The Heavens Declare

For thousands of years, human beings have looked into the night skies and marveled at the stars. In Scripture, we read of King David wondering at them, saying, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). The stars can inspire our awe—it seems that the more we discover about the heavens God created, the more we see how little we really know.

And we want to know more. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021, is the most powerful space telescope ever deployed. But as remarkable as its technology may be, even more remarkable are the fascinating new images it is giving us, presenting new data that deepens—and even upends—some long-held assumptions about our universe.

For most of human history, mankind searched the stars with the naked eye. Only as recently as the early 1600s were the first telescopes made, thanks to the development of glass lenses and a growing understanding of optics, allowing Galileo to discover four of Jupiter’s moons and refute the theory that all heavenly objects orbit planet Earth. But Galileo had to observe through the obstruction of Earth’s atmosphere—nearly 400 more years would pass before the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), orbiting more than 330 miles above planet Earth, would deliver high-resolution images in the visible light spectrum, unobscured by Earth’s atmosphere.

Sadly, soon after it was launched in 1990, astronomers discovered that the HST’s primary mirror had been ground unevenly—an aberration of just one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair was enough to blur and distort the images it collected. NASA had to launch several Space Shuttle missions between 1993 and 2009 to repair the mirror and to replace damaged and failing HST components. The HST performed mightily, but astronomers wanted something better.

A Groundbreaking Telescope

Unlike the HST, the JWST orbits not the Earth, but rather a location called the L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles away from Earth—where, by circling that point, it can orbit the Sun while remaining aligned with Earth. With a diameter of 21 feet, the JWST has a light-collecting area of roughly 270 square feet, about six times the size of the HST’s. It can detect objects 100 times fainter than the HST can detect. While the HST can see objects going back to around 400 million years after the beginning of the universe, the JWST can see back to around 220 million years earlier. Yet although the JWST is much larger, its weight is about half that of the HST.

The JWST’s design includes a sunshield that separates the craft into a Sun-facing warm side with systems that control its power, positioning, communication, and data processing, and a cold side containing its telescope, its cameras, and the electronics that support the craft. Thanks to its sunshield, the telescope gathers data at a temperature below -370°F (-223°C) while the solar panels on its Sun-facing side reach temperatures above 180°F (82°C). Its antenna is always pointing toward the Earth to send the data processed on board the telescope. Computer programmers may be amused to learn that this multi-billion-dollar craft runs on JavaScript software. The JWST computer has 68 gigabytes of solid-state-disk (SSD) memory for short-term storage of the images and data collected by the telescope before it sends that data to Earth. Despite its distance, data can reach Earth in just 5 seconds, but because of their size the JWST’s high-resolution images can take from several minutes to several hours to download, as the telescope transmits its data at no more than 28 megabytes per second—more slowly than many modern cellular phone connections. And there is no prospect of an upgrade—because of its distance from Earth, the JWST is not serviceable by astronauts and must instead rely on remote operation by Earth-bound scientists to perform calibrations and adjustments.

Discoveries and Mysteries

The JWST’s first image—known as Webb’s First Deep Field—captured on July 11, 2022, was revolutionary, providing more detail than astronomers had ever before seen and raising the first of many questions challenging long-held assumptions about the universe. Even that first image, gathered in less than 13 hours, provided a deeper and more detailed view of the universe than previous telescopes had been able to obtain in weeks of data collection. Astronomers saw galaxies more than 13 billion years old—immediately calling into question some key details of the “Big Bang” theory of the universe’s formation. According to previous understanding, galaxies should not have been able to form so soon after the Big Bang.

Astronomers continue to debate what the images mean. One distant star, HD140283 (informally known as the “Methuselah Star”) is now estimated to be 14.46 billion years old—making it older than the visible universe according to current understandings. Obviously, this poses a problem for current theories. To reconcile all the new data, some astronomers are now proposing that the universe is nearly twice as old as previously estimated—26.7 billion years, instead of the 13.7 billion years more commonly assumed.

We should remember that these dates of billions of years are connected to the original creation event described in Genesis 1:1, not to the rest of the chapter’s description of God’s re-creation of the universe in the wake of the Satanic rebellion that plunged the cosmos into tohu and bohu—confusion and emptiness. Scripture tells us that the re-creation, not God’s original act of creation, is thousands of years old, not billions, as Executive Editor Wallace Smith explained in his article “Our Biblically Old Earth” in the March–April 2025 issue of this magazine.

Apart from the age of the universe, other JWST measurements challenge long-standing theories that rely on hypothetical and invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” to explain what we see in the heavens. Whether scientists eventually resolve these questions by changing their understanding of the “redshift” phenomenon that detects the age of objects moving away from the observer, or by abandoning the idea of “dark matter”—or by adopting some entirely new and as-yet-undiscovered theory—remains to be seen. But key details of what astronomers have thought they knew cannot be supported by the JWST’s astonishing new findings.

For decades, astronomers have been as confident in their theories about the formation of the universe as scientists once were about all heavenly objects orbiting Earth, before Galileo’s telescope saw objects orbiting another planet. But with the vast new data provided by the JWST, scientists are again discovering just how much they do not know.

Yet such technical details are far beyond the scope of how most observers appreciate the JWST’s mission. We look with awe and gratitude at the astonishing beauty of the images captured by the JWST—whether of the rings around Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune, or the ancient stars, nebulae, and galaxies about which we know so little—and we marvel at what God has done.

The heavens also remind us of our destiny—and of our mission as Christians. What will be the reward of those who serve God faithfully? We read, “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever” (Daniel 12:3). The day will come when today’s Christians, resurrected as members of God’s divine Family, will inherit the universe (Romans 8:32; Hebrews 2:8) and will learn more—firsthand—about the stars of the firmament than even the finest man-made telescope can reveal.