Holy Smoke

Holy Smoke

Strong and Courageous blog

Sept 8,2017

With our atmosphere recently inundated with smoke from all of the wildfires around the state, it has created an environment of melancholy that seems difficult to shake off. They sky has lost its transparency and both the Sun and Moon have an eerie glow of red. An apocalypse in the making? ...Nah!

Even though times are certainly troubling, that is not the direction that I would like to go in this post. I want to talk about our atmosphere. It is interesting to me that we are so used to having a clear transparent sky, so much so that we are uncomfortable when we have an extended time of smoke inundating us.

So why is our atmosphere ordinarily so transparent? It certainly did not have to be created that way. It could have well been created with an opacity similar to our current smoky environment, or even worse. Granted we often do have quite a bit of cloud cover for our water cycle which is necessary to sustain life. But when our sky is clear, it allows us to see great distances into the heavens. It is almost as if God intentionally made our atmosphere very conducive for us to discover the majesty of the Universe that He has created.

Even the shape of our Milky Way galaxy is created for our discovery process to be probed. The shape of our galaxy is relatively flat, shaped like a Frisbee. (Sorry all of you disc golfers that revile the word Frisbee.) Our flat galaxy allows us to view far beyond the confines of one galaxy and out into the vast expanses of billions of Galaxies. If our galaxy was spherical in shape, only the Solar systems on the outer edge would be able to see large portions of the universe.

So the smoky conditions we are seeing may not be necessarily holy, however it does make us desire to see clear skies again. It also helps not to take for granted the transparency present in our atmosphere.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. ... Ps. 19:1

Links:

A very interesting video revealing how God has purposely created our atmosphere with our discovery in mind.