What A Wonderful World!

I’m sure many of you will know that old song of Louis Armstrong, called “What a wonderful world”.  It is, in its own small way, a reminder that this world of ours was created by God in his own image and likeness, and that it is therefore, a world of beauty, a world of light, a world of goodness.  And it’s important to remind ourselves of this from time to time, especially those who follow world events.  There seems to be no lack of bad news coming out of this wonderful world of ours right now—threats of war in the Middle East, hurricanes in Florida, famine, abortions, political atrocities and moral mayhem even within our own national boundaries—the list goes on, and can lead to a feeling of despondency, that everything is going downhill, even a feeling of dread for the future.  If you find that to be the case, try switching TV channels for a while, and watch some of the nature programs on the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic, and maybe then you’ll be reminded of that altogether different world that God created, a world that existed before the wickedness and snares of the devil brought evil into our midst, a world where I can see those things that Louis Armstrong sang of, I can see skies of blue, clouds of white, bright blessed days, and dark sacred nights.

What a wonderful, glorious world it is.  So radiant with light and brightness, so many multitudes of different minerals and plants and animals, species of every description.  So many steps and grades, from the lifeless rock lying inanimate on the road to the whirling complexity of the solar system and a hundred thousand others, with their moons revolving around planets, and planets around their suns.  Think of all the steps and grades from the lowliest of insects buzzing around our picnic table, all the way up to the amazing structure of our own human body, with all its nerves and veins and arteries, its bones and muscles, its different organs with their various functions, the brain with its incredibly complex flashes of thought and reasoning and memory, all working together to make us what we are and enabling us to do what we do.

All this is part of the world around us and within us, the world which we see and hear and live in.  The visible world, the material world.  But wonderful as it is, this visible world does not begin to contain the limit of God’s creative power.  He has made another world, a second world, an invisible world.  A world even more wonderful than this one.  He has made a world not made up of material beings, not made up of bodies, but made up of spirits.

Just as we live in our own world, we live also in this other invisible world.  We might not be able to see it because it is invisible, we can’t touch it because it is immaterial.  We can’t perceive it with any of our normal five senses.  It’s as though it exists on the other side of a veil, a thin but impenetrable veil that separates us from this world of the spirits, a world which is never far away.  But if we could see through this thin veil, what wonders would we then behold?  An entire universe, larger and more extensive than the one we squint at through our telescopes, a world more luminous, more varied, adorned with an even greater multitude of creatures than our own.  A world, my dear faithful, populated by the Angels.