The Tip of the Iceberg
Ron Walters
It was only the tip of the iceberg. The very tip. Little could the Psalmist have known, after lulling the sheep to sleep, the extent of the astronomical wonder that he would witness as the stars, right on schedule, took their assigned seats. Soon, with just his 20/20's as sponges, he would soak up the grandeur of a star-drenched heaven. For David, it never got old. "The heavens declare the Glory of God...Great is the Lord. His power is awesome. He counts the stars and calls them all by name." Oh, David, how right you were. But what you didn't know was how many stars that meant, and how many names that required.
Now, fast forward 3,000 years: With a dream conceived in the 1940's, designed and built in the 70's and 80's, and operational in the 90's, we're only now beginning to see the extent of the power and number David spoke of. The Hubble Space Telescope, the most elaborate, powerful, and expensive looking glass in the world, is literally out of this world. The telescope is in orbit 373 miles above the earth, deployed by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery. From its non-polluted vantage point, it sees where no human eyes have gone before. It shows the sights the Psalmist spoke of, but could never see. Here are a few of Hubble's discoveries:
Found;A new Black Hole engaged in a feeding frenzy. This stellar phenomenon with its extreme gravitational pull, possibly caused by a massive collapsed star, literally prevents light from escaping its region. The gravity is so strong it has pulled more than one billion stars into its dark belly, an area no larger than our solar system.
Found;A new kind of star called Magnetar. This extremely heavy and dense object is no bigger than a large city but weighs more than the sun. Its condensed, yet enormous magnetic pull is a billion times stronger than the earth's, and could suck coins out of your pocket from 100,000 miles away.
Found;New Quasars. These nomadic mixtures of rocks, dust and gasses are speeding unpredictably through space, and pour out 1,000 times as much light as an entire galaxy containing a hundred billion stars. One searchlight-like Quasar stretches nearly three-quarters of the way across the Hubble-known universe.
Found;Spectacular blue, green and red gasses of the Ring Nebula. These colorful remains from an exploded star have a diameter of 6 trillion miles across. The formation of the debris suggests the star was spinning so fast that it actually flattened out prior to blowing up. Rules of physics, however, say that's impossible. But, I wonder...
Found;A Gamma-Ray Burst. While scientists aren't certain what produces these mysterious explosions in the far reaches of the universe, a January, 1999, burst had the power of 10 million, billion suns. And for one-second it turned the universal night sky into daylight.
Found;A Solar Quake. A tremor in August, 1998, rocked the Sun with a jolt 40,000 times bigger than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The energy, if harnessed, could have powered the United States for the next 20 years at our current rate of usage.
No wonder our Psalmist, and amateur astronomer, said, "When I consider the heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have ordained...Great are the works of the Lord...He has made the heavens with skill...And all the peoples have seen His Glory." Good work, David. You only saw the tip of the iceberg, but you got the whole picture.
The astronomers are no better off than David. Even with all their advanced technologies of Hubble, they've conceded, "It will take 900,000 years, using the looking-through-a-straw-approach, to survey the entire sky." For now, science can give us only the tip of the iceberg.
It's not unlike our work, is it? Sunday in, Sunday out, our teaching shows only the tip of the iceberg, too. Eternity through a straw. Heaven through a keyhole. We speak of immortality from a mortal's viewpoint. We tell all that we know about an omniscient God. With all our might we speak of omnipotence. We faithfully gaze through our telescope, the Bible, but His Truth cannot be exhausted. What we see is good, real good, but it's only the beginning. Someday we'll see face-to-face, but now we see only in part. Someday we'll know more, and what a day that will be.
Our teaching may only be the tip of the iceberg, but it's an iceberg worth showing. Point to it with pride.
Blessings,
Ron Walters
Vice President of Church Relations
P.S. If you're looking for great preaching tools, don't forget Preaching Magazine. It's my favorite. Check it out at Preaching.com. Do your congregation a favor by subscribing.
Copyright 2007 by Ron Walters | | | | 
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 Since the beginning of time, man has thought he was smart enough to know everything about this world. Whether it was the shape of the earth or how computers would affect our lives, man always develops a theory. We just seem to be consistently wrong.
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