Daily Worship

Twinkle boom

Neil I MacLennan January 07, 2024 3 5
day_1_sun_over_water_smegelsky
Image credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky
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Genesis 1: 1-5 (NRSVA)

1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Twinkle! Twinkle! Little star — let there be light!

The contrast could not be more stark between the words repeated in every nursery school and the words that ignited the immense nuclear processes that beat at the heart of every star.

When we read the opening words of Genesis we typically, and parochially, think of our own neighbourhood and our own star — the sun. But God did more than that: he caused to come into being millions and billions of stars, and that’s just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. There are perhaps 200 trillion galaxies. Multiplying the two together is left as an exercise for the reader!

This is a reason the adjective “astronomical” is used to describe numbers and quantities that are simply so large as to be effectively unfathomable and uncountable.

This is our God, the great I AM. In Psalm 8 we read, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

 

Prayer:

Creator God — never has a phrase been so apt.
We praise you!

Creator God — author and perfecter of such a grand design.
We praise you!

Creator God — immense and magnificent; yet in flesh: meek and mild.
We praise you!

Creator God — you gave us light, and the Light of the World.
We praise you!

Amen.