Creation Spotlight
The Lesser Light to Rule the Night
How the Universe came to be is a subject that evolutionists wax
eloquent on. Their stories of the past are quite imaginative as they
seek to seduce people into their religion of evolutionism. The problem
for them is that the facts contradict their imagination. Christians
need to know the evidence that God has given us in His Creation about
His Creation.
The Bible gives us but a brief description of God’s creative actions in
the six days of Creation. His creation of the moon happened on the
fourth day and the account uses only eight words to describe it. Yet
the books written on the importance of the moon to the earth would
literally fill a bookcase.
One obvious value of the moon to the earth is mentioned in Genesis, to
be the lesser light at night. But that is only the smallest part of its
value in making the earth a good place to live for people and animals.
The moon is 1/6 the diameter of the earth, the largest satellite
relative to the planet it orbits in the Solar System. Its relatively
large size is important for the two crucial roles it plays for the
earth, creating tides and stabilizing the earth’s orbit.
Tides are created by the moon’s gravity lifting the ocean an average of
3 feet. This lifting of the water on one side of the earth causes the
water on the other side of the earth to be lowered, causing daily high
and low tides. Why the tides are important to us is simple, the tides
keep the oceans clean. Without cleaning the oceans die, if the oceans
die, we die.
God’s creative design is apparent in His placing the moon at just the
right distance to produce the right tides. If the moon were too close
to the earth the tides would be destructive to the coastal areas. Too
far away, the tides would be inadequate to do a proper cleaning of the
oceans.
The second great benefit of the moon is to stabilize the orbit of the
earth. Without a moon of the size we have, the earth’s rotation would
wobble and the season’s would become unpredictable.
One of the reasons the objects in space were created were to be signs
for the seasons. The moon is not only a sign for the seasons; it helps
to make those seasons predictable and livable.
For evolutionists the very existence of the moon is a headache. They
have invented a number of stories about how the moon came to be. One is
that a piece of the earth broke off and became the moon, but the moon
is moving away from the earth at the rate of 2 inches per year. The
moon is 240,000 miles from the earth; even at the current 2-inch
recession rate per year it is much too close to the earth for it to fit
within the evolutionists imagined age of 4.6 billion years for the
Solar System.
So they invented another story that 2 or more asteroids collided in the
vicinity of the earth at just the right speed and began orbiting the
earth. But any collision powerful enough to create a moon would be too
powerful to allow it to achieve a stable earth orbit.
None of the imagined stories of the evolutionists fit the reality of
the moon. What the facts of the moon do fit perfectly is the
description given us in Genesis.
And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Genesis 1:18-19
