Click here for a Flashback to what we were learning in our Hawaiian homeschool 6 years ago this week.

And click here for another Flashback that has to do with today’s topic.

Teacher’s Two-Cents

I haven’t added my two-cents to a Friday Factoid for a long time, so I’m doing one now and also giving the boys a break since you have 2 Flashbacks to nibble on and they’ve had a crazy busy week.

So I want to add my two-cents to the second Flashback above about the magnetosphere and the auroras it causes and this time my two-cents comes straight out of the bank of Job.

“Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God . . . Can you, like Him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror? . . . And now no one looks on the light when it is bright in the skies, when the wind has passed and cleared them. Out of the north comes golden splendor; God is clothed in awesome majesty.”

Job 37:14-22

Job is one of my favorite books in the Bible because I’m always amazed at the depth of scientific knowledge people of his time had and the conclusions they came to about God through what they observed in nature. They truly believed God made Himself known through creation.

The passage quoted above is a great example of that. It might sound very primitive and ignorant to our ears to hear an ancient person describe the sky as “hard as a cast metal mirror.” But when you think about the earth’s magnetosphere, that description actually makes a lot of sense!

The entire earth has a magnetic field surrounding it and its job is to pull harmful particles produced by solar winds away from the earth or reflect them back toward the sun. Sounds a bit like a mirror, right? The sky may not be hard as a cast metal mirror but it certainly has the reflective, metallic-like properties of one.

And what about that light people of Job’s day seemed afraid to look upon when it shone brightly after the winds cleared the skies? Where did that golden splendor come from? “Out of the north!” Sounds a little like the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, doesn’t it?

And do you know what causes those auroras? The presence of that reflective magnetosphere of course! Some of those harmful particles from the solar winds get trapped in the magnetic field and crash into our atmospheric gases causing a beautiful light show.

Events like those should do nothing less than inspire us, like Job’s friend, to “Stop and consider the wondrous works of God.” He is indeed, making Himself known through them!