Part of Ice Cube

Don´t  be misled by the shortness of this post -- it deals with an immense topic that goes way beyond the power of words. 

Early this week I read something in the New York Times concerning a scientific research project in Antarctica called “Ice Cube.” It is designed to detect tiny particles such as gamma rays reaching the earth from outer space. Recently some scientists have programmed it to detect high energy particles called neutrinos. Here is the sentence that caught my attention:

Over the past decade, Ice Cube has detected hundreds of high energy neutrinos that originated outside the solar system. In 2017, other telescopes pinpointed the origin of a neutrino detected by Ice Cube in a galaxy four billion light years away.“

Wait! Did I read that correctly? Yup! Four Billion light years away! 

The first thing I thought of as I read this number was that God is intimately involved in all of the processes that catapulted this neutrino across the face of creation. So my God has to be bigger than the seemingly limitless expanses of outer space. I thought of some verses from Psalm 8:

O Lord, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth!

When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and stars that you set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,

and a son of man that you care for him?

The psalmist is awed by the vastness and the beauty he sees in the night sky with just his naked eye. How much more, then, should we be in awe of the God who has been flinging neutrinos across four billion light-years all the time!

If you have God in your pocket, a God who is comfortably understandable, and bounded by your own ideas and minus any mystery, then your God is way too small for the job! I mean, four billion light years! Our God is indeed an Awesome God!

We cannot even imagine the extent and depth of his love for each of us -- I mean, four billion light-years!

This is good material for meditation, if you can keep from fainting in the face of all this Immensity.

A photo from the James Webb Space Telescope