Welcome to JimSwanson.com - a site dedicated to sharing insights from my personal Bible studies and quotes I like.
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Your world view has everything to do with how you view life. Those who view the world as our master will surely view environmental issues differently from those who accept the fact that God made the world for us. Read on for an example of this clash.
Our sun is a wonderful gift from God!
It is big. The diameter is 870,000 miles, about 109 times larger than earth. This means if it were hollow, it could hold over a million earths!
It’s a good distance away. The sun is 93 million miles away. This means its light takes 8 minutes to reach us. Light takes 7 hours to reach Pluto which is 400 below zero!
It is heavy! The sun, though made up of gases, weighs 2,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 tons.
It is hot! Though on the surface it is only 10,000 degrees F, inside it is 3 million degrees.
The sun sustains life. The Sun heats the land, oceans, and air. It evaporates water from lakes and oceans. This water eventually falls as rain or snow. It provides energy for plants to produce oxygen for us in their green leaves.
The sun is wearing out! Every second, the sun converts 600 million tons of hydrogen to 596 million tons of helium. The other 4 million tons is given off as energy to keep us alive. At this rate, the sun will wear out in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! Of course, it will probably complete its purpose and vanish before this. (Rev. 21:23)
If the sun were hotter it would destroy life on earth. If the sun were colder, all life would freeze. It is just the right size, right distance away, and right temperature to sustain life on earth. That sounds like design, doesn’t it?
God made the sun to “rule the day,” and for signs, seasons, days, and years. (Gen. 1:14-16) A recent news article had this title: Human greed takes lion’s share of solar energy. The first sentence read, “Humans are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the sun’s energy captured by plants - the most of any species.” This reduces energy available to other species by 10%, it said. The concluding sentence read, “"Here we are, just one species on the earth, and we’re grabbing a quarter of the renewable resources … we’re probably being a bit greedy.” Do you feel greedy? I don’t either. God gave us humans richly all things to enjoy, and that includes the sun.
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