The Creation of a Goldilocks World

But even after his amazing insightful discovery, Newton went on to chide the scientific unbelieving world by writing this, gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. One scientist said, we're pretty good at evaluating what's taking place, but we don't know what set it in place. Isaac Newton went on to testify, the more I study science, the more I believe in God. Science is amazing. Every single one of us benefits from the discoveries and insights that science has given us over the years. But there's one area where science falls short.

Science can't help us understand how and why we got here. The Bible presents a very clear picture. God is the creator of the entire universe. He set it all in motion. Today on Wisdom for the Heart, we're going to look at the vastness of God's creation and the wonder of his love for us. Stephen called this message the creation of a Goldilocks world. Isaiah the prophet declares some breathtaking truths about the creation of our universe. Every generation needs to hear the word of the Lord and our generation is in desperate need of hearing it as well. Isaiah writes in chapter 40, do you not know?

Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars.

The one who leads forth their hosts by number, he calls them all by name because of the greatness of his might and the strength of his power and not one of them is missing. We've been taking a tour around the creation but nothing in all of what's been created by our creator God which we can observe or study is more clearly declared by God's word to lead us to forget ourselves and to be in awe of him, nothing quite like looking up into the sky and beyond. The Psalm as David leaves no doubt when he composes this song for Israel to sing, by the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts. Let all the earth reverence the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him for he spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast.

Over and over again you read in the creation account of Genesis chapter 1 and God said and God said and God said and it was so just as he said. Just take a tour of the heavens and the earth and David says it will lead you, it should lead you to reverence the Lord and stand in awe of him. So let's take a little tour today. Let's begin with planet earth. Earth has a diameter of 7,926 miles.

You're going to need another for the final exam. 7,926 miles. Here we are at home. This is home for now. Eventually it will be destroyed. The book of Revelation tells us and reconstituted as a new and immortal earth upon which the Father's house will sit and I want to take a session or two in the near future and deal with that. Right now as I speak we are hurtling around the sun doing about 67,000 miles an hour and if you happen to feel a little tired today it's because so far this year you've traveled 500 million miles around the sun. Before this year is over, just like clockwork, we've got about 70 million more miles to travel and then we'll make our annual voyage around the sun and it will be right according to the timetable of God. And I mentioned this before but it's good to point out again none of us prayed one time this year that God would please make sure we completed our annual orbit around the sun. We never doubted for a moment that God in his God designed solar system that it would fail.

We never even conceived of the idea. I don't know about you but I get to the end of my year and I look at my list of things I wanted to do this year and half of them aren't done and some of them will never ever get done but God in his created resolution to keep everything spinning and orbiting and holding together as he promised in his word until the end of human history when he sets up a new earth, a new universe, his resolutions will all come true, every one of them. He promised in Isaiah that not one planet or star is missing.

In other words, none of them stray, none of them move or take a turn outside his created design. I found it interesting in my research this week in preparing for this message, the scientific world has coined an expression that they call the Goldilocks zone. It's a play off that children's story you read or heard read to you growing up about a little girl who wanders into a home and it's owned and operated by Papa Bear and Mama Bear and there's a little baby bear and she tries everything out. Some of it's too hot, some of it's too cold, some of it's too hard, some of it's too soft, some of it's too big, some of it's too small but eventually she finds everything she needs and she repeats several times this is just right. So the scientific world has adopted this fable as an expression for earth and our region, a planet and a region where life is just right.

It's not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft, not too big, not too small. I thought that was interesting. We happen to be living on a Goldilocks planet in a Goldilocks region where everything is just right and that's not by accident. In fact in our lifetime discoveries have been made that reveal just how unique planet earth is in affecting our livelihood.

We call it viability. In other words for the earth to support life it needs to provide for things like a correct orbit of the earth, just a precise tilt of the earth on its axis, the right range of temperature, the right amount of barometric pressure, the existence of the nitrogen cycle, the nature of the water cycle, the exact composition of elements in the atmosphere, a filtration system for the radiation emanating from the sun, the exact amount and pressure of gravity and on and on and on and it just so happens to be just right. Isaiah puts it this way, he is the God who formed the earth and made it, he formed it to be inhabited.

Isaiah uniquely specifies the earth, uniquely independently of all of the universe. This planet has been created to be inhabited. Why is the earth able to sustain life? There are so many marvelous discoveries that we don't even know about yet which God created so that it would be inhabitable when we have discovered quite a bit.

In fact I just dipped into the shallow end in preparing for this. For one thing the earth's atmosphere has just the right amount of gases to keep us from having temperatures that could fluctuate 100 degrees in the same day. Venus is earth's nearest twin in size yet its atmosphere is made up of thick layers of carbon dioxide.

It converts this planet into a boiling inferno. Mars lies in a zone where liquid water is possible, however it can't collect or stay long because of one little problem, the air pressure is too low which causes the water to boil away. In the meantime the world has spent billions of dollars looking for another planet that might have the same atmosphere as earth but no such discovery. The earth, as Isaiah declares, is uniquely crafted to support life.

