Chattanooga Times Free Press

Earth, moon and sun? God did that

- Dr. William F. Holland Jr. Commentary Dr. Billy Holland is an ordained minister, community chaplain and Christian author. Read more about God and the Christian life at billyholla­ndministri­es.com.

Within the unlimited amount of evidence to prove that God is real and the Creator of all things, there is no greater example than the sun, Earth and moon.

The average person does not wake up in the morning and rush to the window to see if the sun is going to rise or if the Earth is being drawn into a black hole. Neither would anyone jump up and down just to make sure the levels of gravity did not change during the night or if the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide levels are still maintainin­g the perfect atmosphere to breathe.

God not only created where we live; he also carefully maintains it. The reliabilit­y of time and the seasons, for example, relays a message from God that we can trust him with everything.

Science has written a library of knowledge about the sun, Earth and moon, but no one can fathom why they work together no more than why oxygen gives life to the blood or how the brain can manage every system of our bodies instantly all at once.

The sun is actually a star, and the universe contains an incalculab­le amount of them. They are different sizes, and some are even 100 times larger than our sun. According to the experts, they are luminous balls of gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, with nuclear fusion at their core to support the masses, which are held together by their own gravity. Beyond what all the celestial bodies are, how do they stay in place?

If the sun moved away even a small amount, our planet would be frozen. If it inched closer, we would be burned to a crisp. The conclusion: We build miniature replicas and hang them with strings, but the only explanatio­n about how these massive round objects remain stationary can be nothing other than the one who made them is holding them there.

The Earth has not only been in a precise orbit around the sun since the beginning; it also maintains a perfect tilt and a perfect rotational speed. The moon orbits the Earth exactly every 27.3 days, as the Earth and moon are both moving around the sun with such precisenes­s that we can know the exact minute when the sun will rise and set 100 years from now.

Random chance? Hardly. God regulates a bearable temperatur­e with a constant perfect amount of carbon dioxide as we do not appreciate oxygen until we can’t breathe.

If our planet were a tiny bit smaller or larger, let’s just say that mass effects gravity and, without it, life would not be the same as we enjoy now. All of this and so much more is going on every second, and we rarely stop to even give him thanks. As technology advances to study the cosmos, the more complex it becomes. The same is true with the vast mysteries of the human body and all living creatures. They are such intricate and perplexing miracles of creation. It’s said the human eye consists of more than 2 million working parts, and this is just a small component compared to the brain. The most advanced computer cannot compare to the brain, which controls 100 billion neurons communicat­ing with each other constantly.

When it comes to how the universe began, we’ve heard about how everything we see and know projected outward from this ginormous explosion and that it’s still expanding. This is quite different from the Bible’s account of creation. However, if this is the way God wanted to create the universe billions of years ago, why should we argue?

The writers of Genesis did not call it a “big bang” because the creation of the entire cosmos and the creation of the sun, Earth and moon are probably two separate events. Read the creation account carefully and you will discover it focuses on our planet. The mention of heavens refers to multiple atmosphere­s such as tropospher­e, stratosphe­re, mesosphere, thermosphe­re, ionosphere, exosphere and magnetosph­ere. Could God have formed the Earth billions of years after he created the universe? Yes! The point is that none of it happened by coincidenc­e.

As we’re told in Colossians 1:16-17: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth. Visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principali­ties, or powers: all things were created by him and for him: and he is before all things, and by him, all things consist.”

 ?? ??
 ?? GETTY IMAGES ??
GETTY IMAGES

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States