Sky car

Its Sunday evening late in the fall of 1963 and the newest episode of the Jetsons is about to premiere. For you younger space travelers the Jetsons were a space age cartoon family who lived in a floating city where robotic maids cleaned and cooked for them making their lives incredibly more endurable. The citizens of earth also navigated the heavens by flying in space age sky cars which defied gravity. Life was incredibly trouble free in this modern utopia.

I want to take a closer look at these sky cars. Yes, believe it or not they are going to be an everyday sight that will eventually fill the skies in which are now crowed with large air busses. These space age cars, operated by globally positioned satellites, will give humans the freedom to get anywhere without the hands of a human driver and without the possibility of accident or loss of human life.

Now I want you to consider something. Let’s look at how wonderfully vast our universe is and one illuminating component we call light. If light travels at 186,000 miles at second then it will take light particles leaving the surface of the sun about 8.4 minutes to reach earth. To give you a perspective that is closer to earth think about this; in the time it takes you to flip on a light switch, light would have already traveled 7.4 times around the circumference of the earth at the equator. Now, it took me 2 days in the air just to fly just halfway around the world to Kathmandu in a jumbo jet flying at 450 miles an hour.

Let me develop this idea a little further to illustrate a future point. Our solar system is located in one of several spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years from earth. That is the distance that light travels in 4.2 years at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. To put this in laymen’s terms, that’s a long way. If we launched a probe it would take 20,000 years to reach it. 

Let’s take one additional cosmic step before settling back down to terra firma. It’s roughly estimated that our galaxy contains 300 billion stars. Its diameter is 100,000 light years across, remember that light can circle our globe 7.4 times in a second and light would have to travel for 100,000 years to travel the diameter of our own galaxy. Yikes!

Now let’s look at psalm 19. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.  Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge.  There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices like a strong man to run its race.  Its rising is from one end of heaven, and its circuit to the other end; and there is nothing hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;  The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, Yea, than much fine gold; Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.  Moreover by them Your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward.  Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.  Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.”

Is it really that hard to believe in God? The obvious precision in which the heavenly bodies operate shows that there is design to the overall operation of the universe in which we live. If there is design then there is a designer and suddenly all of our problems that look like mountains here on earth begin to shrink into the microscopic world as we jump into our sky cars and head out into the heavens!

The heavens certainly do declare the glory of God.

This article was condensed from a sermon Dean gave at Sonrise Church in El Cajon, California on June 6^th, 2012. You can watch the entire sermon at https://www.youtube.com/sermonsfromthecave