The Cradle That Rocked The World Series

Let me give you a verse—a beautiful verse—Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 26: “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things” (Isaiah 40:26). Joyce and I, on a recent vacation, went out, at night, to lie down on a dock and look up at the stars for hours, just to look, as it were, in the face of God. This is what he’s saying: “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth” (Isaiah 40:26). What does that verse tell us? It means that God created the host of the heavens, the stars that hang like a candelabra in the black velvet of midnight. God created those to display His majesty and His glory, and we’re going to find out that that God, who made all of that, is Jesus, and He considers you more important than all of these things.

If you were to highjack a light beam and travel at the speed of light… And, how fast is that? 186,282 miles per second. How fast is that? Well, that’s around the world 70 times in the time it takes you to blink your eyes. Blink your eyes, and light has traveled around the world at its equator seven times—that’s the speed of light—186,282 miles— not an hour, a second. That’s how fast light travels. Now, if you were to highjack a light beam, and say you’re going to travel to the sun—how far is the sun away? Ninety-three million miles—how long would it take to get to the sun? Eight-and-a-half minutes. Eight¬and-a-half minutes, you’d be 93 million miles away. But, if you wanted to go out past Mars, and Jupiter, and Pluto, and the rest of the planets—if you wanted to go out past the sun and the moon to the nearest star—do you know how close the nearest star is, or how far away? It’s 4 1/2 light years away. Now, what is a light year? Well, that’s how far light travels in a year, not in a second. It travels a good distance: 186,282 miles in a second. Then, how far has it traveled in a year? Well, you’d have to travel at that speed for 4 1/2 years to get to Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star in our Milky Way—that is 27 trillion miles. Four-and-a-half years it’d take you to travel 27 trillion miles.

They tell us, now, that there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. If you were to travel from rim to rim in the Milky Way, traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to go from rim to rim, in the Milky Way, at the speed of light. Yet, on Mount Palomar, they have this great 200-inch telescope, and they have taken that 200-inch telescope, and looked through just the cup in the Big Dipper—you know what the Big Dipper is—they just looked through the cup of the Big Dipper; and, they say, in the cup of the Big Dipper, they estimate there are one million galaxies like our galaxy, the Milky Way. They’ve looked on the furthest thing they can see, which is what they call a quasar. It’s 15 billion light years away—the speed of light traveling 186,282 miles a second for 15 billion years. That’s getting out there—that’s getting out there. That’s a quasar; and, they say that a quasar—whatever it is there, in space—generates enough power, enough electrical energy, in one second to fuel all the needs of the world for one million years—just in one second. That’s how much power is coming from that quasar that is out there, in the nether reaches of space, 90 billion trillion miles away. Who made it all? Jesus. Jesus. He made it all, and “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).