Pearl of Great Price Introductory Note; Moses 1

(January 1, 2014)
This is a fascinating chapter to read, especially when I am so interested in astronomy.  I think of the billions of stars that make up galaxies, and the galaxies that form clusters and groups, and the groups of galaxies that form superclusters, and the filaments along which countless superclusters flow like the veils in a bloodstream.  I am so far beyond amazed at the scope and size of the universe that we live in that it is impossible to conceive of in its majesty.

Like Moses wisely noticed, the scope and scale of the universe should fully teach us one thing – for this cause, we know that man is nothing.  Nothing temporal will stand against the inevitable.  We cannot build technology sufficient to escape the intersection of the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies some billions of years from now.  But though man is nothing, children of God are something – something precious and immortal.  It is only by clinging to that immortal part of ourselves that anything else that we do matters.

As God says, this Earth will pass away and another will come, only to be replaced by another.  Worlds without end.  Innumerable to man, but not to God.  With our best technology and a million years, we could not guess the number of Earths with life in all the billions of galaxies, with billions of stars (even the idea of multiplying a billion galaxies times a billion stars gets beyond human comprehension – much less the hundreds of billions in each).  But God knows them, and he knows each and every child on each and every Earth – including you and I.  This seems impossible, but something inside us shows us that it is true.  Man is nothing, but God makes him something because to hold the attention of God is to become immortal.