What’s that glow in the middle of the universe?

By Elizabeth Prata

In my earliest days of my walk with Jesus, I tried to witness to a close friend. She rejected Jesus as God, the notion of personal sin, and God’s creation work because, she said, Genesis shows that God made light before He made the sun, and that’s just illogical. You can’t have light without the sun, she asserted.

I didn’t have an answer to that, except that if God could make the sun He certainly could make light too, and in whatever sequence He wanted.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:1-5).

Genesis 1:1 has been said to be the most important verse in the Bible. ‘In the beginning, God…’ One believes what God said or one does not believe it. As John MacArthur said once, if you disbelieve that God said He created the world, when does your belief kick in? Genesis 3? Genesis 50? Matthew 1? Never?

I read the following headline this week, it intrigued me since I love God’s creation work and Genesis 1 is one of my favorite books of the Bible. Here is the beginning of the article, from Christian Post-

NASA discovers unexplained light; finding an answer in Genesis

“About a month before the great December conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, NASA researchers announced a separate, unexpected discovery: evidence of light in deep space without an explainable source. After studying photographs taken by the New Horizons space probe, which is now 4 billion miles away but still beaming footage to Earth, NASA came across an unexplained “glow.” It was in areas particularly distant from the known sources of light, such as stars and galaxies, and from sources of reflected light, such as dust particles. In fact, one astronomer told NPR that the amount of unexplained light was about equal to the light coming from sources they could identify.”

“The NPR article described the “problem” this creates for scientists: “… for 400 years, astronomers have been studying visible light and the sky in a serious way and yet somehow apparently ‘missed half the light in the universe.'” The choice astronomers face is either to double-down on the known explanations for light or be open to new ones.”— end excerpt.

Here is an excerpt from the mentioned NPR article. From NPR:

“In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, “or some other source of light that we don’t yet know what it is.”

That’s so interesting! Anyway, my exhortation to you, dear reader, is to decide what you believe and why. The time is upon us to drill down to the basics, know what we know, and be ready to make an answer to those who ask us the reason for the hope that is in us. (1 Peter 3:15). It begins with Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God…”

Further Resources

Answers In Genesis: Creation

Creation: Believe it or Not, part 1, sermon series by John MacArthur

Christianity for Skeptics, book by Steve Kumar from Ligonier.