eDevotion
Encouragement for your daily walk with God
I read just about anything I can get my hands on. A lot of times it means I read stuff I don’t understand. A little while back, I read a couple of books by astrophysicists explaining the origin of the universe. It wasn’t easy reading, let me tell you. I understood so little of it that, afterwards, I thought, why bother? However, there were a couple of things that really got my mind in tune with God—just how immense and powerful He is!
Consider this:
The Hubble Space Telescope has sent images of faint galaxies to earth, which astronomers believe to be twelve billion lightyears away. For all you mathematical types, that’s 12,000,000,000 X 6,000,000,000,000 - in case I got the numbers wrong, that’s twelve billion times six trillion miles!
Or how about this “little” fact. There is a star out there that has a diameter of 100,000,000 miles. The star even has a name, Betelgeuse. It’s the ninth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in Orion’s constellation. Just how big is that? Well, if you put Betelgeuse at the center of our solar system, it’s surface would go beyond the asteroid belt, perhaps beyond the orbit of Jupiter. That means it would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars!
By now you may be rolling your eyes as I did while reading the books. But please hold on, there is a punchline. Why is the universe so immense? Why is it so vast, virtually unmeasurable? Let me offer two suggestions; one practical and one pastoral. Practical: For all intents and purposes, the universe has to be as large as it is in order to sustain life as we know it. Pastoral: The universe is so vast in order that you and I, daily stunned, can be stirred with the realization that the Lord of the universe is the Lord of my good and bad days!
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Philippians 4:13
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