Did Christ Create Klingons?

“God .. has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds.” Hebrews 1:1, 2

Genesis tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but in Hebrews we read that Christ made “the worlds”. What caught my attention and curiosity was the mention, not of the earth, but of the worlds. (The NIV has “the universe”.) Yes, the writer used the plural, which immediately makes some of us think that Hebrews may be boldly going where no biblical writer has gone before. Are there Klingons out there? Did our Lord populate other planets with alien beings, or are there other kinds of worlds somewhere?

I got curious and started doing some research. What I discovered was that the “worlds” mentioned in this verse are a little closer to home. In the New Testament there are actually three different Greek words translated with the same English word: “world”.

Gai is used to describe planet earth as a whole, often in contrast to the heavens, as Jesus used it in Matthew 5:18, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away ...” But that’s not the word used here.

Then there is kosmos, which refers to the world’s system. By that I mean the people, events and things that are working together to oppose God. That’s the way John used the word in 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” But that is not the kind of world made by Christ.

The third kind of “world” is the Greek word, aion which normally refers to long periods of time, like eons or ages or generations. This is the same word Jesus used when He promised “I am with you always, even to the end of the age”. (Matthew 28:20) To my surprise, that’s the word used in this verse.

So why do translators take a word that refers to periods of time and translate it worlds or even “the universe”? The context is the key. This passage is a clear reference to the Lord’s work of creation, which includes the sun, moon, stars, earth, planets and everything in them. It also includes the creation of time.

It may be difficult for us to conceive of time as something that has a beginning (and end), but it truly is tied closely to the rest of creation. The earliest measurement of time was apparently the changing phases of the moon. Then around 1500 B.C., the Egyptians began using sundials to measure the time of day. As you might expect, today we have developed more precise methods to measure time. For example, according to Wikepedia, the current official definition of a second is, “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.” It’s interesting, isn’t it that no matter how we try to refine them, all of our measurements of time are still connected to simple observations of motion within God’s creation?

I get it now. Without the rest of creation, there would be no ages, generations or eons. I can understand why scholars chose the English word “worlds” to translate aion in this case. Let’s not stop there, however. We should be thinking about periods of time or even dispensations when we exegete or apply this verse. If our Lord created time and all the ages since that day, then He is the one in control of the events of history, the days of your life, and the ages still in the future. This means that time does not consist of days and years filled with random events and meaningless acts. Time has a destination and it follows the course laid out by its Creator.

Unfortunately this verse, packed with meaning as it is, won’t help with the Klingon issue. What it will do is give us the encouragement of knowing that our Savior, the One who love us the most, is also Lord over all the ages.