Found and Lost

 

In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei saw something curious through the telescope he made – four stars traveling around Jupiter. Stars in the sky are not novel, but stars traveling in the opposite direction as the others were intriguing. Galileo realized they were not stars but moons, and they rotated around Jupiter with such precise regularity, you could set your clock by them. Before cell phones worked their magic, you had to set your clock by some standard, something fixed. Imagine (or remember) a world where it took a lot of work to set your watch if you lost time. Jupiter's moons were that reliable, and the regularity of the moons was so precise you could calculate longitude by them. 

In the 1600s, there was no reliable way to find longitude. Latitude was no problem, but you need a standard to go by with longitude, something fixed (Longitude lines get smaller as you move toward the poles and are not the same distance apart as the parallel). If you are in the middle of the ocean, how are you going to be able to find your bearing? At the time, the only conceivable way to calculate longitude at sea was to know the exact time in a fixed location, compare it by the time on the ship, make some calculations of the time difference to find your bearing. But the problem was timepieces in the 1600s were large and couldn't keep time at sea because of temperature and atmospheric pressure changes. Besides, if a clock lost a few minutes every day, you'd be hundreds of miles off course by the time you crossed the ocean. And, there was no reliable way at the time to look through a telescope with the regularity needed to keep on track. Plus, sometimes it's cloudy. 

Galileo made a fantastic discovery. We learned about the universe, found moons we didn't know existed, and we saw the faithfulness of God in keeping in motion distant moons on uninhabited planets hidden far from the eyes of man 365 million miles away. Psalms 8:3-4, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" We have studied and learned much about the world we live in, yet so much is undiscovered and scarcely understood. It wasn't until the 1700s when John Harrison built a clock that could keep time at sea, that we could know where we were or how big our world was. With all of our technological advances, we can know our location in the world with GPS because we can shoot satellites into space. We can see off into the distant stars and keep time in perfect sync. We found something fixed in the wonders of God's creation through technological advances and forgotten the God who created all and holds all things in motion. We found our bearings of location and time but are lost without Christ.