We Live on a Ball of Fire

A recent news article in the Cody newspaper featured a hoax on the internet that had anyone living within 100 miles of Yellowstone National Park being evacuated due to an impending volcanic explosion. The hoax was built on factual reports of hundreds of small earthquakes occurring in the Park during the Christmas holidays. The largest of the quakes was measured at 3.8 on the Richter scale and was not considered dangerous. The series of quakes, however, did remind everyone that Yellowstone Park is in fact the dome of the world’s largest volcano, and molten lava comes within a few feet of the surface.
No one knows why the quakes occurred, but there is a fearful recognition that a huge volcanic eruption of disastrous proportions is possible in the Park. And for good reason. The rocky crust of the planet is no more than 25 miles thick (or thin, depending on how you look at it), much less than that in Yellowstone. The core of the planet is molten lava, with a temperature of about 6,000 degrees centigrade, 8,000 miles across.
Almost nothing is known about this fiery core, or how it affects life on the earth’s surface, including human beings. The little that has been deduced relates to such things as the Earth’s magnetic field and the probability of its influence on the migration of birds and animals. One thing that is known is that human bodies are composed of the substances of the planetary body, the crumbly minerals that originated in the fiery core – “the dust of the earth” as it is put in the Bible.
It is also known that all life on the planet, including humans, is dependent upon the radiation of the sun 93 million miles away. Without the sun all life would perish. Exactly how the sun affects human bodies is a relatively new study, but it is known, for example, that being deprived of sunshine often results in mental depression.
The sun, of course, is entirely molten, and is a thousand times bigger than the Earth. There are uncounted millions of suns – stars – in the galaxy. In cosmic terms, our little earth is exceptional because it has that thin little skin of cold rock where there lives these peculiar little two-legged creatures called humans.
So we have the sun above us, and the fiery core beneath us. Life, including us, is animated by energy which emerges from both the planetary core and the sun. There is a chain of relatedness of smaller forms to larger ones. There is the relatedness of man to the planet, the planet to the sun, the sun to its center in the galaxy, and the galaxies orienting to their larger Center of orientation. The core of the cosmic Body is fire – and the suns, which are spread throughout the cosmos, are the primary portals of the animating energy.
Fire can be a purging, healing element, an animator of life. Or it can be destructive. Peter wrote: “But the heavens and the earth…are…reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” Offending life forms can be eliminated with the dropping or raising of the earth’s temperature by just a few degrees – an ice age can readily clear the decks, as can raising the temperature.
We live on the cool crust of a planet that is essentially a ball of fire. We are blind to what goes on underneath our feet, even though our very lives depend upon that fiery heat. It is all part of a Grand Design established long ago, in which human beings were created to tend and keep a Garden. One way or another, the planet and the life upon its surface will fulfill the purpose for which it was brought forth.