The image on the right is our Sun! Three hundred thousand times the size of Earth, blazing at nearly eleven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, its magnetic field stretching through interplanetary space to the outer limits of the solar system.[1]
No one has ever seen the Sun like this before! It’s the first “closeup,” via the world’s largest solar telescope atop Hawaii’s Haleakalā volcano, more than ten thousand feet above the clouds.
What appears to be a bowl of gold nuggets is actually “a pattern of turbulent ‘boiling’ plasma that covers the entire Sun. The cell-like structures — EACH ABOUT THE SIZE OF TEXAS — are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the Sun to its surface. That hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of ‘cells,’ cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes.”[2]
We’ve been trying to get a closer look at the Sun since the first telescope was patented back in 1608.
The Son who created the Sun has been drawing us nearer for a couple of millennia. Heat and distance have interfered with the latter. Sin has interfered with the former.
While science today is making astounding strides toward seeing and understanding the star at the center of our solar system, Jesus long ago totally removed the only obstacle that stood between us and him.
We pay any price, tackle any obstacle and face any risk to learn about the universe that surrounds us, yet say that the Man who created every atom of it is passé, no longer believable, irrelevant to our modern age and advanced thinking. The late Ronald Dworkin argued that “whether or not there is a God, He (or She, or It) is neither necessary nor even helpful in grounding or explaining moral goods and obligations.”[3]
“The definition of new…tolerance,” explains one modernist, “is that every individual’s beliefs, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal…. Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal, and all truth is relative.”[4]
“This misconception assumes that truth is inclusive,” counters apologist Josh McDowell, “ that it gathers under its wings claims that oppose each other. The fact, however, is that all truth is exclusive—at least to some degree—for it must exclude as false that which is not true.”[5]
And the greatest source of truth on Earth has been, is and always will be the Bible.
It took more than 40 authors over 1,500 years to write—in three languages, in styles ranging from song and poetry to parable and prophecy, on three continents at different times during different moods. The Bible addresses hundreds of controversial subjects that create opposing opinions, yet it presents a single unfolding story of God’s redemption.[6]
The blazing truth offered by the Son of God in the Bible is infinitely greater than the combined light of the Sun, 400 billion stars like it in our galaxy and all the stars in 200 billion other galaxies.
So why do we leave it sitting on a shelf?
[1] NASA, “The Sun and Us,” A meeting with the Universe, chapter 3-1.
[2] Recent photo of the solar surface, National Solar Observatory, Maui, Hawaii.
[3] Dworkin, Ronald, Religion without God, Harvard University Press, 2013.
[4] Helmbock, Thomas, executive vice-president of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, quoted in New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, p. xxxix.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. pp. 4-6.
