Carl Sagan. Astronomer.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
And yet , that help did indeed come. And hints, even promises, there were in abundance.
Into the world where Satan claimed dominion God permitted His Son to come, a helpless babe, subject to the weakness of humanity. He permitted Him to meet life’s peril in common with every human soul, to fight the battle as every child of humanity must fight it, at the risk of failure and eternal loss.
The word gospel means ‘good news’. The good news is that God is good. Very good. And He loves you. With a passion. And nothing you can do or say will ever change that. That’s the good news to a world that believes God to be an overbearing tyrannical control freak. A world that has been informed by a church that God is angry, looking for any excuse to punish, and is only held back from destroying everyone by the love and intercession of Jesus. But God was in Christ redeeming the world to Himself. That’s good news. That’s the gospel.
We aren’t alone. We have not been abandoned. The planet and it’s inhabitants is not in danger of becoming extinct, our Creator had not wandered off into the vast universe to tend to other business. This planet is His business. We are His business. Christmas and the birth of our Saviour was but one step in the grand plan of redemption. God is not finished with us yet, and He is not going to allow mankind to destroy itself before the job is done. We need have no fear of tomorrow. Tiny, seemingly insignificant in comparison to the universe, yet the Son of the Almighty God thought we were worth dying for. That is the value of our existence. The price God was willing to pay for our redemption, and the risk He took in sending His only begotten Son to become a helpless baby in a backwater town in a small nation controlled by a foreign power.
The story of Bethlehem is an exhaustless theme. In it is hidden “the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” Romans 11:33. We marvel at the Saviour’s sacrifice in exchanging the throne of heaven for the manger, and the companionship of adoring angels for the beasts of the stall. Human pride and self-sufficiency stand rebuked in His presence. Yet this was but the beginning of His wonderful condescension. It would have been an almost infinite humiliation for the Son of God to take man’s nature, even when Adam stood in his innocence in Eden. But Jesus accepted humanity when the race had been weakened by four thousand years of sin. Like every child of Adam He accepted the results of the working of the great law of heredity. What these results were is shown in the history of His earthly ancestors. He came with such a heredity to share our sorrows and temptations, and to give us the example of a sinless life. DA 48.6
We are not alone. A pale Blue Dot we may be. But we are loved. Unconditionally loved.
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