The Dance of the Heavens

“The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
Psalm 19.1

Imagine taking a handful of sand and throwing it up into the air, and all the grains of sand immediately fall into complex orbits around each other, and form systems that coalesce into spirals and bands and bars of clusters of grains of sand, and the whole thing just continues to expand before you. And it all happened quite on its own, without any plan or design; you just threw that handful of sand into the air. It would be a pretty good trick wouldn’t it?

I was driving home late one afternoon last week, and I saw a bright speck of “sand” shining just above the horizon in front of me. Of course it wasn’t a grain of sand at all, it was Mars! I recalled reading that Mars would be coming closer to earth than it had for fifty years or more, as its orbit and earth’s brought the planets near one another, at least as near is measured in celestial terms.

It happened that just a few days after staring in wonder at Mars, shining more brightly than the brightest star, that one of the biggest full moons we could ever see filled the sky. I don’t know about you, but it never occurs to me that the Moon and Mars are just grains of sand that just happen to float in space in a happenstance relationship to Earth.

No, Mars, the Moon, and Earth follow the very courses in space that God has appointed for them. And the seeming eccentricities of their orbits are in fact just a very small part of an incredibly choreographed dance of the heavens designed by God. The author of Psalm 19 saw and understood this, and was compelled to testify how the heavens declare the glory of God, and how the sky above all but shouts out that they are the careful craftsmanship of the Creator.

How impoverished an existence, for one to imagine that the grandeur of the waltz of the stars is but the accidental residue of a cataclysmic explosion in some far recess of time back beyond knowing. How rich beyond measure am I, to witness the exquisite beauty of the heavens, to note the dance of the heavenly bodies, and to realize, speck of sand that I am, that the God who created all this is mindful of me.