and a half years to reach the sun

Both of these times assume we could just go in a straight line from earth to the sun, but orbital mechanics would actually make it take much longer.

At this point, talking about km gets unwieldy, so I'm going to introduce you to a new unit.

Imaginatevely named an "Astronomical unit" which is simply the average distance between the earth and the sun.

We can therefore say that Earth is 1AU from the sun, or Venus is 0.7AU from the sun.

Mars is about 1.5 AU from the sun

Neptune, the furthest planet from the sun in our solar system is about 30AU from the sun.

These are the equivelent of our celestial neighbors.

Voyeger 1 is a spacecraft that we sent out in 1977 to learn about our solar system. It is the furthest away man-made thing from earth.

It is currently traveling at *about* 17 km/s or over 61,000 km/h. We have made faster probes since, (and also a faster manhole cover - ask me about that later if you want), but it is still extremely fast and I'll be using it to try and explain some much bigger distances in a minute.

To put that in perspective, it could travel the distance between earth and the moon in just 6 minutes. As a reminder, it took apollo 11 3 days.

Before even Astronomical units get to unweildly, I'd like to introduce you to another family of units: Light-time

Light is the fastest thing in our universe. In a vacuum, it will travel, and will always travel, at just under 300 million meters every second. So, we can measure things by describing how long it would take for light to get between two points.

Earth is about 8 light minutes from the sun (on average) which means light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to get to us. This means that when we look at the Sun, we are seeing it how it was 8 minutes ago.

Voyager 1 It is currently about 23 light hours away.

Now, here is our closest star besides the sun.

Proxima Centauri is 4 and a half light years away, that is over 40 trillion km

Voyager 1, the spacecraft we just met traveling at over 60,000 km/h would take 75,000 yeart to reach it, if it were going in the right direction.

Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing."

I hope I've given you some idea of the distances between objects in our universe. I now want to give you some idea of the quanity of them, for God has called each one by name.

This is a render of what our galaxy *probably* looks like. Nobody's been able to send a probe out of it and take a picture. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Estimates put the number of stars in it at between 100 billion and 400 billion.

The circle I've drawn shows approxmately 2000 light years away from earth.

To say that another way, the light reaching us from the stars on that line started it's journey whilst Jesus was walking and teaching here

If we were standing on that line, and able to point an impossibly powerful telescope at earth, we could see him walking and talking

This is the Andromeda Galaxy. The closest galaxy to the milky way, but still 2 and a half million light years away.

Again, this isn't a photo, this is just what we think the supercluster looks like.

We don't know how many Galaxies there are, but in our cluster of galaxies, the Laniakea supercluster, there are at least 100,000 of them spanning around 500 million light years. Each of those probably containes hundreds of billions of stars.

Each

The universe we can observe contains millions of these super clusters spanning aroudn 93 billioon light years.

As we contemplate the vastness of the universe I want to remind you of what I said at the beginning. I'd like us all to look up at the night sky at some point, tonight if you can, and just stand or sit in awe of it. Be in awe of God who made it. I want you to look up and feel small and insignificant.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands

When I behold Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which You have set in place-

It is easy to get lost in the vastness of the universe's size, and forget about the detail and beuaty in the comparitavely small parts of it.

So the next few slides are simply some of the photographs we've taken that I think are the most beautiful.

As I scroll through, remember that God's creation shouts of his glory

Remember that each star was set in place by a creator

When I behold 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,
or the son of man that You care for him?

This psalm is attributed to David. The defeater of Galiath. A King of Isreal.

I think when he wrote this, he looked up at the stars and felt small and amazed that God, the creater of all of this and more, cared for him

The more we learn about the universe, the more spectaular it appears.

To paraphrase David, "Whart are we that the creator of all this cares for us"

It's baffling and mind bending and wonderful to me that the creator cares for us. How do we know that?

This is how

The creator of everything we've explored today, and more, allowed himself to be crusified so we could be in a relationship with him.