The story is told of how Sir Isaac Newton, while sitting under an apple tree, was struck on the head by a falling apple, and as a result of this experience, he formulated the law of gravitation. Aside from a loud "ouch" and a lump on the head, I doubt if this did much to stimulate his scientific endeavors. The truth is, the general law of gravitation arose from Newton's questioning of what keeps the moon in orbit around the earth. His thinking was greatly influenced by the work of Galileo in the sixteenth century and Kepler in the early 1600's. Galileo proved that the acceleration of gravity is constant; Kepler formulated the three laws of planetary motion. This led to Newton's proposal in 1687 that the motion of the moon around the earth and of the planets around the sun could be explained by a single universal law of gravitation.
However, Newton did not explain why objects attract one another. He just assumed that this was a property of all matter. In 1916 Albert Einstein formulated a new theory of gravity. In his theory, called general relativity, gravity does not exist as a force. Instead, each mass bends the structure of space and time which surrounds it. This distortion of space bends the paths of all objects, even those with no mass, such as photons of light. He predicted that starlight would be bent as it passed near the sun, and he calculated how much it would be bent. His prediction and calculations were dramatically confirmed during the solar eclipse in 1919. His theory also predicted the existence of black holes.
Einstein does not try to explain why objects distort space. So we are no closer to solving the mystery, the question of what gravity is. In spite of Einstein we still define gravity as the weakest of the four fundamental forces in nature, the other three being electromagnetism, the "strong force" which holds atomic nuclei together, and the "weak force" which involves radioactivity. The mystery is that these three forces are effective over very short distances while gravity, even though it is the weakest, acts over infinite distance; it extends to the farthest reaches of the universe. No matter how far you travel from earth, you would never escape its gravitational field. That is a boggling thought, that the force or distortion of space due to gravity is infinite. Some have postulated gravity waves as an answer to the puzzle.
So, man's view of the universe and gravitation in particular has progressed from Newton's laws and Galileo's heliocentric solar system to our modern view from the Hubble telescope of an apparently limitless universe populated by innumerable spiral nebulae, and dark matter scattered like dust across the cosmos. Nowadays, avantgarde cosmologists are toying with the idea of multiple universes, sort of like bubbles, each one diverse from the rest. They say that our own universe bubble, which is some 140 billion light years deep, could only be a small patch in the ensemble of bubbles. And yet there is a strand of cohesive design in all this expanse. Someone has said that we are living in a lucky universe since a change of only half a percent in the force that holds the nuclear structure together would cause catastrophic changes in nature; if it were a little larger, stars would not burn; if it were a little smaller, molecules could not form. Brandon Carter of Cambridge University has invented the Anthropic Principle to explain these coincidences. He says it looks as if the universe knew we were coming, that the universe was designed to be inhabited. This comes very close to admitting that there is a designer.
God has told us that by Him all things consist and have their being. It is by His laws that everything in the animate and inanimate universe, works in perfect harmony except for this world, which has been marred by sin. It is by His power, which we call gravity, that the universe holds together, that spiral galaxies rotate around black holes, that solar systems rotate about stars, and that apples fall from trees. This mysterious gravitational force permeates all space and, despite the efforts of such minds as Newton and Einstein, no one really knows what it is. So it is with the spiritual universe; there is an attractive force that draws mankind toward the divine. This spiritual gravitation is unexplainable except that we are made that way. This force is found in every culture from the primitive heathen idol worshipers to the sophisticated pagan deities of Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Just as every physical body has its gravitational field, so does each religion have a focus of spiritual gravitation. Jesus is the force that attracts with the powerful force of divine love; a force that draws us to Him across the limitless reaches of space. Around His throne are millions of angelic beings and His dominion extends to all the inhabited universe. He declared that, if He were lifted up, He would draw all men to Him. This is the most powerful gravitational force in the universe. Do you feel it? Have you felt the tug of "heaven's gravitation"?
