During Advent, we focus on the story of Jesus, but there is more to the story than just wise men and a baby. In fact, we have to go all the way back to the beginning to see the big picture of what God has done for us. We have to go back to the beginning of everything.

If you open up your Bible, the first book is called Genesis, which is called that because it’s about origins. 3500 years ago, Moses wrote the first words in the first book of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1 NIV).

Notice that Moses said, “In the beginning.” Before we discovered the laws of physics or chemistry, before astronomy was understood, Moses made an incredible claim: the universe had a beginning. Once upon a time, there was a beginning to time. There was a beginning to space and matter. There was a beginning to nature. There was a beginning to the universe.

Here is the important follow-up to that: if the universe has a beginning, it has a cause. If time has a beginning, it has a cause. Time cannot give birth to time. It doesn’t work that way. If nature has a beginning, it has a cause; the cause of nature cannot be natural, so it must be something outside of nature – it must be a supernatural cause.

From the time of Aristotle to the early 1920s, the most prominent scientific minds on the planet believed that the universe was eternal and infinite. It had always existed. This is what we call the Static Universe Theory. They believed that there never was a time when time didn’t exist.

Albert Einstein decided that there was a scientific problem with that when he began to formulate his law of relativity. That law said that once upon a time, there was a beginning to time, space, and matter. Once upon a time, there was a mathematical nothing, a zero on the timeline of the universe. Einstein didn’t like the implications of that, but when he looked through the Hubble Telescope in the mid 1920s, he saw the evidence of it in something called the Red Shift.

All of science began to reevaluate itself. In 1965, scientists discovered cosmic background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang. When we were actually able to capture pictures of this cosmic background radiation in the 1980s, NASA project manager George Smoot saw the pictures and said, “We’re seeing the fingerprints of God, because now we know that the universe had a beginning.”

It took us 3500 years to catch back up to what Moses knew: that God made the heavens and the earth. That belief is what set the Hebrews apart from other religions of the time. Others worshipped creation itself, but the Hebrew people worshipped the one Creator of it all.

We see that in something King David said in Psalm 19, written 1500 years after Moses wrote Genesis 1:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” One of the most famous scientists in history, Sir Isaac Newton, agreed, saying “God has written the universe in the language of mathematics.” If it’s been a long time since you’ve experienced God, or if you’ve never felt like you’ve experienced God, contemplate nature. Contemplate biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Think of the size of the universe and the objects in it. The sun is the closest star to Earth, and it’s 93 million miles away. If you got in a jet plane and traveled an average speed of 500 miles an hour, it would take you three weeks to get to the moon and 21 years to get to the Sun. There’s a star called 61 Cygni that is so far away that even if you could travel 93,000 miles per hour, it would still take you 78 years to get there. Our sun is so massive that you could fit a million Earths inside it. If Earth was the size of a football, the Sun would be the size of a seven-story building; if the Sun was the size of a seven-story building, the largest star in the universe would be four times the size of Mount Everest. Andromeda, the next nearest galaxy to us is 2.5 million light-years from us. That's 15 quintillion miles. The observable universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter. Every time we look through a telescope, we're learning how big God is.

King David said, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4 NIV). David didn’t have access to the knowledge that we do today, but he understood the bigger picture. God is bigger than what’s behind us, and God is bigger than whatever may be in front of us. God is bigger than anything we will ever face on this little bitty Earth of ours. God is greater than your greatest fear. He is greater than your greatest disappointment. He is greater than your greatest heartbreak. He is greater than your greatest doubt. Whatever it is, God is greater.

This season, be reminded that the God who is powerful enough to create the whole universe also created you and cares about you.