What is the circle of the earth (Isaiah 40:22)?

The ancients believed that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a hypothetical giant, named Atlas. The balancing of the earth in space and its maintenance in an orbit by gravitation was known to Job, 1000 years before Socrates. God "hangs the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7) was his inspired reference. While Egyptian philosophy was propounding the "flat earth" theory, Isaiah was found stating that God sits upon the circle of the earth and sets a compass or decrees a circle on the face of the deep, thus proclaiming the spheroidal shape of the earth. The Psalmist tells us that "His going forth is from the end of the heaven." (Ps. 19:6). The refined astronomical measurement of the 19th century has revealed the fact that the solar system is moving through space towards a point in the constellation Hercules.

Even the early Fathers of the church taught philosophy only a little less foolish than that. Lactantius wrote, “The rotundity of the earth is a theory, which no one is ignorant enough to believe.” When we come to the Scriptures the rotundity of the earth is implied as forcibly as if stated in so many words.

There was a time when men believed the earth was flat. It was long before astronomers believed that the earth was a globe in shape. But Scripture, without setting out to teach science as such, in a statement of our Lord, proves that the earth is round, though centuries after the Romish Church was ready to excommunicate any who dared to affirm this, as in the case of Galileo (about 1609). Speaking of His coming as the Son of Man to earth, our Lord said,

How can an event take place at one and the same moment, when it is night, when two men are in bed; and morning when two women are grinding the food for breakfast; and broad daytime when two men are working in the field? We carry a diary in our pocket telling us what time it is in different parts of the world. When it is 12 o’clock noon at Greenwich, England, standard time, it is 11.30 at night in Auckland, New Zealand; 8 o’clock, breakfast time, at Buenos Ayres, Argentina. How can this be? Only if the earth is round, and revolving on its axis day by day. How did our Lord know this? Was He not the Creator of the universe? Did He not plan all this? Can those who refuse inspiration tell us how Scripture embodies this view of the earth being round, when all around for centuries learned men thought otherwise? We leave such to answer this question.

Here are two men in bed, night-time; two women grinding corn, breakfast-time; two men working in the field, day-time. How can one event find those it affects at one and the same time at different hours out of the twenty-four. Extend this statement, and the one event would find those it affects during every hour and minute of the twenty-four hours forming a complete day and night. That could only be if the earth were round and performed its diurnal motion of turning round its axis in relation to the sun once every twenty-four hours.

Even the astronomer Galileo (1564-1642) was threatened by the Romish Church with excommunication if he continued to assert that the earth revolved round the sun. It was looked upon as an insult by the Romish church that the earth should have a subservient place in relation to the sun. How is it that enshrined in the scriptures lay the truth of the rotundity of the earth, over fifteen long centuries before Galileo, and still longer before its truth found universal acceptance?

"Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell Me, if you know all this" (v.18). At that time, no doubt Job did not know the earth was formed as a tremendous ball rotating in space. But even today, though we are told the earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, who can possibly comprehend the greatness of this? Though scientists have learned a great deal about God's creation, yet the more they learn, the more evident it becomes that their ignorance is far greater than their knowledge.

It is like an orange, flattened at both ends. Its surface covers 193,836,000 square miles. The flattened top-end is called the North Pole; the flattened bottom-end, the South Pole. They are called Poles, because they are the two ends of an imaginary line, stretching from north to south, and round which the earth revolving once every twenty-four hours gives us day and night. This imaginary line is called THE AXIS.

The glory of God in creation is of a different order, and speaks of the distinctive character of His handiwork. Then even the glory of God has different bearings according to its context. This is a subject which transcends human comprehension, not to speak of human expression, and it is essentially the subject of the Holy Spirit's teaching. Spiritual matters are communicated by spiritual means, and they are compared by spiritual standards, but since the only vehicle of communication of human thought is by "words," so like those who feared the Lord at the close of the last dispensation, we are found speaking often one to another of our essential interests, viz., the precious things of heaven. Since the Scriptures abound in references to God's handiwork in the material creation, we do well to pay attention to their distinctive character and magnitude. Geographers tell us of the size and wonderful physical features of the earth, which is a spheroid of 8,000 miles diameter containing 6,000 trillion tons of matter and we have only direct knowledge of a few miles thickness of its crust or exterior layers, and much of its surface has not been explored. It may be instructive to consider a series of magnitudes in the physical creation. A rain-drop is a sphere of about one-eighth of an inch diameter, and yet its physical characteristics are no less wonderful than those of the earth.