God and Gravity

Oct 17, 2019

NOTE: This newsletter has been sitting in my drafts folder for ages, and I just needed to push it out. It’s still pretty good (I hope!). Also, scroll down for tons of tweets!

My 4-year-old daughter asked me this massive question the other day: “What is gravity?”

SIDE NOTE: The best thing to do when a kid asks you a question is to be as thorough as possible. Because one of two things will happen:

They will learn something, and perhaps even find great interest in something.
They will learn not to ask you questions about things if they’re not actually interested, which will lead to more free time for you.

In response to Abby, I said something like gravity is a force in which things are attracted to each other simply because of their size.

Here’s a definition of gravity from “Cool Cosmos,” a NASA education website.

Gravity is a force which tries to pull two objects toward each other. Anything which has mass also has a gravitational pull. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull is. Earth's gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what causes objects to fall.

So we actually all have gravity too because we all have mass. We pull on the earth with our mass. But the earth is so much bigger, and so our gravity has a negligible effect on the earth (duh).

But now let’s think about something with even more mass than the earth: the sun. The sun is gigantic. It would take 1.3 million Earths to fill up the Sun. That’s a lot of Earths. See photo below for that tiny dot of the earth under that solar flare.

Photo credit: universetoday.com

The sun is so massive that it has a massive gravitational pull. And we all know that its gravity is what is keeping our solar system together. All of our planets, dwarf planets (I see you, Pluto!), comets, and asteroids orbit the sun, around and around.

Okay. Hold onto your thoughts about gravity. Because now I want to talk about glory.

Christians hear a lot about giving glory to God. #GGTG

In song:

I see the King of Glory, coming down the clouds with fire — “Hosanna,” Hillsong
All glory, honor, power, is yours, Amen — “Cannons,” Phil Wickham
Glory to the risen king, Glory to the Son, Glorious Son — “Glory,” Hillsong

In verses:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” — Psalm 19:1
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” — 1 Corinthians 10:31

But what does “glory” mean?

To us, the word glory generally connotes great beauty or light. It is also connected to success or honor. Kabod is the Hebrew word for glory, and the definition kabod is closer to the words “weight” and “heaviness.”

So to give God glory means to give him weight? Yes. What does that mean?

This makes more sense if you think of Biblical glory more in terms of honoring someone as we do in many Confusion-inspired Asian cultures. When we honor someone, perhaps by bowing correctly or using the proper honorific, we are showing that they have a special value. They are worthy of our respect because of their title, age, or family position.

You can also make the connection by linking the “weight” of a precious object to it’s worth. Ligonier Ministries describes that here:

Things of value are often measured by their weight, for example, precious gemstones such as diamonds. Scripture often speaks of the weight of precious metals when it is talking about prices or trying to measure generosity and wealth (Gen. 23:16; 24:22). So, glory and worth are correlative concepts. God has a glory that surpasses the glory of anything else in existence because He is of infinite value and worth.

So when we give glory to God, we are giving him worth or a value. Or we can put it the other way around. When we recognize, praise, and teach about the greatness of God, we are giving him glory.

When we sacrifice our time and money for him, we are saying that God is worth it. When we spend time with him and seek to learn more about him, we are saying that God is more valuable than the things of the world. When we worship him and invite others to do the same, we are saying he is so transformational. And in all of these things, we are giving God the glory.

Now let’s put these two ideas together.

When I think of glory and the weight, I think of the massiveness of God. He is huge, immense, infinite. And the biggest thing I can sort of comprehend that I interact with is the sun.

The fascinating thing about the sun’s gravity is that it simply exists. Simply by fact of its mass, the sun has massive gravitational pull that holds the solar system together and creates a nice, tidy orbit for our little planet to have light and radiation to sustain life.

And yet the mass of our sun still doesn’t come close to how BIG God is (Our God is so big! So strong and so mighty! There’s nothing our God cannot do!). Our large-seeming solar system is part of a galaxy that has bazillions of stars, and there are a bazillion galaxies (seriously, astronomers think there are at least 100 billion galaxies). And God created all of them. He is bigger than all of it.

Because of his mass, we are all orbiting him whether we realize it or not. He is the center, and we cycle around and around.

We little Earthlings barely notice our planet orbiting around the sun once every 365.4 days. We definitely don’t feel our sun orbiting around the center of Milky Way Galaxy. (The Milky Way Galaxy actually also has its own orbit tied to the orbit of the Andromeda Galaxy or something that I don’t quite understand.)

How easy is it for us to not see that God has intricately paved our paths and our ways? And yet how much is he spinning and weaving us around him so that we might see a glimpse of who he is? That we might recognize his glory and then give him that glory he deserves?

Are we orbiting him? Are we falling into him? Or are we trying to pull or wrench ourselves away into black holes and the nothingness of space-time. Are we trying to make things orbit us, saying we are the most important things in the universe?

OH MY GOSH this analogy is starting to go too long and/or fall apart.

So let’s end it here.

God is heavy. God is weighty. He deserves all of the gravity that his mass is due. Let us give him the glory.

Now for some tweets!

Ancient math: