COSMIC DEATH
The Bible in Genesis chapter 3 describes how all kinds of death and decay began. The account says that man chose to disobey God. In particular, Adam and Eve chose to disobey God's order not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As a result they sinned. And because of their sin, the ground was cursed. Genesis 3:17 describes how God cursed the ground, and then Romans 8:22 states that the curse extends to the entire universe. Romans 8:22 claims that the entire creation is groaning under the curse of sin. Clearly the sin of Adam and Eve had very severe, wide-ranging consequences.
In fact the consequences of catastrophe and disaster in space are very evident. The moon, for example, is pockmarked with millions of craters made by millions of meteor impacts. Nor have other planets been immune to catastrophe and disaster. The planet Mars is riddled with what seem to be dry water channels -- dry riverbeds. Once they were full of liquid water. What happened to the apparently once large water supplies on Mars? Mars is now drier than any desert on earth, and no one knows exactly what happened to Mars to cause it to loose what once were great reservoirs of liquid water. All we can say for sure is that Mars has evidently been the victim of great degradation, great disaster, and great destruction of some sort.
If we look elsewhere in the solar system, we see other remnants of decay and death. The rings of Saturn are one such remnant. The rings of Saturn, as beautiful as they are, seem nevertheless to have resulted from the explosion of one or more moons around Saturn.
As attractive as the products of destruction sometimes appear, the fact remains that the solar system is not in the original form as it was created by God. It has been degraded by sin. Such degradation and disaster might explain another phenomenon -- could it be that the ancient fear of comets, meteorites, and other types of cosmic debris originated with ancient catastrophes, which involved the formation of fragmentary debris spewing out through the solar system, possibly causing much destruction and death even on earth?
As we continue to probe the solar system, we see other objects like Halley's comet. Halley's comet, as beautiful as it is, seems like meteors to be a fragment resulting from cosmic explosion. No one knows exactly when such explosions occurred, but we can say that this kind of destruction happened after the curse on the ground. We know this because the Scripture teaches that the creation was totally good before man sinned, with no instabilities such as explosions.
As we continue our survey of catastrophe and disaster in the cosmos, we consider objects in the Milky Way Galaxy, but outside the solar system, like the Crab nebula. The Crab nebula is a cloud of gas and dust that formed when a star exploded. This stellar explosion was witnessed by the Chinese people about a thousand years ago, and today the cloud is still expanding outward from the center of the explosion.
Now think about the implications of this kind of explosive and destructive activity. The Bible claims in Genesis 1:14-18 that God on the fourth day of the Creation Week made certain heavenly objects: the sun, the moon, and the stars. The sun and the moon were made to be lights. The sun was to give light by day, and the moon was to give light by night. The stars were made to be time-tellers, as were also the sun and the moon. They were to mark the passage of time -- seasons, days and years. To fulfill these purposes, the sun, the moon, and the stars must have been visible to the very first men, Adam and his descendants. Yet stellar explosions cause a star to become dysfunctional. They destroy the star. The star can no longer fulfill its purposes.
It is appropriate here to think about the comparison between the physical destruction that we have seen is due to the curse of sin, and spiritual destruction. Sin always has bad consequences. The results of sin are often very far reaching, and to our minds sin seems to thwart the purposes of God, just as in the physical realm the purposes of God seem to be thwarted in stellar explosions. Sin warps God's creation physically and spiritually.