Isaiah 40:22 New International Version (NIV) “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.”
Three years ago my wife and I vacationed in Utah. (Put it on your bucket list if you’ve never been!) When visiting Bryce Canyon we stayed in nearby Tropic. A serendipitous discovery led us to hire a professional astronomer to show us the heavens.
We met him late at night in the middle of nowhere in a place billed as one of the darkest in the continental United States. He owned a monstrous telescope that could reach deep into space. To look through the eyepiece we had to climb a stepladder.
He spent the next three hours sharing his knowledge with us–tremendously educational and entertaining! Until you see the skies with a really big telescope, you really haven’t seen them. He showed us all kinds of heavenly bodies–the planets and their moons, star births and deaths, star clusters, other galaxies, and incredible close-ups of the moon.
One fascinating fact is that the universe is expanding rapidly at an incredible rate. Known as the “Big Bang”, it was discovered in 1964 by Drs. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Here’s what Penzias said about it: “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole. The creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far.”
The fact that God stretches out the heavens appears seven times in the Bible. I also find the Isaiah 40:22 verse interesting as it mentions “the circle of the earth”. I maintain that these observations confirm the inspiration supporting the scriptures, as references to stretching the heavens and the circle of the earth predate scientists’ discoveries of these actual facts by thousands of years. It’s readily apparent that the Biblical authors received inside knowledge about the universe that would have been totally unknown to anyone. The more one studies the Bible, the greater realization that it is inspired, genuine, and trustworthy.