The Aliens Are Coming and God Is Fine

For the Christian Whose Faith Is Apparently Held Together with Scotch Tape and Wishful Thinking

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

— Genesis 1:1

So let’s just play the tape forward.

Tomorrow morning, you pour your coffee, you settle into your recliner, and the news anchor — voice trembling like he just saw his ex-wife at H-E-B — announces that a video has been verified.

Crystal clear.

Not a deepfake.

Not CGI.

Not somebody’s third cousin in Roswell with a weather balloon and a Bud Light.

Spaceships.

Real, honest-to-goodness, hovering-over-the-Capitol, ride-the-glowing-elevator-down, here’s-our-eight-fingered-ambassador spaceships.

And then — and you cannot make this up — they meet with the President.

There’s a handshake.

There’s a signed agreement.

Trump declares it “the most beautiful treaty, possibly ever, the aliens were very respectful, very classy people, tremendous people, although technically not people.”

And somewhere in suburban America, a Christian sets down his coffee, looks at his Bible, and quietly whispers:

“Well. I guess that’s it then. Faith was a nice run.”

Friend.

Friend.

Sit down.

Let me explain something to you that the Hebrew writers of Scripture figured out roughly three thousand four hundred years before the History Channel was a glimmer in anyone’s eye.

Genesis 1:1 Already Told You. You Just Weren’t Listening.

Open your Bible. Page one. First sentence.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Heavens. Plural.

That’s not a typo.

That’s not a translator getting fancy.

The Hebrew word is shamayim — and it’s grammatically plural in form.

Already plural.

Built-in plural.

The word arrives at the party with friends.

So before Moses ever picked up a stylus, before the ink was dry on the Pentateuch, before David wrote a single Psalm, the Holy Spirit inspired the first verse of the Bible to say:

“Yeah. There’s a lot up there. Buckle up.”

And we — we sophisticated, modern, telescope-owning, James Webb-following Christians — we somehow convinced ourselves that God’s creative project topped out at one rocky planet circling one mid-sized star in one nondescript spiral arm of one of at least two trillion galaxies.

Beloved.

That’s not faith.

That’s imagination failure.

The Universe Is Embarrassingly Large and God Is Not Sweating

Let’s do some math the Hebrews didn’t have access to but suspected anyway.

Two trillion galaxies.

Each one with somewhere between a hundred million and a hundred trillion stars.

Most of those stars with planets.

A meaningful chunk of those planets in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the kind of chemistry that makes you and me and the dog at the back of the sanctuary.

If you crunch the numbers, the odds that earth is the only address God ever wrote down are roughly the same as the odds I’ll suddenly become a soft-spoken minimalist preacher who finishes in twelve minutes.

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

It takes me 12 minutes to say “hi” in a sermon.

Now — hear me — I’m not declaring that aliens exist.

I haven’t been to Area 51.

The most extraterrestrial thing I’ve ever seen is a Whataburger taquito at 2 a.m.

But I am telling you that the God of the Bible — the One who flung galaxies like a kid throwing rice at a wedding, the One who calls every star by name according to Psalm 147 — that God is not in heaven right now wringing His hands going,

“Oh no. They found out about Kepler-186f. The whole project is ruined.”

It’s well within the realm of possibilities that we are not alone.

Even Augustine wrote about this possibility in 410 C.E. in his work City of God.

It’s not even a novel thought.

Your Faith Is Not the Flat-Earth Society

Here’s the thing that breaks my heart a little, church.

Some of us have built a Christianity so small, so brittle, so allergic to discovery, that any new fact feels like a threat.

We act like our faith is a sandcastle and science is the tide.

That is not the faith of Abraham, who looked up at a sky full of stars he couldn’t count and said, “Yes, Lord. I’ll trust You with all of that.”

That is not the faith of David, who wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God” — and David didn’t even know about Andromeda.

That is not the faith of Paul, who told the philosophers on Mars Hill that in God “we live and move and have our being” — a statement so big it covers every life-form in every galaxy that ever was or will be.

If your faith collapses the moment somebody else gets invited to the dinner table,

you didn’t have faith in God.

You had faith in being the only one God liked.

That’s not a theology problem.

That’s a sibling rivalry problem.

Bigger God, Not Smaller Bible

Here is the move I want you to make.

Write this in the margin of your Bible.

Tattoo it on your forearm.

I don’t care.

New information about creation does not shrink the Creator. It expands our understanding of how big He already was.

When Galileo pointed a telescope at Jupiter and saw moons, that didn’t make God smaller.

It made the people who’d locked God inside a tiny geocentric box look silly.

God wasn’t surprised.

God put the moons there.

When we cracked the genome and saw the staggering elegance of DNA, that didn’t make God smaller.

It made every atheist who said “life is just a chemical accident” sound like a guy explaining the Sistine Chapel as “some paint that fell on a ceiling.”

And if — if — there are intelligent beings out there somewhere who’ve been watching us run this experiment called civilization, that doesn’t make God smaller either.

It makes Genesis 1:1 read like a spoiler alert we somehow missed for thirty-four hundred years.

The Snarky Section

Let me give you some lines you can use at the church coffee hour when Brother Steve corners you and demands to know what you think about the spaceship video.

Try these on:

• “My God made galaxies for fun. You think He couldn’t handle a few neighbors?”

