What the Webb Telescope Cannot Show You

The James Webb Space Telescope peers thirteen billion years into the past, capturing light from the earliest galaxies. When it launched from French Guiana in December 2021, astronomers held their breath through 344 single points of failure — any one of which could have ended the mission.

The telescope succeeded. And what it revealed stunned even seasoned scientists: galaxies far more structured and organized than anyone predicted for the young universe. Something was holding it all together from the very beginning.

Physicists call it the strong nuclear force — the mysterious power that binds protons together inside every atom despite their natural repulsion. Without it, every star, every planet, every molecule in your body would fly apart in a fraction of a second. No one fully understands why it works. They just know that it does.

Paul did not have a telescope. He knew nothing of nuclear forces. But writing to the church at Colossae, he pointed to something — Someone — even more fundamental. "In Him all things hold together." Not gravity. Not electromagnetism. Christ. The firstborn over all creation, through whom all things were made.