You are currently on a 4.5 billion year old spaceship**********************************************************************************************************
A self sufficient, organic, complex spaceship.
You are orbiting a power source that is a million times larger than your ship.
There are 200 billion more power sources, possibly with ships like your, in your group.
There are 40 more groups in your particular neighborhood.
Your neighborhood is moving at 2 million miles per hour to an object that is 150 million light years away.
Welcome to life. It's more exciting when you think on a larger scale.
My friend attributed this quote to Carl Sagan, but the web site does not say. I must agree that it is in the spirit of Sagan. This quote raises many questions. Why does astronomical sizes and millions of years make life more exciting? If that is the case, should not contemplating the end of the universe be our most exciting meditation? The most popular theory of the end of the universe is "The Big Freeze." The universe will keep expanding until it approaches absolute zero. No life, no light, nor even matter as we know it will exist. It will be the big zero. The end of the universe is a big whimper. It is indeed an exciting end to contemplate.
The author of the quote introduces meaning or purpose through the words spaceship and direction; However, in Carl Sagan's universe, the earth is not a spaceship, but the result of random events. In Sagan's view, we are just the product of time and chance. There is no design. In Sagan's universe we do not have a direction. We are on top of a spinning globe, which is spinning around a star, which is spinning around a galaxy, which is spinning around a local group of galaxies. There is no one driving. We are literally spinning out of control. The biblical world view offers an alternative. Life has meaning; the earth has meaning; and the universe shouts meaning. Read these two quotes.
When Hebrews 1:3 speaks of Christ "sustaining all things by his powerful word," sustain is the Greek verb phero, meaning "bear, carry." This not a picture of Christ as a kind of Atlas, holding up the world on his shoulders ("upholding," KJV), but a dynamic image of him carrying the world from one point to another through time. There is a destination, and Christ's purpose is to bring the world process to that goal, that conclusion. John Frame, A Theology of Worship Volume 2: The Doctrine of God, p. 276 by John Frame.
But already in the New Testament this "Son" is identified with the Discourse or reason or Word which was eternally "with God" and yet also was God. He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion--the final statement of what they have been trying to express. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles. p.76)Christ has an ultimate end in mind for the universe, it is for his glory; and He will bring it about.
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