• “If aliens shake hands with the President, I’ll be impressed. Jesus already shook hands with death and won. Hard to top that.”

• “You’re worried this disproves the Bible? Brother, the Bible opens with the word heavens — plural. We’ve been telling you this since chapter one, verse one. Catch up.”

• “The cross was harder to believe than aliens. And I already signed up for that one.”

• “My faith doesn’t depend on being the prettiest planet at the dance.”

• “Look — if God wants to redeem Klingons, that’s between Him and Klingons. My job is to love my neighbor, which last I checked includes anybody with a face.”

And Now for the Plot Twist Hollywood Never Saw Coming

Now let me push this one step further, because I’ve been thinking about it all week and I cannot shake it.

Every alien movie you’ve ever seen has the same plot.

They show up.

They’re hostile.

They want our water.

They want our women.

They want to harvest us for protein.

We launch the F-16s.

Will Smith punches one in the face.

Roll credits.

That’s our imagination.

That’s us projecting our worst impulses onto the cosmos.

Because we know what we’d do if we had the technology and showed up at somebody else’s planet.

We’ve got a track record on this earth that reads like a rap sheet.

Every time one civilization showed up at another with better technology, it didn’t go well for the locals.

But what if — humor me here — what if they showed up and they were the opposite?

What if the first thing they said was,

“You folks are still building bombs? Bless your hearts. Let us show you how we stopped doing that fourteen thousand years ago.”

What if they said,

“You have nine hundred million people drinking dirty water on a planet that’s seventy percent ocean. That’s a solvable problem. Here’s the technology. It costs about a dollar a person. We figured this out before we left our solar system.”

Can you imagine the City of Corpus saying Praise the Lord — water!

What if they said,

“You’re throwing away a third of your food while children starve. Let us teach you logistics. We’ve got a workshop on Tuesday.”

What if they said,

“You have a disease called cancer that has buried someone in every family in this room. We watched you fight it for a hundred years with poison and radiation and prayer and grit, and we are so sorry it took us this long. Here. Take this. It’s not even hard. We solved it three thousand years ago.”

Imagine that for a second, beloved.

Imagine your grandbaby never has to hear the word chemo.

Imagine your spouse never has to schedule another scan.

Imagine the chair that sits empty at your Thanksgiving table — full again — because somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, somebody figured out what we couldn’t figure out yet.

Tell me that’s a threat to faith.

Tell me that’s not the kind of thing the God of Psalm 103 — “who heals all your diseases” — would absolutely send.

Church. Listen.

That would not disprove God.

That would sound suspiciously like ambassadors of God.

Because everything they’d be teaching us — beat your swords into plowshares, give a cup of cold water to the thirsty, feed the hungry, heal the sick, love your neighbor as yourself — that’s not their curriculum.

That’s already in our Bible.

We just keep choosing not to do it.

Hebrews 13 says some folks have entertained angels unawares.

The Greek word for angel — angelos — literally just means messenger.

A sent one.

An ambassador.

So if a being from somewhere we can’t pronounce shows up and starts teaching us how to actually live the Sermon on the Mount — to make peace, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to lift up the poor —

I’m not going to be standing there clutching my pearls saying, “This contradicts my faith.”

I’m going to be saying,

“Welcome. Took you long enough. The pulpit’s that way. The band starts the service at 11.”

Because here’s the deepest truth, beloved.

If God in His infinite creativity made other intelligent beings, and if He gave them more time and more wisdom and fewer wars, then sending them to teach us how to live like Jesus already told us to live — that’s not a threat to the gospel.

That’s the gospel with reinforcements.

That’s the God of Jonah using a foreign sailor and a big fish and a Ninevite king to teach a stubborn prophet what mercy looks like.

That’s the God of Numbers using a donkey to correct Balaam, because if God can use a donkey, He can use a Martian.

That’s the God of Acts 10 sending Peter to Cornelius to learn that “God shows no partiality.”

If your theology can’t handle a non-human messenger, you haven’t read the Bible.

You’ve read the Cliff’s Notes and you skipped the weird parts.

And friend — the Bible is mostly weird parts.

The Real Question Underneath the Spaceship

Here’s the thing I want you to hear under the comedy.

The fear of aliens isn’t really about aliens.

It’s about whether you’ve staked your faith on something so fragile that any new discovery will tip the whole thing over.

And if that’s where you are, can I gently say —

your faith was already in trouble.

The aliens didn’t do it.

The aliens just showed up and noticed.

Real faith — the kind that survived Babylon, survived Roman lions, survived the Black Plague, survived Stalin, survived Madalyn Murray O’Hair, survived your atheist nephew at Thanksgiving —

that faith doesn’t die when the universe gets bigger.

It worships harder.

Because every new wonder is just one more line in the song the heavens are already singing.

Here’s Your Homework.

Tonight, before bed, go outside.

Look up.

Find a star.

(If you live in Corpus and the humidity is doing its thing, look for the brightest blur and use your imagination.)

And say out loud:

“Lord, I don’t know everything that’s out there. But I know You made it. And I know You’re not nervous. So I’m going to stop being nervous too.”

Then go to sleep.

The God who made the heavens — plural, beloved, plural — has been holding it all together since before Genesis 1:1 hit the page.

He’s got it.

And so do you.

The Best Is Yet to Come —

Your Hope Dealer,

Rookie Roberts