The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

Video from BBC, enhanced images from Hubble Space telescope. (2 minutes)

The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4)

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

and by the breath of his mouth all their host. (Psalm 33:6)

We know so much more about the sky, the stars and the universe than David but do we marvel more? When have you last looked up and marveled at what our God holds together?

The size of the cosmos is beyond comprehension. The Milky Way’s spiral arms for example— are roughly 1,000 light-years thick! The Milky Way in its totality is spiraling around a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A, which is about 27,000 light-years from us. Estimates are that our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide.

If we look at the sky with our naked eye, as David would have done, we can see a few thousand stars. If we look through a telescope you’ll find there are somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.” As immense as that sounds our neighboring galaxy Andromeda may contain a trillion or more stars.

We are small and weak. Attempts to explain and described God's glory in creation often comes off as trivial to say the least.

Job said it best “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3).

All of creation is fearful and wonderful, including the heavens. Our God knows the number of stars in the heavens, the number of grains of sand on our beaches and how many hairs are on our heads. He knows when a sparrow falls and he knows you and you are so loved and esteemed by him that he sent Jesus to die in our place.

Jesus at this very moment stands as a living breathing human being at the right hand of God the Father. Somewhere out there beyond that field of stars he waits for you and listens to your prayers.

Proverbs 3:19  The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;

by understanding he established the heavens.

#extraordinarygod