We are living on a Goldilocks planet tailor made for life. We often focus on the amazing aspects of this planet, the creation of earth, without even considering that life on earth would be impossible without the moon. But it was the moon that led Sir Isaac Newton to his discoveries of gravitation.

We thought it was an apple hitting him on the tree when he napped underneath the apple tree. It was actually in reality the orbiting of the moon along with its effects upon the earth that led him to his amazing insights about this fundamental law of God's creation. But even after his amazing insightful discovery, Newton went on to chide the scientific unbelieving world by writing this, gravity explains the motions of the planets but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. One scientist said we were pretty good at evaluating what's taking place but we don't know what set it in place. Isaac Newton went on to testify, the more I study science, the more I believe in God. Scientists and evolutionists have so far spent 20 billion dollars on trying to answer this simple question of how the moon evolved. The Bible tells us in Genesis chapter one that God created it on day four.

He spoke and it was so. How important is the moon? How important would it be that it would be spoken into existence with the orbit it has? Well one scientific article recorded that if the moon disappeared, earth's axis would begin to wobble. The stability of earth's climate would be lost. We'd be locked into a permanent deep freeze or deep fry. If the moon disappeared, gravity would disappear and gravity lifts our oceans, tides, keeps coastline waters from stagnating and drives currents around the planet. In other words beloved without the moon we would be a stagnating, stinking cesspool.

You could say goodbye to Goldilocks. Instead we find this earth to be viable and it is just right. National Geographic, I came across an article that ran some time ago. National Geographic is not exactly a promoter of biblical creationism.

I usually don't read it for devotions but it did carry this interesting article. It cataloged the fact that humans can survive for about 45 days without food, 7 days without water, 10 minutes in temperatures above 300 degrees and 3 minutes without oxygen. All that to say it's one thing for us to talk about human life evolving or even the creation of Adam and Eve but before their creation if there had not been fruit mature and hanging from the branches ready to eat as Genesis 1 says it was they wouldn't have lasted 45 days.

If there wasn't fresh, clean water ready to drink they wouldn't have lasted 7 days. If the earth's temperature wasn't boiling because it lacked the right distance from the sun or the moon had disappeared or wasn't around and the sun and the moon controlling the tidal processes and the seas controlling the temperature in their water and by their water we wouldn't have lasted 10 minutes. And if there weren't trees and plants pumping oxygen into the atmosphere we wouldn't have lasted more than 3 minutes which evolved first.

According to the Bible it was all ingeniously created within a matter of days and by the way just in the right order for there to be life on planet earth God spoke and it was so. Let's pull away from the earth for a few minutes and take a look at the planet nearby called Jupiter. Jupiter was first discovered by the Babylonian astronomers 700 years before the birth of Christ. The red spot you see there in the lower center region of Jupiter just so happens to be a huge hurricane that has been raging for 350 years. Not exactly a Goldilocks planet.

Jupiter has been visited by 8 different spacecraft all unmanned and it has to be. It's too cold to get out. It's 187 degrees below zero. Let's travel 93 million miles away from earth and look at the sun. The sun is so huge that you could fit 1 million earths inside it.

In our Goldilocks system the sun just so happens to be the right size and just the right distance to keep life from freezing on our planet or burning up. We know that a single typical flare from the sun's surface that sends warmth our way we feel it 8 minutes after it leaves the surface of the sun. That little flare is equivalent to several atomic bombs going off at the same time on the sun's surface. Now fortunately the sun is 93 million miles away.

I think I may have mentioned that so we're not all turned into barbecue. But literally there are billions of nuclear bombs essentially exploding on the surface of the sun every single second. If you can imagine it this way it would take Duke Energy that we're keeping you know in business 5 million years to produce the energy produced by the sun in 1 second. But one of the puzzling things as I read and researched this particular heavenly being that puzzles the scientific community is its stability. I mean with all those nuclear bombs going off things don't usually stick together and they talk about its unusual composition.

It has a what they call a very low amount of variation which is a nice way of saying it doesn't change much which is a good thing. You need to understand that God has designed the sun to warm the earth and if you read on and through the book of Revelation you discover that the sun is still around to the end of human history and it is only when God brings judgment to the planet that the sun misbehaves. Only then.

You don't need to be afraid. If you think the sun is impressive and it is the Romans thought it was a god. Let's travel outside our solar system where we discover a star larger than the sun. It's called the pistol star. Earth has a diameter you remember this for the quiz 7,926 miles. The pistol star has a diameter of more than 100 million miles. It was discovered by the Hubble Spacecraft in 1990.

