When I was a child, I had a very specific dream. I wanted to be an astronaut, but I didn’t really understand all it entailed; I just thought traveling into space was very cool.
I read books and watched movies (e.g., The Right Stuff and Apollo 13). Then, the dream faded when my eyesight began to dim. When I learned that pilots required better-than-average vision, my childhood obsession fell apart. As a middle-aged man, I’m still fascinated by all things outer space, and the recent return to the moon by the Artemis II mission got me thinking about the Bible and the cosmos.
After a little research, I noticed a pattern that surprised me: the men and women who have traveled farther than anyone else have repeatedly come back with the same thought.
The cosmos is a place of wonder and awe, just as the Bible has said all along.
The Psalms
Psalm 19:1 might be the most emphatic statement on this idea. When it says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above (the expanse) proclaims His handiwork.”1 There is a paradox present in this passage. Notice in 19:3-4, creation speaks without words or flowery language, but its voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” One scholar describing this passage said, “It is God’s intention in communicating through the spender of nature and all the specifics of His Word to reach us.”2 I couldn’t agree more with that statement.
When we look up and inevitably look in, we should see the One who made us in His image.
In Psalm 8:3-4 it says, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”
There seems to be a double meaning in the psalm: (1) the vastness of creation can’t help but produce humility, yet (2) God is mindful of humanity and their humble existence. That tension seems fully illustrated when humanity travels into space and gets up close to how small, yet blessed, we are.
The classic commentary by German authors Keil and Delitzsch says of this passage, “The most natural thought would be (when observing all God made): frail, puny man is nothing before all this; but this thought is passed over in order to celebrate, with grateful emotion and astonished adoration, the divine love which appears in all the more glorious light – a love which condescends to poor man, the dust of earth.”3 We are nothing but dust, but even dust “made in the image of God” has something to consider. May the heavens consistently remind us of all the Lord made for us. Truly, it’s worth repeating, “Who are we, that You are mindful of us?”
In Psalm 33:6–9, it says, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host. He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; He puts the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him! For He spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm.” The creation is not accidental or self-generating; it bears the fingerprints of intentional design. That creation connects naturally to astronauts who fail to call it random.
In Psalm 104, the Creator is described in detail, not the creation. As the psalmist moves from cosmic scale to intimate detail, we see that God is woven throughout the creation of our world. Consider the following passages from that chapter:
- 104:1-2 says, “You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering yourself with light as with a garment…”
- 104:8-9 says, “The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.”
- 104:19 says, “You made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting.”
- 104:31-32 says, “May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke!”
The Astronauts
There are several instances worth mentioning from history that give modern readers a glimpse into the thoughts of those who traveled into outer space.
- As astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders entered into lunar orbit on Dec. 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, they were able to connect with Earth on a live television broadcast. They ended the broadcast taking turns reading from the Book of Genesis, beginning with 1:1, which says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and concluded with 1:10, and the phrase “and God saw that it was good.”4
- In 1998, after returning to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery, original astronaut John Glenn said, “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.”5
- Jack Lousma, an astronaut who was a part of the second crew of Skylab and the third shuttle mission, once said, “…when you leave the earth, in a spacecraft, I personally think there’s a real motivation to look toward God. After being in space, I certainly have a much greater appreciation for the world God has made, the universe He’s created. It’s very clear in my mind that this universe couldn’t have happened by chance.”6
- Recently, Victor Glover aboard the Artemis II mission said in a message on Easter Sunday 2026, “And you know, when I read the Bible, and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created, it’s — you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”7
I’m not surprised that the thoughts of these men are turned towards our Creator in the moment of their space flights and the reflection of all that’s happening around them. Even though the psalmists never left our planet, they looked up and arrived at the same conclusion: awe, smallness, and the undeniable weight of a Creator. The astronauts didn’t discover something new. They experienced what the Psalms had named centuries before. They saw the wonder of God right outside their window in the declarations of the heavens.
We don’t need a rocket to “consider the heavens” (see Psalm 8:3). Any clear night sky will do — if we stop and look and stand in the same awe of those who went before us into the heavens.
Notes and Further Reading
- Scripture quotations are from The ESV (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright (c) 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ↩︎
- Donald Williams, Mastering the Old Testament (Psalms 1-72), 149. ↩︎
- C.F. Keil and F. Delitasch, Commentary on the Old Testament, Psalms, 93. ↩︎
- To read more about the thoughts of the astronauts on Apollo 8, follow this link. ↩︎
- To read more about his faith, follow this link to a post from the Washington Post. ↩︎
- If you’d like to read more from Lousma, please follow this link to an online article. ↩︎
- If you’d like to watch his address, follow this link. ↩︎
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