A journey with me through God’s infinite glory.
Before the first moment
Nothing here is empty the way a room is empty. There is no room. No space to be empty and no clock to be empty for. Everything that will ever exist is about to — and there is not yet any such thing as “about to.”
Time begins here, not in it. Asking what came before is like asking what lies north of the North Pole.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Genesis 1:2
380,000 years
For 380,000 years everything is a fog so dense that light cannot cross it — every photon scattered before it travels the width of a hand. Then it cools, the electrons are captured, and space turns transparent in a single moment. That first light is still arriving.
We call it the cosmic microwave background. It is measurably still here — a faint hiss reaching every point in space, including this one.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Genesis 1:3
380,000 – 180 million years
Light can finally travel, and there is nothing yet to emit it. A hundred million years of clear, cold, unlit space — and through all of it gravity is quietly gathering matter along those first ripples, assembling everything that is about to shine.
No telescope has ever seen this era directly. It is the last great unobserved stretch of cosmic history.
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places.
Isaiah 45:3
180 – 400 million years
The first stars burn hundreds of times brighter than the sun and die in a few million years. Every atom heavier than helium is forged inside them: the carbon in your hands, the oxygen in your breath, the iron in your blood. They had to die for you to be possible.
Population III stars reached perhaps a thousand solar masses — and not one has ever been directly observed.
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
Job 38:7
1 – 10 billion years
Matter falls along the filaments it was seeded on. Two trillion galaxies gather into threads and sheets around voids hundreds of millions of light-years wide. From far enough away the largest structure in existence looks grown rather than scattered.
Laniakea, the supercluster we live in, is 520 million light-years across and holds around 100,000 galaxies.
He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.
Psalm 147:4
13.8 billion years
Nine billion years in, one unremarkable star ignites in one arm of one galaxy among two trillion. The observable universe is now 93 billion light-years across. And on a small world circling that ordinary star, some part of it woke up and began to look back.
93 billion light-years wide, at 13.8 billion years old — space itself kept expanding while the light was still in transit.
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?
Psalm 8:3–4