Looking up and out towards the heavens

Many years ago a dear friend of mine struggled with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was overwhelmingly inviting. It was also challenging. In exasperation one evening, he told me he was going to go out and walk along the lakeshore and look up into the star-lit night.

He was going to ask God to do something spectacular in the sky to confirm the gospel.

We met the next day. “Did anything happen last night?” I asked. Rick was really pumped with excitement. “Yes,” he said, “It was awesome. The stars shone with particular brightness and there was one spectacular shooting star!”

I suggested that this probably resolved his tension. His response was, as the expression goes, underwhelmingly wonderful. “Well, you know all the stuff in the sky was great but what it all seemed to do was point me back to the Bible and the wonder of the gospel. You see, I can know God through his promises in Christ even when the evening sky is overcast!”

What really is impressive is not that we can shoot out into space and up towards the heavens but that the eternal and one true God stoops down in the incarnation of his Son, the Lord Jesus, and in his Word in Scripture (which points to Jesus) and tells us—in essence—what is really wonderful is not that we know God as much as he knows us and loves us.