Hey Brother,
To quote one of my favorite writers, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space” (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
God created the universe. Sometimes I think we forget how spectacular that statement really is. Let me give you some perspective and humble you in the process. We live in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is estimated there are between 100 – 400 billion stars in our galaxy. BILLION! And that’s just our galaxy.
In 2016, a new experiment with the Hubble telescope revealed that there were around 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than we originally thought. So, do you know how many galaxies that makes now?
2000 BILLION GALAXIES!
2000 billion galaxies, each one with hundreds of billions of stars, each star with the potential to have multiple planets orbiting around it, and God created it all. Whoa…
No wonder King David wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1).
It makes you feel small, doesn’t it? Well, let’s go the other direction. Let’s go from the grandness of space all the way down to the diminutive atom. We are made of atoms, but what are they made up of?
Well, it turns out… almost nothing.
Let’s look at hydrogen. It’s the most common element in the known universe. It is made up of around 99.9999999999996 percent empty space. It is made of practically nothing.
Therefore, you, I, and everything we see is made up of pretty much nothing. The only reason we don’t fall through the ground or pass through each other is that the force holding atoms together is so strong.
These numbers are really hard to grasp, so let’s put this another way. If you took every human alive today, roughly 7 billion people, and smooshed them together taking away all the empty space and made them as dense as a neutron star, the resulting mush would fit in the same volume as…
A sugar cube.
We really are made of dust. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).
Let’s zoom back out from atoms made of almost nothing all the way to billions upon billions of galaxies and stars. God created it all. And for some reason, God has decided to love us.
How can we ever fully understand a God so much grander and more spectacular than we can possibly imagine? We can’t. Until we are with Him, we never will. I find this very humbling but at the same time comforting.
I think it’s obvious why this is humbling. We are just so small and insignificant compared to God. But why do I find this comforting?
Well, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I read Scripture, and I get confused. Sometimes I read verses that seem to promote concepts like predestination and then others that support free will. Sometimes, from my perspective, things just don’t make sense at all. But it’s comforting for me to realize that I can’t completely grasp God and His perspective. I’m not failing as a Christian if I don’t fully understand everything about God.
He even told us this Himself. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). I can’t fully understand and grasp God, and that’s okay. What’s important is how I live my life each and every day.
If anything, it’s foolish and prideful for any of us to think we fully understand God. That would be like a koi fish claiming to grasp how tall Mount Everest is even though it’s only ever lived in a foot-deep garden pond.
So, Brother, remember, when we get confused by God, it’s not His deficiency but ours. Let this realization be both humbling and uplifting. God is greater and more spectacular than any of us can comprehend, yet He humbled Himself to be like us, to die for us, to save us (Philippians 2:5-11). It may be overused in our culture, but I think there is really only one word that describes this kind of love… Awesome.
May we all grow to know our awesome God more deeply and truly every day.
Kristopher Galuska
Family Radio Staff