a word before we begin

There is a phrase, My Friend, that has become almost a slogan for the whole modern fascination with what lies beyond our sky. The truth is out there, it says, gazing upward with a mixture of longing and dread, quite certain that the great answers, and perhaps the great dangers as well, are somewhere among the stars. And I have borrowed that phrase for the title of this little booklet, and turned one word of it, because I am convinced the world has it precisely backwards. The truth is not out there. The truth came down here, to us, in a manger and on a cross. What is out there, in all the fearful fascination the world pours toward the heavens, is far more often a lie.

This is not finally a booklet about whether there are little green men on some distant world; we will touch that question, and I will tell you honestly where I land, but it was never the point of any of this. This booklet is about something lying underneath the question: the fear and the longing that the whole subject stirs in the human heart, and how the believer, who was made for the God who holds the heavens, has no business whatever being captured by either one. For here is one more arena where the world trembles and obsesses, and where the believer may stand calm and clear-eyed and entirely unafraid, because he already knows who made the heavens and who holds them still.

So look up with me for a little while, not in dread, and not in that restless longing that has gripped so much of mankind, but in the steady peace of people who happen to know the One who flung the stars out in the first place, and holds every last one of them in His hand.

chapter one

looking everywhere but here

We start not with the heavens at all, but with the ground beneath our feet, because the first thing to understand about mankind’s restless reach toward the sky is that it is, at heart, a turning away from the very place God actually gave us. To see that clearly is to understand half of the whole phenomenon at once.

Consider where God set us and what He told us to do. He placed man upon this earth, in a garden, and gave him dominion over it, a stewardship, a charge to tend and keep and cultivate the world beneath his feet. This earth is our assignment, our post, the place He appointed for us, and it is no small or mean place; it is a world of staggering richness and beauty, packed so full of wonders that after all these centuries we are still discovering new ones every year, still unlocking, with the very minds and capacities God gave us, the secrets He folded into His creation. There is more genuine wonder in a single tide pool or a single cell than a man could exhaust in a lifetime. God gave us a feast of a world and the ability to keep marveling at it.

And where does fallen man most want to look? Anywhere but here. Outward, upward, away, to the far reaches of space, to whatever might be out there, to anyplace at all but the place he was actually given. Now ask yourself why that should be, and you will find it is the oldest pattern there is. It is the fallen nature, which wants by sheer reflex the very opposite of whatever God has ordained. God said stay and tend the garden; man’s heart says go, climb, reach past the bounds. For the enemy is the spirit of opposition to everything God says, and the fallen heart has caught that same contrary bent, so that the one place God assigns is the one place the restless heart cannot bear to remain.

The reach to the stars is the old tower in a new shape.

We have seen this before on the plain of Shinar, where men gathered to build a tower whose top would reach unto heaven, to make themselves a name, to climb past the place and the limits God had given them. The reach to the stars is the old tower in a new shape, the same refusal to be content with the post we were given, the same itch to be anywhere and anything but what God appointed. I do not say it is wicked to wonder at the heavens; we shall see there is a holy way to do exactly that. I say only that much of this modern straining outward is the fallen heart doing what it has always done, preferring to look to the ends of the universe rather than be still and faithful in the garden where God has placed it.

fear not

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sources & notes

  1. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), entry “Fear,” on yirah and the “fear of the LORD” as reverent awe rather than cringing dread (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom”); the term ranges from terror to reverence, its covenant sense being awe, worship, and reverent obedience. Cf. the New Testament balance in 2 Timothy 1:7 (“not a spirit of fear”) with the reverence of Hebrews 12:28.
  2. The contrast of two space travelers, one who “saw no God” and one who “saw Him everywhere,” is a widely repeated Christian illustration; it is told here without names because the popular attributions are historically unreliable. The “I did not see God” remark is most securely tied to the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov (Seattle World’s Fair, 1962) and was also put in Yuri Gagarin’s mouth by Soviet propaganda, though Gagarin himself was a professing Orthodox believer; the answering “I saw God everywhere” line is popularly credited to John Glenn but is not well documented as his own words. The illustration’s point stands regardless of attribution: the difference lay in the eyes that looked, not in the sky.
  3. Luke 1:13, 30; Luke 2:10; Matthew 28:5; and Daniel 10:12, 19, on the holy angels’ characteristic greeting “Fear not,” spoken to calm the terror their appearing caused; with 1 John 4:1 and 2 Corinthians 11:14 on testing spirits and the enemy’s capacity to appear as “an angel of light.” The demonic/angelic contrast drawn here (fear versus “fear not”) follows the consistent pattern of these accounts.
  4. The anecdote of Dr. J. Vernon McGee (1904–1988), longtime pastor and teacher of the Thru the Bible radio ministry, declining to visit a California desert site where a “craft” was said to descend, is recounted as the author heard it under his teaching; it is offered as illustrative pastoral wisdom (leaving alone what one cannot understand or master) rather than as a documented report.
  5. Job 1:12 and 2:6, where the adversary may act against Job only so far as God allows and no further, showing Satan operating only within the limits God permits; with John 12:31 (“the prince of this world”), 1 John 4:4, and Colossians 2:15 on his real but bounded power. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Job 1–2, on the leash imagery.
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