Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

• Genesis 3:17-19

God mentions thorns and thistles in his punishment of Adam for having eaten the forbidden fruit.  It has been said from the pulpit many times that the earth was cursed due to Adam’s sin.  After all, the world that we are in is winding down.  Even if God does not end the world soon or the humans of the earth do not blow it up, the world will die all on its own.

But what can we learn about the universe?  Is the universe also cursed?

In this “A Thought On …” series, I often just raise questions for thought as opposed to developing the thought.  But have stars died?  According to esa.int/kids, they do.

“Most stars take millions of years to die. When a star like the Sun has burned all of its hydrogen fuel, it expands to become a red giant. This may be millions of kilometres across – big enough to swallow the planets Mercury and Venus.
“After puffing off its outer layers, the star collapses to form a very dense white dwarf. One teaspoon of material from a white dwarf would weigh up to 100 tonnes. Over billions of years, the white dwarf cools and becomes invisible.”

• Esa.int/kids

The quote from the European Space Agency is very specific about what happens when a star dies.  It boggles my mind that they can make such statements unequivocally.  Has anyone weighed a white dwarf?  If so, what substance known to man weighs 100 tonnes per teaspoon?  And why do they mix their measurement systems with teaspoons and metric tonnes?  One hundred metric tonnes is 110 US tons (roughly).  Does such a substance exist?  And how many billions of years has the “scientific community” been watching this transformation?  And they are teaching this frightening concept that our sun will die to our children?!?!

To answer the dense substance question, osmium, the densest material known to mankind, weighs in at about 100 grams per teaspoon, thus the “education” provided by the European Space Agency is imagining something that does not exist, being 1,000,000 times more dense than anything that we know of.  Why are we turning science into fantasy or science fiction?

But I digress.  We have observed red giants and white dwarves in outer space and we have surmised what is happening.  Correctly surmised might be a different topic.  While the secular “scientists” can dream of the millions and billions of years theories and what might be happening in their fantasies, what should a Christian think?

Maybe the Christian could think anything on the scientific level, as long as it cannot be easily disproved.  And please imagine something that makes sense!

But on a spiritual level, could a Christian see the progress of a red giant or a white dwarf in deep space and think – “We could be next.”

Now that is a scary thought, but one that points toward the images recorded by the Apostle John in The Revelation.  When the sun burns so hot (Rev. 16:8-9), could that be the starting point of the death of our sun?  There are other ideas that might cause that to happen.  Climate change run amok might deliver that kind of sunburn, burning covering the boils or sores from the first bowl.  But could something happen to the earth that caused our orbit to become closer to the sun?  Okay, I should probably use Occam’s Razor to get from three theories to explain the fourth bowl down to just one.

I’m just asking questions, thinking out loud, or at least through typing the words.  Such astronomical discoveries may have a variety of interpretations, but the impact upon Christians should be that of urgency.  Our lives are limited in the first place.  That is one urgency to spread the Gospel while we still can.  But if the end is near, we may not have the time of a full life and others may have an even shorter time than that.

Jesus said, “Look to the skies.”  In seeing stars die, we should see the limited time that we have left to tell others that Jesus saves.

And thank you, in advance, Candy Christmas and David Phelps.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.