Back when Seattle’s Kingdome was still up, I had an
interesting experience there. I was with some friends who were setting up for a
Promise Keepers thing (yeah, that long ago).
They shushed all the workers, and waited for it to get
quiet. Then they dropped the lid on a huge equipment case. It made a formidable
“Bang” as I expected. Then it echoed. And echoed. And echoed. It was nearly a
minute before that single bang stopped rumbling around that room.
Another time, I was with a musician (a gift I do not have)
at a canyon with a solid echo. She made music with the canyon. She sang some
things, and the canyon echoed them back later, and then she sang harmony or
rhythm with it. It was amazing. She was literally singing with herself through
the time warp of that canyon’s echo.
While I don’t have the music gene, I do have the science
gene. Did you know that both radar and sonar are both examples of creating
pictures using echoes? Sonar uses echoes of sound under water. Radar uses
echoes of radio waves in the air. It’s amazing how much detail they can come up
with if they’re careful.
Sound is an interesting thing. It’s just stuff vibrating.
Most commonly it’s air vibrating, but sound travels through most anything that
will pass vibrations on. Water is especially good. Even space is not completely
empty; many kinds of vibrations do still pass through space.
Another thing about sound is that it takes time to get from
here to there. Light takes time too, but compared with light or electricity or
radio waves, sound is really slow. That’s why when we see a lightning strike,
the crash of thunder is delayed.
(You can measure the distance to the strike: every five
seconds of delay indicates a mile; a twenty second delay means the strike was
four miles away. Physics is also useful!)
One more factoid about sound: it loses volume as it travels
distance (and therefore time). It’s a logarithmic scale, so every time the
distance doubles, the volume drops by another six decibels, or about half of
it’s energy.
So if the thunder you heard twenty seconds after you saw the
lightning strike was 90 decibels, then twenty miles further away it will drop
to 84 decibels, but it won’t drop that much again until it hits 78 miles from
the source, but that won’t happen until almost a minute and a half after the
strike. The next time it drops by half will be 160 miles (and almost three
minutes) away. And it keeps going.
Sound loses half its energy every time you double the
distance (or the time) since it was created. But that means that no sound ever
goes away completely. It just keeps losing a portion of its energy. In fact,
science nerds have actually measured the echoes of the Big Bang, from 13.8
billion years ago. It was very quiet, and they had to listen closely, but they
did hear it (and they won a Nobel Prize for it),
OK. Sorry for the nerd-fest there. But we’re not quite done yet.
When God spoke and said, “Let there be light,” he made a
sound. (My screwball personal opinion is that this sound actually was the Big
Bang, but who knows.) Because he made a sound, therefore by the laws of
physics, the echoes of his voice are still rattling around the universe.
The other thing that happened when God spoke and said, “Let
there be light,” was that light was, in fact, created. When God speaks – and
this is one of the basic facts of the universe – God’s voice carries not only
information, it also carries power; it carries the power to accomplish what is
declared. Think of it as the design for the creation and the funding to make it
happen.
(And that, of course, is why our own words are so important.
Being created in God’s “image and likeness,” our words also carry both
information and power, though maybe not as much as his. We need to wield that
power intentionally, not carelessly, but regardless of our means, power is
wielded when we speak.)
Now here’s where I’m going. If the echoes of God’s creative
statements are still echoing around the universe (and they are), does that also
mean that the information and the power that they carried is also still echoing
around the universe?
I recall that there are a whole lot of places in the universe
(seriously: trillions of such places) where ordinary matter is condensing into
big blobs of matter, where friction and gravity ignites them and a new star is
born, spewing forth newly created light where no light had been a moment ago.
That looks to me like an echo of “Let there be light.”
The part that really captures my attention is a little later
in that same Bible chapter, where God spoke again. Part of those words
included, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”
What if those words that resulted in the creation of mankind
are still echoing around the universe, echoing around the Earth? Would that
mean that God’s creativity is still at work forming mankind, forging mankind?
Or do you think our creation was a one-time thing, and God isn’t still refining
his masterpiece?
I have begun to wonder if we as a species are still in the
process of creation. We’re not just starting out, but neither are we finished
and done. I’m thinking that God is still molding and forming and making us into
the mature Sons and Daughters of the Kingdom that he’s always planned for us to
be.
The human race is pretty untidy. But it’s not broke. It’s
just not finished yet.
Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been
revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be
like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
