When I last left off in October, I was attempting to illustrate the insignificance of the amount of physical space I take up. Trying to understand that God created and maintains the vastness of the Universe and is still a personal God who is uniquely interested in me and has a plan for my life is something so mind-boggling it actually hurts to attempt comprehension. But as if that was not enough, God is not only the Creator of physical space, he is also the creator of time. So. how do I fit in the time part of the Space-Time Continuum (shout out to all my Trekkie friends).
Actually, when God created the Universe, time was the natural by-product. Time only exists because there was a beginning. We measure time by marking physical events. The earth's rotation, the moon's revolutions, our planet's path around the Sun, the frequency of atoms vibrations, the birth and death of an individual. All of these give us our sense of time, and, what is hopefully obvious by the examples I gave, time is very relative. It's conditional on what it's being measured against. It's so conditional that a pretty smart guy by the first name of Albert figured out time can be relatively slowed down or sped up by the influences of mass and speed.
How does all this relate to my insignificance in the Universe? Well let's go back to my last post. I stated that my best hope is to live around 80 years or so, give or take 20 years,(hopefully give). The year will be 2035 when I turn 80. Our country will be almost 260 years old, so my life will be about 1/3 the age the United States, which when you put it that way, really makes our country seem pretty young, and it is. So, let's go a little further, to say, 10 times my life, or 800 years, 1235. This would have been the height of the Middle Ages, just a few decades from the beginning of the Renaissance. Now lets go back 100 times my life to around 6000 B.C. This would be the time of the beginning of civilization when hunters and gatherers, became farmers and ranchers and the first permanent cities were built. If we go back 1000 times my life span, then we reach the period when most scientists believe humans began there existence and began spreading out across the planet.(Yes I am taking an "old earth" view, but to any creationist readers, this does not mean I believe in evolution, that's another topic). One important fact to also note is that generations are typically measured in 20 year spans, so at this point we are talking about anywhere from 8000 to 16,000 generations of humanity have lived on earth.
At this point, we can skip from counting in hundreds and thousands to millions and billions of years. Most scientists place the explosion of life forms on our planet as beginning around 600 million years ago. Again at this point I would have to use scientific notation to explain how short my life is compared to that number. From there, the estimated age of the Earth is 4.5 billion or 4.5 thousand million years old. The universe then triples that to somewhere between 13 and 15 billion years old. And all that time, before humans ever walked and communed with God, the Scripture tells us the stars, the rocks, the hills, the trees, everything living and non-living were praising Him.
When I begin to reflect on the vastness of time and space, two questions arise which I will give my
If I am so small, why is God interested in me?
If my life is so short, why did God make the consequences of my actions in this life so important for eternity?
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