Ultima Thule and Ultimate Value
February 27, 2019
Since the invention of the remote control, we no longer have to get up to change channels. (Kids, ask your parents!) Remember the old lady who was on the television commercials selling ‘the Clapper’? She showed us that we don’t have to get up to turn off the lights. The Roomba means a robot can vacuum our own floors for us. Pizza delivery means dinner dropped off at our door. We love convenience and at times can be averse to any form of motion or labor. But interestingly, scientists recently sent the New Horizons spacecraft on a flyby of an object called Ultima Thule, some 4.1 billion miles from earth. It took 13 years for New Horizons to reach Ultima Thule from earth traveling at 36,400 mph at a cost of approximately $700 million. If you’ve seen the pictures, Ultima Thule looks like a snowman. It’s about 19 miles long and 12 miles across. We are often too lazy to get up to go to the kitchen to get a snack, but to explore something new, even if it’s just a big rock, we’ll go to the end of our solar system.
What is it about space that is so compelling that we will expend this kind of money and effort to see pictures of a giant rock? I think it’s the longing of the human heart and mind to know that there is something else out there, that we are not alone, that somehow we are joined to something else in this unfathomably vast universe. I also think that the human heart was made for adventure. We were made to explore. Magellan, Columbus, Cortes, Ponce de Leon, Pizarro, Lewis & Clark and many others gave their lives to exploration. We are always trying to fill our longing for something beyond ourselves with finding something new, either in our own world, or beyond it. We can be like the Greeks in ancient Athens, who ‘spent their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new’ (Acts 17:21).
Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensees: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” That quote has been paraphrased by others to say that our hearts have a ‘God-shaped hole’ in them that only God can fill.
I love space exploration. I am fascinated by a snowman shaped rock 4.1 billion miles away. If it were on earth, most people wouldn’t look at it twice, but put it 4.1 billion miles away, and now it’s a novelty, and we are captivated. But if we think that we will find any ultimate satisfaction in anything found in our own solar system or beyond it, we will be disappointed. Reaching Ultima Thule only makes astronomers ask, What’s next? There is another recently discovered body in our solar system called ‘Farout’, which lies 120 Astronomical Units, or AU, from the sun. (One AU is 93 million miles, the distance from the earth to the sun.) By comparison, Ultima Thule is about 40 AU from earth. What if we ever reach Farout? Well, just last week, a new body called Farfarout was discovered, which is 140 AU from earth. What if we reach Farfarout? Will we ever be satisfied?
We won’t because the quest for anything other than God will only leave us with a hunger for more. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says ‘God has set eternity in our hearts.’ In fact, the whole book of Ecclesiastes is Solomon’s testimony about how he tried to gain satisfaction in everything under the sun; food, women, knowledge, pleasure, building projects, labor, and it was all vanity. There was no ultimate value in any of it. Nothing satisfied him other than God. That’s because nothing of ultimate value is found apart from God. Jesus is the only One who can ultimately satisfy. He helps us through life and He brings us safely to heaven when our lives are over. If you have a hole in your heart that you can’t seem to fill, that’s because the hole in your heart is God shaped. No amount of food, drink, money, pleasure, sex, travel, or anything else will ever fill it. Only God can fill it with His Son Jesus.
