“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Hamlet to his friend in Act 1, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

Part of having a biblical worldview is accounting for the supernatural. One way I’ve heard it stated is that “things are more than they are.” The purely material worldview can only account for what’s physically seen with our eyes, which if we’re honest, doesn’t hold up in real life.

Imagine if I said there’s nothing more to my wife and children than their molecules, than what I can see. It’s silly. Things are more than they are. There’s more to my wife and children than mere material. The wholeness of them is what makes life so beautiful — their joys, their likes, their laughs, their smiles, their voices, and how those play with one another to create a beautiful harmony — even when our baby is crying.

But it’s hard to remember that in our day and age. Our culture certainly doesn’t preach it. If you watch the mainstream news, it seems to preach material things — money and power — are of great gain, not godliness with contentment.

Indeed, the god of this world tries to blind us from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4). He hates the light, and he’s always trying to keep us in darkness. He loves for our culture to stay in its dark, bland, gray room, unconcerned with Hamlet’s statement that there might be more to things than what we dream of.

But every once in a while, you get something so profound in the mainstream media, the light bursts into the room, almost leaving you breathless.

“Wait, did he really just say the quiet part out loud?”

And that’s why I want to draw your attention to what Commander Reid Wiseman said in a press conference last week as the team of four astronauts from Artemis II reflected on their journey around the moon:

“When I got back on the ship [upon landing], um … I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything. So, I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute. And when that man walked in, I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just, I broke down in tears, like it’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through. ... When the sun eclipsed behind the moon, I think all four of us, I turned to Victor [Glover] and I said, ‘I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we were looking at right now, because it was otherworldly and it was amazing.’”

Does that sound like a man who just entered “space” — an empty, cold vacuum of nothingness?

Or did he encounter something so profound, so full, so warm and bursting with life, it’s almost as if someone was breathing on it?

You might even say it was so meaningful that the word “space” doesn’t do the journey justice!

It sounds to me like he didn’t encounter “space,” but something else, what the Bible calls the Heavens. As the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God” and continually “pours out speech,” and that speech just might leave you speechless if you’re seeking it.

It really is startling and glorious to consider Commander Wiseman’s honesty before the world as he tries to comprehend the sheer weight and beauty of the eclipse, the rock-bottom reality that things are more than they are.

It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory” that “we do not want merely to see beauty. ... We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it.”

It reminds me of what the 16th century scientist Johannas Keplar explained, that as we explore and discover the universe, we get to “think God’s thoughts after Him.”

It reminds me of what the psalmist described poetically in Psalm 139: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?”

The psalmist couldn’t take a trip around the moon like Commander Wiseman, but with the eyes of faith, he saw that even if he could have, God would be there waiting for him.

Lord willing, Commander Wiseman will one day find the psalmist’s words to be his own, with an added flourish, “If I ascend to heaven [and orbit the moon], you are there!”

This gives me hope that even though I’ll never orbit the moon, and neither, most likely, will you, the struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible — to make sense of life — lies in the human condition. It’s unique to all of us.

After all, these astronauts did the unbelievable, orbiting the moon, but they still had to come back to Earth and pay their taxes. This earth is a valley of tears, and these are “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” — to quote another line from “Hamlet.”

So as we spend much of our lives “looking down,” as it were, struggling and grasping, trying to do life and make sense of it, perhaps the Artemis mission will remind us to look up for where our help comes from — the Lord, the maker of earth and heaven (Psalm 146).

And these are wonderful things to ponder in our hearts, as beautiful and fair as the moon and the stars: That we can look up and consider that the one who sits in the heavens didn’t stay in the heavens. He came down into our broken world, forsaking the treasure of heaven to make you his treasure. That he took on flesh and dwelt among us, and something truly cosmic happened the day he died — something truly incomprehensible — when the one who stretched out the heavens like a curtain, stretched out his hands for us on the cross.

That’s why the sky went dark, and the earth quaked, for darkness had extinguished the light of the world.

But the darkness couldn’t comprehend the light. The Sunday-morning dawn signaled it was impossible for death to keep its hold on life itself.

Jesus rose from the grave, ascended into heaven, and he lives! In one sense, every sunrise reminds us that, as dark as the night is, the Light will never be eclipsed again.

So as we look down at our work, and look around at our broken world, we must not forget to look up, to Jesus, who sits in the heavens, yet reaches down with his pierced hands, calling us to take his hand and grasp it, and find that “he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17). And one day, he will seat us in the heavens to be with him forever and ever.

So let Commander Wiseman’s wise words stir your heart in a similar way. Let it remind you that things are more than they are. Indeed, the heavens have been singing God’s song all along, and the call for us is to join the heavenly choir, for “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2),

And Jesus is the light.

Andrew Franzella serves as senior video producer at Family Research Council.