I love Doctor Who’s passion for humanity. In an episode I recently watched, the Doctor loved the fact that humans had landed on a planet orbiting a black hole just to see what it was like.
While humanity didn’t land on a planet orbiting a black hole, late last night we landed a robot on Mars.
Curiosity is a rover, part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission to the red planet. The mission was launched on November 26, 2011, while some of us were recovering from too much turkey and too much Black Friday shopping. After just over eight months of flying through space, Curiosity successfully landed on Mars and began transmitting data, including the first pictures that you can see above.
I am blown away by what humans are capable of. I know that I had nothing to do with the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Other than going up, I wouldn’t even know where to begin when sending something to Mars. Even though almost none of us had anything to do with landing Curiosity on Mars, we can all marvel at the human spirit which fueled the project as much as the rockets.
The human spirit breathed into us by our creator.
It’s that breath of God that separates us from every other animal on the planet. Dogs show loyalty. Elephants show maternal instincts. Dolphins have sex for pleasure. But it’s the breath of God that gives us our soul, our desire to create and our drive to explore. Being created in the image of God allows us to move beyond our animal instincts and do something truly amazing.
In an ideal world, the amazing things we do: building skyscrapers, sculpting statues and landing robots on Mars would all be done for God’s glory. Rocks glorify God by lying there. Whales glorify God by leaping out of the ocean. Humans glorify God by putting their intellect and ingenuity to work. Unlike whales and rocks, though, humans can claim the glory for themselves and forget the one who gave them their intellect and ingenuity to begin with.
Even if not everyone glorifies God because humans successfully landed a robot 154 million miles away, some of us still can. We can marvel at the feats of humanity and glorify God because of them. So every time we see new pictures from the surface of Mars over the next few days, we can praise God because we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
What feats of humanity push you to praise and glorify God?
Love this post Scott, we should glorify God with all that we have and do. I will have a new perspective as I watch all the reports on the Red Planet.