It's so large that you could see it with the naked eye if there weren't so much stuff in between us and it. But frankly what I learned is you really wouldn't want to get that close to it because the wind generated by the energy of this planet is 10 billion times stronger than the sun. In fact the pistol star generates more energy in 20 seconds than the sun does in an entire year. Unfortunately we don't get nuked by the pistol star because God placed it in the galaxy 6 trillion miles away. Again if you think the pistol star is impressive and it is let's take a look at Antares. The diameter of Antares is not 100 million miles long. It is 600 million miles long.

Antares is emitting light 10,000 times brighter than the sun. Now if the sun were the size of the head of a stick pin Antares would be the size of a beach ball. Are you feeling small yet? One author said it isn't that we should just feel small we are small.

You see God tells us that this was all created to show how great he was and as long as we're great he isn't. When we become small he becomes great. He did this by the word of his mouth.

I like the way one author said it. That means he didn't even have to lift a finger. He did it as it were with his hands behind his back. He just spoke and it was so and God said and it was so. So how great is our God? He is as one author said magnificent. He is powerful.

He is unrivaled. So here's our galaxy where he's placed us among billions of stars and planets and you might think we're in the central region of our galaxy because we know everything spins around us right? Well not exactly. The incredible bright core you see in the center there is because of the densely populated region of stars and planets it would vaporize us in just an instant if we got too close. That's how small we are. If the Milky Way, think of it this way. If the Milky Way was a record, a record is a round black object with music recorded on it that you play on a record player. A record player is a square box that you… If the Milky Way were a record planet Earth would be at the spot that's roughly halfway between the center and the outer edge. But if you're not quite small enough yet, well let the perspective pull back for us thanks to some of the pictures that give us an idea and you discover that our galaxy happens to be simply one of literally billions of galaxies in the universe. In fact I've been told that if you look up into the night sky and you think you see a star, you probably see a galaxy.

Where do they come from? In the beginning God created the heavens, the universe, and here's his focus, the earth. He stretches out, Isaiah says, the heavens like a tent.

From the word of his mouth they came into being. Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of stars and planets and billions of galaxies and the further out we see, the further out it goes. And I'm convinced that if we can figure out how to see even further we still wouldn't reach the edge.

Why? Why did God make it so big? If his focus is earth, this is what he'll recreate one day, this is where heaven will be and all of the universe is for us.

Why did God make it so big? Isaiah tells us, lift up your eyes on high and behold who has created these things, he calls them all by name by the greatness of his might. God is essentially asking us to look up and then be amazed and in awe of his power. And by the way, be amazed and in awe of his grace and his care and his attention over all of creation so much so that he has given a name to every planet and to every star in the universe. And here's the point he's making. If he has given a name to chunks of rock, if he has delivered to them that kind of attention, his point later on in the chapter is imagine the attention he has given to you, the image bearer of God. If he's done all this for all of that, here's the point.

Imagine where you fit in to his care. He might be small. I mean compared to the really big planets and stars, he can't even see us. I mean Antares is impressive. That's the impressive one.

In the last decade, they have discovered stars a billion times larger than Antares. You know what that means? It means our little planet is like a grain of sand in an ocean of planets and stars. But here's the amazing thing. We are prized and loved and uniquely designed and cared for and longed for and looked after by our creator God. This amazing creator God is aware of you and he loves you and he invites you to walk with him and to talk to him by faith in his son, your creator.

This is the gospel. The creator left his throne above, beyond as it were the universe and became one of us on this little speck so that he could die for us and pay the penalty for our sin and ultimately reverse the curse of sin which has affected the entire universe which he will one day recreate and immortalize so that Jesus would then defeat death and rise from the grave and at his resurrection then ascend and turn around and promise to us who believe in him a future that defies our imagination. The Scriptures are leading us to not shrink our lives down to living for self or our sin, to not measure our worth by what we're going to drive out of here in this puny little parking lot and what kind of house we're going to go to in our little neighborhood and what the title is at the job and however much stuff you can stick in your attic. Imagine you were created for so much more. You are heading for an incredible future. In fact, according to Paul's letter to Timothy, one day you are going to own this universe. God has designed you to own this universe.

You will be a co-regent with Jesus Christ. This was the amazing conclusion of the psalmist David and David didn't have the advantage of a cheap little telescope from Walmart. I mean he didn't have that. He just looked up just based on what he could see. Here's what he writes. Here's his conclusion. When I look at your heavens, that is the universe, the work of your fingers, the moon.

He can't get much past that. The stars which you have set in place. What is man? Who are we that you are mindful of us?

Here's his conclusion. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Oh, when I look up, it's a wow. But when I think as I look up that you are mindful of me, that is wow.

Wow. God created this entire vast universe as a display of his power and glory. Nevertheless, he peers down into the universe that he's made, sees us and loves us deeply. I hope this time in God's word has encouraged you today. Stephen Davey is working his way through a series on God's creation called In Living Color. If you tuned in late to this lesson, or if you want to go back and listen to any of the lessons in this series, we've posted them to our website, wisdomonline.org. Thanks for joining us today and tune in next time for more Wisdom for the Heart. I'm Stephen Davey and I'll see you in the next video.