With all the constellations and nebulae we’ve discussed thus far, there is something invisible in the midst of it that continues to baffle the scientific community.
Throughout The Song of the Universe, we have been looking at what can be seen. We’ve watched stars being scattered like seed across the Carina Nebula, followed the light that led the Magi toward Bethlehem, contemplated Jesus as the Bright and Morning Star, listened for the ancient “music of the spheres,” and traced the Gospel through the constellations.
But all of those beautiful things—stars, planets, galaxies, you and me—appear to make up only a small fraction of what actually exists.
According to our best current cosmological models, the ordinary matter from which stars, planets, trees, oceans, and human bodies are made accounts for only about five percent of the universe. The rest appears to consist of two things we have given rather mysterious names: dark matter and dark energy.
And these names are more revealing of our ignorance than our understanding. “Dark” does not mean evil, sinister, or even necessarily dark in color. It essentially means that whatever these things are, we cannot see them. Instead, we know them primarily through what they appear to be doing.
In other words, much of the universe seems to be shaped by realities that remain invisible to us.
Something Is Holding the Galaxies Together
In the 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied the movements of galaxies in a place called the Coma Cluster and concluded that the visible matter did not appear sufficient to account for what he was observing. Thus, he proposed the presence of unseen matter.
Decades later, astronomer Vera Rubin and her collaborators found another clue while measuring how stars orbit within spiral galaxies. If the visible matter were all that was there, stars far from the center should have been moving considerably slower. Instead, the outer stars were moving surprisingly fast.
Something appeared to be providing additional gravitational influence.
Other observations, including gravitational lensing—the bending of light by mass—have strengthened the case considerably. Dark matter is now part of our standard cosmological model, although we still do not know what it actually is. We infer its presence largely through the gravitational fingerprints it leaves throughout the cosmos.
So, we look at a galaxy and see its brilliant stars spiraling through space, while the visible galaxy appears to be embedded within something much larger that we cannot see. It’s incredibly fascinating.
But then things get even stranger.
While dark matter appears to help pull things together, another invisible mystery appears to be doing the opposite.
Something Is Pushing the Universe Apart
By the twentieth century, astronomers knew that the universe was expanding, and the natural expectation was that gravity should gradually slow that expansion. In the late 1990s, two independent teams studied extremely distant supernovae in an attempt to measure that slowing.
Instead, they discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up.
The discovery transformed modern cosmology and eventually earned three men the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess).
Something appears to be driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, and this is what we have come to call dark energy.
But once again, giving something a name should not be confused with explaining it. Dark energy could come from a number of factors. It could involve the energy of empty space, an unknown field, or some feature of gravity we do not yet understand. Whatever it is, our current estimates attribute roughly two-thirds of the universe to it.
So here is the remarkable picture modern cosmology has handed us: everything we see—all those magnificent stars and galaxies—is only a thin slice of the cosmic pie. The visible universe exists within an overwhelmingly invisible reality.
And for someone who knows the Scriptures, it’s pretty difficult not to feel some resonance here . . .
Filling All Things
The book of Hebrews begins with one of the most extraordinary descriptions of Christ anywhere in the New Testament:
“He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.”
Creation is not something God constructed in the distant past and then left to run on its own. According to this passage, our universe is being upheld every moment by a word of power. Jesus is speaking, sustaining, and releasing something.
There is another intriguing biblical image that appears repeatedly in the Old Testament. Isaiah speaks of God as the One “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain” (Isaiah 40:22). Elsewhere God declares, “I, the LORD, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself” (Isaiah 44:24).
Modern astronomy tells us that the universe is being held together by far more than what we can see, while at the same time it is stretching outward at an accelerating rate. Dark matter and dark energy—two unseen and yet very real factors—appear to participate in these processes, even though we still cannot directly identify what either one actually is.
It’s hard to miss the biblical connection here.
Now, I am not saying that dark energy is the Holy Spirit. There are some apologists out in the wild, wild west of the internet who make bold assertions like that. Again, there could very well be a physical explanation we simply haven’t figured out yet because of the limitations of our current instruments. Nonetheless, the message behind this discovery is remarkable.
We’ve been saying all along that creation is heralding a message—a message confirmed and expounded upon in Scripture. And Scripture itself is always pointing beyond the created sign toward something bigger than itself.
Or, more accurately, toward Someone.
For many people, God exists somewhere vaguely outside the universe, occasionally reaching into it to perform miracles. But the biblical picture is far more intimate. Creation exists at every moment within the sustaining presence and activity of its Creator.
When Paul stood before the philosophers in Athens, he described God as the One who “is not far from each one of us,”adding the remarkable words, “for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28).
The God who fills all things is not simply somewhere beyond the outermost galaxy. Every breath we take, every thought we think, every movement of our bodies takes place within a creation that exists continuously in Him!
Now doesn’t mean that God is the universe. That’s something called pantheism. I prefer an idea closer to what some theologians call panentheism—literally, “all in God.” Creation is creation and the Creator is the Creator; however, that distinction does not require distance. The One who transcends creation is also intimately present to it, sustaining it from moment to moment.
Creation is testifying to this.
But beyond God’s sustaining presence, there is another powerful insight to draw from all of this. To go there, we have to look at an interesting line from one of the Psalms . . .
The Mystery of Christ
“I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old…”
(Psalm 78:2 KJV)
These words open a retelling of the story of Israel—which suggests that there is a deeper message hidden within the stories of Scripture.
This is partly because the word “dark” here does not mean sinister. It simply means something hidden—much like the description given to the invisible matter and energy filling the universe.
The hidden message within the stories of the Old Testament is what Paul calls a mystery in the New Testament. He says this mystery was hidden from previous generations but has now been made known to us (Colossians 1:26).
In this sense, the Gospel is a kind of dark message.
It is a reality that fills all things, yet remains hidden from our eyes. Like dark matter and energy, we see its effects, but it takes faith to trust in the reality itself.
And here is the mystery more fully articulated:
Christ crucified.
But the mystery is not merely a message about something that happened to Jesus.
The mystery is what happened to all of creation.
The One in whom we “live and move and have our being” is the One who died at the cross. Therefore, Paul makes the astonishing claim that “one died for all, therefore all died” (2 Corinthians 5:14).
The cross is not something God did over there, separate from us. Christ died for us, with us, and as us. This is because the One who sustains and fills the universe with His power is the same One who was crucified.
All the cosmic language of Scripture begins to make more sense with this in mind. Elsewhere, we are told that Christ is “before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Yet only a few verses later, we’re told that this same Christ reconciles “all things to Himself” through “the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:17, 20).
The One who holds all things is the One who reconciles all things. Those two statements are in the same paragraph.
Did you catch that?
Whatever happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus, Scripture presents this as something larger than a private religious transaction between God and a few people who believe correctly. The One hanging on the cross is the One through whom the cosmos exists in the first place. His death enters the death of Adam, and His resurrection opens humanity into a new creation.
The church has spent centuries trying to reduce the Gospel to mechanisms we can diagram and transactions we can explain. But the cross and resurrection are stranger, deeper, and more cosmic than our systems have allowed.
And the universe itself is a parable that points to this whole reality!
Like the hidden power at work in the universe, the Gospel is a mystery working beneath the surface of all things. Indeed, it is the hidden song of all creation—the reality that holds it all together in the first place and pushes it forward toward a glorious and expansive destiny.
And this mystery—hidden for ages—has now been revealed.
His name is Christ.
Lord, open our eyes more and more to the wondrous glory of this Mystery.
Amen.
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