Timeline of the Universe

A couple of years ago, my imagination was captured by an image Jennifer Wiseman shared at the VA Seminar of Science, Theology & Ethics. Wiseman, an astrophysicist, is the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She is also a Christian, and a United Methodist to boot!

The image is the timeline of the universe. To me, it directs me to the enormity and eternity of God. What it shows is the 13.77 billion years of the development of the universe. I know that someone could look at this image and see it in an entirely different, even prosaic way, but I can’t. I keep this image on my iPad. Sometimes, I need to have a sense of perspective that time is a part of creation which is far more than my little slice of it.

Tonight that image became an even deeper metaphor as we talked about grace during our Wednesday night Lenten study. God’s grace has been flowing for well over the 13.77 billion years of this universe. This grace that floods my life and makes all things new is a part of the enormity of God’s eternity. The grace, or love if you prefer, bursting forth from God has moved and is moving through the creation of the stars to the first sunrise on earth to the tiniest atom in the tiniest cell in my being. As it has moved into me, so it seeks to move through me and flow from me radiating the eternal Yes of God’s creating power. God is not just a first mover who set creation into motion and then stepped back. God is intimately touching every single part of all the universe, or even universes.

And what is so amazing is that the best and most whole image we have of that powerful, eternal grace is in the person of Jesus, who, “though he was in the form of God, did not grasp at equality with God, but emptied himself…”

And all I can do is marvel and praise.

Psalm 8: 3-5

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.