Verse: Job 12:7-9
7 “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
8 or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
9 Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
Devotional Thoughts:
I was recently discussing the idea of intelligent design with someone. Intelligent design refers to the reality that life cannot have began by chance and was rather designed by a Creator. Job mentions something similar in this verse. He says, “Ask the animals, the birds, the bushes, the fish, they will all tell you – isn’t it obvious that the Lord created all of this?”
Just ask creation, as Job tells us to do, and it will tell you that there is a Creator. I learned an interesting fact recently that I wasn’t aware of. Have you ever thought about how, from Earth’s vantagepoint, the sun and the moon appear to be the same size?
But how can that be the case? The moon is much, much smaller than the sun. So why do they appear as the same size?
As it turns out, the sun is roughly 93 million miles from Earth, and the moon is in the ballpark of 240,000 miles from Earth. If you crunch the numbers, you’ll come to realize that the distance to the sun is about 400 times the distance to the moon. Now – hang with me for a second – the diameter of the moon is roughly 2,200 miles, and the diameter of the sun is about 870,000 miles. Pull out your calculator again – the sun’s diameter is roughly 400 times that of the moon’s.
This means that the distances and diameters of the sun and moon line up perfectly so that both appear as the same size from our backyard here on Earth. This reality allows us to experience some really neat cosmic spectacles – such as a solar eclipse. It’s also incredibly improbable. This doesn’t occur again in our solar system, and astronomers have yet to find another instance in which this is the case.
Points to Ponder:
Look around you. The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky proclaims his handiwork. Never get the idea that science and faith are incompatible. The call to follow Christ is not one that requires us to check our brains at the door. This incredible world we live in just reinforces the fact that our God is awesome and mighty and worthy to be praised.
