M:G: 5.11.15 // Heaven-Bent, Part 5

There is one more big number I wanted to share with you to add to your growing list of math frustrations of the totally unrelatable, incomprehensible numbers of Part 4. If you recall I mentioned that the most distant observable galaxy in the universe was said to be ~13.1 billion light years away from our terrestrial ball. If we multiply the light year's distance by the distance light travels in a vacuum for a year (~5.9 trillion miles), the mileage would be ~77.29 sextillion miles. In decimal notation, this would be written as 77,290,000,000,000,000,000,000 sextillions or 77 billion trillion. This can be more conveniently expressed in scientific notation as 77.29x1021 or 77.29e21 or 77.29^21. 1 sextillion is 1021 or 1 with 21 zeroes trailing it.

There are other larger numbers in the -illion family of big numbers, but sextillion is enormous; we will stop with this big bad boy in our series. I had to hack my way through those thick bushes of numbers! How far did you go before you quit following me? Hang with me! We are near the clearing! And don’t thank me for skipping quadrillion (1015) and quintillion (1018) to get to sextillion (1021)!

I found a website that gives us some sort of sketchy concept of sextillion. This one guy said that 1 sextillion gallons of water would be 3 times the amount of gallons of water on earth. Obviously, these are rough approximations, but you get the idea of its maddening magnitude. The other analogies are creative but really not very helpful. On the opposite scale, which has more to do with atoms, if this next analogy is anywhere in the ballpark of approximation, this is simply amazing.

“A sextillion carbon atoms in a cube would be 1.34 millimeters wide, about the size of an average flea. Therefore a sextillion can be seen as a number so big that these many atoms are large enough to see with the naked eye, though really this tells us more about how small an atom is than how big a sextillion is”b.  Anytime I talk about stars and atoms, the passage found in Col 1:16, 17 comes to mind.

(16) For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. (17) And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

All things were created by Him and through Him and for Him. He is before all things (present tense indicating His eternal status, cf. Jn 8:58) and in Him all things consist! There is a ton of theology here. He is before all things visible (material) and invisible (immaterial), all of creation, the entire universe. That last clause “in Him all things consist” tells me that our very existence and continued existence is because of Christ who is the sustainer of creation (cf. Heb 1:3). Our very existence and continued existence are because of Him; the verb “consist” literally means “to hold together.” He is the Creator and Controller of all of creation.

This is more comforting to know and taking less faith than believing everything evolved from non-life! Oh, since I am on the subject of stars and atoms, no human knows how many stars exist in the universe; there are a lot of large numbers floating around. Some base the count on uniformitarianism which is the belief that the same natural laws and processes have always been in operation across the universe. 

Though the biblical record does not give any specific number concerning the stars, Moses alludes to God keeping his promise to Abraham that his descendants will be like the stars in heaven in number in  Deut 10:22 (cf. Gn 15:5; 22:17; 26:4). Jacob’s seventy multiplied (Gn 46:27; Ex 1:5) in Egypt to 2+ million! This number, however, pales to the actual number of stars in the heavens. This is a clear example of hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. They bred like rabbits in Egypt even under pressure (Ex 1:12; Psa 105:24)!

How many stars are out there? No one knows for sure, except God (Psa 147:4; Isa 40:26), how many stars exist in the universe because they cannot be counted literally, only guesstimated. With new discoveries over time of some distant galaxy, the “guesstimation” grows in number. One thing is for sure; there is an unbelievably large amount of stars in the universe, and that won’t take much convincing. What we see with the naked eye only numbers in the thousands, but telescopes like NASA’s Hubble provides a window to the myriad of stars unseen in outer space previously.

This one science writer indicated that there were more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth based on research calculations at the University of Hawaii. I won’t bore you with incomprehensible numbers. We’ll find out when we get to glory, but let’s go in the opposite direction again, and mention something about the number of water (H2O) molecules in an ordinary drop of water. This same article goes on to say that there are as many molecules in ten drops of water as there are stars in space (guesstimate)! So once again, we have another illustration of the greatness of our God in the vastness of the great and small of creation. I agree with the consensus, “We just can’t handle the biggitude”b. So, I have pinpointed our problem! We have an attitude with biggitude!

Now, let’s talk about eternity. From our previous discussion on the starry expanse, we have to conclude that it is immeasurable. When you read where Israel can certainly expect God to fulfill His unconditional New Covenant made with them in the near future (Jer 31:31, 35-37), we should not interpret this as God waxing eloquently in a hyperbolic-like fashion. I think He was being very literal by His illustrations (two in particular – “If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath” Jer 31:37) to show the certainty of His unilateral agreement with Israel, namely, “being a nation before Me forever” (Jer 31: 36). I do think the consummation of the times is fast approaching to where all measuring will come to an end anyway, and all of Israel’s enemies will never dislodge her from her land; she is there to stay after all has been said and done, eschatologically speaking.

What I am going to say concerning eternity in this series will be based on theological suppositions. The rejection of the universe being bound (not expanding) by many secular astrophysicists and astronomers is not due to any observable data contradicting it, but because of a philosophical perspective – atheistic, auto-denial of an intelligent design of the cosmos, and a secular evolutionary mindset. People see what they want to see and interpret accordingly and disregard the rest. I am not a scientist, but even though my world viewpoint runs contrary to secular evolution and secular humanism, I am not guilty of the proverbial saying of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There is a lot of good science taking place. But science is flooded with intellectually dishonest men and women who disguise their philosophical bias by treating evolution as an institutionalized fact rather than a personal theory or belief. I believe that the Word of God is the supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and practice; however, creation still remains a theory if I am being intellectually honest. 

With that said the biblical record of creation is a much stronger, tried and true theory than the emergence of radical ideas coming out of post-revolutionary France after 1799 on evolutionary thinking. Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution, but with the publishing of his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, this English Naturalist, 1809-1882, stepped onto the stage of history and introduced to the world “proof” of the idea of evolutionary adaptation by natural selection. It didn’t happen overnight, but today, natural selection has become the “unifying concept of the life sciences”bb.   

Our faith claims creation to be factually based upon God’s Self-revelation of Himself to man via general revelation (creation) and specific revelation (the Word of God) and not man clinging to some recent iconoclastic belief, in historical perspective, that the transmutation of the species is valid. Our authority comes from God Himself. There is no specific revelation (the Scriptures) that has ever contradicted real science, only an irrationality of a science so-called that promotes evolution and denies creation. Though the Bible is not a book of science or uses scientific language, whenever it speaks of the natural world it is spot on!

Without the Word of God, how do we become heaven-bent? If we never read, study, meditate, memorize, and apply the Scriptures in our lives, we are earthbound, not heaven-bent! Being heaven-bent breaks the horizontal bonds of this passing world for the vertical realities of eternity (Col 3:1, 2). Loss of the joy of the things above is a good indicator of being world bent. We will pick up from here with Part 6; I promise there will be no more math, well, less of it. The metaphysical hypothesis on the eternal state configuration should prove to be interesting, but not revolutionary, in this series. <>< 

To Part 6